Letters from Pemberley

In case you didn’t see Derek’s facebook announcement, we’re moving to Iowa for the fall!  Derek accepted a one semester visiting position at University of Iowa Law School in Iowa City, where he’ll be teaching Election Law and Federal Courts.  Cue “The Music Man” references (actually, I showed the kids a scene this morning and realized they’re going to expect a rural town from a hundred years ago…maybe that wasn’t a good call).  We’ll be four hours from my parents, four hours from Chicago, and 8 hours from Royal Oak.  The prospect of being within driving distance of all the grandparents is amazing.

So this opportunity came up pretty suddenly (though there had been potential for a while), and we had a week to decide.  The big factors were the prestige of the school (Iowa is a much higher ranked law school than Pepperdine), the chance to serve God somewhere other than the (sortof-)Christian ghetto that is Pepperdine, the proximity to our families, a mixed bag of changes here at Pepperdine, the compliment that Iowa is actively pursuing Derek, and, of course, the fact that my ideal place to raise a family is a small, midwestern university town versus the fact that we’re finally settled and fairly content here in Malibu, we’re so close to being done with our foster certification process here in LA County, and the fact that we love, love, love Pacific Crossroads Church.

Since it’s only for a semester, the biggest hang-up for me was the fostering thing.  If we leave in August, we can’t take a long-term placement, and even the allegedly short-term ones are never guaranteed–we could be told someone was going to be with us for two weeks, only to have him for two years.  So our timeline with fostering would have to be adjusted.  We thought we’d have a child by now.  We are ready!  We’ve done everything (and are just waiting on the agency to do their thing).  We’ve childproofed our home, gotten TB tests, attended hours of training, and reorganized our rooms so that there’s a designated foster kids’ room.  We have a support network lined up, I had front-loaded our school year so that we could adjust to craziness this spring, the kids are on board, and our church has actually declared that the LA County Foster system is our corporate congregational focus for the year.  I even met an amazing new friend who works here at Pepperdine and wants to come alongside a foster family and help us succeed, even willing to do training with our agency to best help us.  I mean, it seems like now is the time to do this all, right?  Except that my knee is still healing slowly (and I still have biweekly physical therapy 45 minutes away), and the foster agency has been taking their sweet time to certify us.

I sought a lot of counsel on the fostering side of things from several seasoned foster mom friends, and their responses surprised and encouraged me.  Devin pointed out that sometimes God calls us to obey all the way up to the point of sacrifice, then tells us He has a different plan (like with Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac).  The LA foster system is so corrupt and horrible, and maybe in His mercy, He’s not going to have us go all in with foster-adopting *this* year, after all.  (Respite care is still a huge need–with 34847 kids in the system, there will always be more foster parents who need a break than respite homes able to provide it.)  She also challenged me on the identity thing–it’s so easy to become proud that you’re doing this great, hard thing for God, and maybe going to Iowa and being a welcoming Christian family opening our home to law students for a semester is not as cool-sounding as fostering, but it could be just as needed, albeit in a totally different way.  I talked to Nicole about the really hard part of living in Malibu and having to drive 1-2 hours one way to do visits with bio parents, and how it’s okay to get certified somewhere, move somewhere else, move again, and get re-certified, foster, and adopt your forever kids.  There’s no one right timeline for foster care. And Regan, who is spearheading the orphan care initiative at church, has been talking in our Sunday meetings about all the ways families can be involved–Safe Families, respite, mentoring, etc–and now that we’ve gone through the training, we have a good knowledge base to look into those other options, as well.

And today I found out that our agency branch in LA County is transferring us over to the Ventura County branch.  We’re about an hour’s drive from either office in good traffic, but it could be 2+ hours into LA in bad traffic, and if a social worker needs to be coming to us at least once a week, it’s much better to have the girl living in TO drive down than some poor soul from LA sitting in traffic.  So that will complicate things.  Maybe we’ll foster a Ventura kid, after all.  If we have an LA County kid but a Ventura County agency social worker, we’ll have to make absolutely sure WE stay on top of the different rules and regulations.  It is doable, and we definitely are still going to proceed, but it is more complicated.

The funniest part of this decision is southern Californians looking at us sideways and asking politely, “Um, do you…want…to move to Iowa?”  It’s hilarious how they can’t imagine why we’d want to leave, even for a mere five months.  They just don’t get the appeal of the Midwest!