A reader e-mailed me and asked if I would share more about my personal story with our home study. I am working through a series about each of the interviews we had as part of the home study process.

As I mentioned in my post, Home Study: The First Interview, one of the interviews had to be conducted in a one-on-one with the social worker. That was the interview in which was discussed our childhoods.

As I shared in my posts, Abuse Survivors: My First Adoption Home Study and Abuse Survivors: My Second Adoption Home Study, I was dreading the discussion about my childhood. I was severely abused as a child throughout most of my childhood, and I was still in the process of working through my emotional issues related to the abuse. It was hard enough for me to talk about the abuse at all. Talking with a "stranger" who had the power to deny me the opportunity to be a mother was almost too much to bear.

The social worker asked lots of questions about my childhood. Where did I go to school? Who were my friends? She asked me to describe my childhood house. She asked if I had siblings (I have a sister) and what our relationship was like then and now. We talked about what things I wanted to pass along to my child from my childhood (not much!) and what things I planned to do differently.

Then, the social worker moved on to questions about what I planned to do differently when the baby arrived. She asked what I thought the biggest changes in my life would be. I saw two: (1) I would get less sleep by tending to the baby throughout the night; and (2) I would drastically reduce the number of hours I spent watching television.

I grew up living in front of the television. Having a television blaring whenever I was awake was the norm for me. In fact, I even studied for finals while watching television and maintained a high grade point average while doing so. However, I did not want this life for my kid. I did not want him to be dependent upon a television, and I also did not want to expose a young child to the content that was in my adult shows.

The social worker spent a lot of time talking to me about setting realistic expectations for when the baby arrived. I remember thinking that she does not know me very well. When I make a resolve, I stick to it…and I did! My son watched very limited television as a young child, and anything he watched was educational rather than a show that I wanted to watch. To this day, I only watch my shows when my son is at school or asleep because the content of many of my shows is not appropriate for a seven-year-old child.

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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt