Ep. 89 Lane Igoudin

On this episode I am joined by Lane Igoudin. In his candid and poignant memoir, A Family, Maybe Two Dads, Two Babies and the Court  Cases that Brought Us Together,  Lane details his and his husband Jonathan’s fraught path through the Los Angeles County’s foster-to-adopt process. A Family, Maybe offers an unprecedented look into the adoption process as it affects the lives of everyone involved, from the children taken into the system, to the suffering birth parents, to the couples hoping desperately to start a family of their own.

In the fall of 2005, after years of preparation, planning, and waiting for a chance to raise a family, Jon and Lane were given the opportunity to foster an infant named Marianna. Lane and Jon fell in love with the child and decided they would give her the best life they could. Marianna’s mother, a teenager in foster care herself, had voluntarily placed her in foster care before going AWOL. With her birth mother absent and father unknown, Marianna seemed to be on the fast-track to becoming adoptable.

The couple could not have predicted the return of the child’s mother, still in foster care, and the news that she was expecting a second child. With the second child also came the sudden appearance of the baby’s birth father, a man 10 years older than the mother, which would complicate the kids’ cases and begin to pull Lane and Jon’s family apart.

A Family, Maybe documents the ensuing spiral, rife with legal challenges, emotional blows, and no less important, political strife. In the early 2000s, with gay marriage and adoption still illegal in most U.S. states, Lane and Jon’s family would join the first wave of out LGBTQ+ families fighting for respect and equality. A Family, Maybe is a story of hope and heartbreak; of relatable first-time parenting highs and lows, but also with the pressure of knowing the family you’ve built could be ripped from you at any moment.

Lane Igoudin
Lane Igoudin (@laneigoudin) • Instagram photos and videos

Ashley ~ Filled Up Cup podcast (@filledupcup_) • Instagram photos and videos
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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Filled Up Cup podcast. We are a different kind of self-care resource. One that has nothing to do with bubble baths and face masks, and everything to do with rediscovering yourself. We bring you real reviews, honest experiences, and unfiltered opinions that will make you laugh, cry, and most importantly, leave you with a filled up cup.

Ashley: 0:32

I am very excited. I have Lane Igoudin joining me. He is a writer, activist professor of English and Linguistics at LA City College. We're gonna talk about his book, A family, maybe Two Dads, two Babies, and the Court Cases that brought us together. Thank you so much for joining me.

Lane: 0:52

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Ashley: 0:55

Did you always wanna be a dad?

Lane: 0:57

I always wanted to be a father. Probably it's because I helped to raise my younger sister who is almost 10 years younger than me. And that experience was very important to me. It really sort of implanted something in me as I explained in the book that I didn't know if I was going to be married. But I knew that I would definitely be a dad.

Ashley: 1:17

Which is always so nice to see, like when you have that dream, be able to bring it to Fruitation. Is that why it was always important to have two children because you had such a beautiful relationship with your sister?

Lane: 1:29

So the vision of myself that I had back in my, I would say early twenties, was that I would be a single dad with two kids. And it was kind of like a, you know what I was imagining some sort of a triangle where it'd be me and them and it'd be the two of them together interacting. And so there would always have each other. That's kind of, what I saw for myself in the future. It is interesting enough, I didn't really see Jonathan in it, you know, that came later. I didn't think of myself as this kind of a long-term commitment kind of person, but I look at it as 26 years later. So I guess that was there too.

Ashley: 2:08

How did you meet your husband?

Lane: 2:10

It was a very special day. What's interesting, that was one of the chapters that is not in the book. It wasn't the book. And I took it out because I felt it wasn't really so much about the children's story, but it was a very special day. At the time I graduated from Stanford, I was working in Stanford news service, and that was the day when president Clinton, so Bill and Hillary were dropping off Chelsea at Stanford. If I remember correctly it was somewhere in the mid September of 1997 17th or 19th. I don't rem remember the exact date. So that day I was working on campus. From like 5:00 AM till late at night. And the next day I was leading I was actually flying to Europe for a conference. So I came home to San Francisco and everything was packed and I was like, I'm going out. I mean, I was so wired from the day there was so much going on, being there chaperoning the media, being in the presence of, you know, the Clinton family for, quite some time. So I went out and that's where I met Jonathan. I went out to a bar and we met, we chatted all I got out of that very short conversation was a business card. So when I took the business card, I said, listen, I said, I'm going to Europe and I'm going to visit three countries would you mind if I send you a postcard from each country I go to? And he said, sure. And so I did. So I went to Greece and Turkey and Israel and I sent a card from each country. And when I came back, I called him up and I asked him, I dunno if you remember me, you know, my name is Lane. You gave me a business card about three weeks ago and I sent you a postcard. Did you get them? He said, yes, I did. Thank you. You know, it was really, really sweet of you. And then I was kind of like nervous, and I said, well, would you be interested in going out to, before I could even finish sentence? He said, yes. So I knew he was sort of waiting for that phone call too. So that was our first date.

Ashley: 4:02

That's such a cute, like people I think forget, like pre-cell phones to actually get something in the mail. Like, that's such a cute gesture to be able to send post cards.

Lane: 4:14

Well, he certainly thought so. He still has them. He still has my postcards. Oh, that's so sweet. He keeps him in his office desk.

Ashley: 4:21

What made you guys decide to do the Foster to Adopt program instead of maybe seeking out a surrogate or going a foreign adoption route?

Lane: 4:33

So at the time we went into the process, I was in my early thirties and he was closer to 40. We have a seven year difference between us and we were both, you know, working, we're both middle class, right. So he worked in insurance company. I was working public affairs marketing at the time, and so we made pretty decent living for the two of us. We had multiple routes available to us. We could have gone the surrogacy route that was already open to, gay men. We could have adopted internationally. There was some opportunities there too. Or we could have gone the foster adoption route and we strongly felt that we really didn't feel that much of a need to produce more children or whoa, you know, I gotta have my own child biologically, but like, that really wasn't that important to us. But we really wanted to, help really, and, we thought like, why should we go to some far away country? There's so many kids right here in la Even though we didn't know much about the process, we were very much aware that that Los Angeles, I don't know where we read about it, but we knew that Los Angeles had the largest foster system in the country. And it still does, by the way. So at the time we entered the process, there were, you know, between 30 and thirty-five thousand kids in the foster system in Los Angeles, which was a quarter of all the. Foster kids in California, which itself was a kind of a sizable portion of a half a million foster kids in the United States during that time. It was also very good timing for us to do that because the state of California, you know, it's a pretty, liberal state. Progressive state began to open up to allowing gay men coupled and single to take and kids to, foster with an intention to adopt. It was done a little bit under the radar. It was before, like all these campaigns, reaching out and sending out flyers. And now you've got, like, you know, if you drive through Los Angeles or Long Beach, where we live, you can see banners, you know, with happy, couples with two dads and one, two or three children. It was before that, lemme tell you that. But, I started going to the meetings of, prospective parents. And then with John, we started going to the meetings of the pop luck club, which is still active. which is an organization of gay dads based here in Los Angeles. We saw men like us and loads of kids running around. So we're like, wow, you know, this is really possible to do. We learned about the process and we learned about the agencies, which were open to gay men or specializing, working with LGBTQ community lawyers if you needed them. So there was a whole kind of like list, you know, kind of a pool of resources that open to us. And it was doable. But it comes with risks. That's something we also learned very, very early on.

Ashley: 7:18

For anybody that's not aware, can you touch a little bit on sort of the history of gay people being able to adopt and why it could have been such a challenge in some places and maybe what has changed, if anything.

Lane: 7:34

So unlike gay women who've had more of an opportunity to have children biologically I would say probably my guess, 95% of, the children that gay men had prior to maybe 19 ninety-five were children. Which continued from their straight marriages or relationships. And among our friends, we actually have friends who have been married before. And their ex-wives would've, you know co-parented the kids that they had, I would say the state of California began to open in certain places. I wouldn't say, you know, it was everywhere, but in certain urban centers to kind of under the radar reaching out to men. they have to realize that before marriage equality we're all single, you know, to the state and to the federal government. At the time, and we're talking about late-nineteen-nineties, early-two-thousands. It wasn't in every state and the more gay men and women, the LGBTQ parents began to sort of pop up on the radar of the media or, and in the news, some more conservative states began to even put more legal barriers. So there were states where if you know, there was a famous case in Virginia. Where a lesbian mother lost her biological child to the ex-husband, because of being gay. There were states which I think it was Oklahoma it's in my book.'cause I kept tabs and all that, where basically if you move into the state and your same sex couple, only one of you can be recognized as a parent or your adoption is null and void. There all kinds of crazy things were going on. I would say there were probably 15 states where around the country where it was relatively easy for gay man to go into the system and foster child. And luckily for us, California was one of'em. I

Ashley: 9:16

like heartbreaking and frustrating that when you take the thousands of children that are looking for a home, hundreds of

Lane: 9:23

thousands of children. Yes. Hundreds of thousand children

Ashley: 9:27

that. Just want somewhere safe to be and wanna be loved. Mm-Hmm. That it just seems so frustrating and almost unfathomable that people would disqualify other people just because they don't agree with their choices. Which again, at the end of the day, it's like you want the children to be happy and healthy and loved and it really shouldn't matter whether it's two moms or two dads, or a mom and a dad, or a single person. Or a

Lane: 9:54

grandparent, I would say any functioning adult. Yes. I mean, the bottom line that I took away from my years, my decades of experience and from the people that we know, any functioning adult, you know, I would say among our you know, friends, neighbors, extended family, I can count a mother who is single by choice. I can count a grandmother grandparents raising children. Very successfully, you know? Yeah. And aunt and an uncle who adopted, and also single and married gays and lesbians who have been able to bring, so I would say functional adult. That's really, really key to parenting success.

Ashley: 10:33

Yeah, absolutely. When you had gone in through this process, I know that you had talked about how you had like the pop Luck organization was Mm-Hmm. A resource that you had used. Knowing what you know now and looking back on it, is there advice that you would've given yourself in the beginning of this whole process?

Lane: 10:52

Definitely, definitely. And I should also mention that when you mentioned the pop luck, that it was only the two of us, we didn't have brothers or sisters or parents to help us, you know, Jonathan's parents had passed away. Mine lived in the Bay Area. And so we didn't really have any help besides just the two of us working. We developed a network of friends and, neighbors gay, straight, whatever, you know, mostly with children with whom, you know, we could sort of share, you know, some of the difficulties and also help them and that would help us. That's been very important to us. So kinda like an extended family of friends that was part of it. We went into the process with a very, I would say, rudimentary knowledge of the system. And if, you know, I tell'em like, you know, myself good 20 years ago, right? We should have learned more about. So learn about the system and army itself with resources as much as you can going in. Then know your limits in choosing a child and stick to them. And by by limits I mean that going into the process, you know be clear with yourself as to all these parameters of the child that you're looking for in terms of gender in terms of age, in terms of the number of siblings. And I would also say in terms of the amount of risk involved and the risk here is the risk that you won't get to keep the child and the child will go back to the biological family. That's the risk that any foster adoptive parent is facing and some are not comfortable with it. Some are comfortable with a certain amount and things like that. That's what I would look at. In terms of going back to the beginning of the process.

Ashley: 12:29

Do you feel like the way that your situation went, I don't know whether trauma would be the right word, but do you think that it changed how you were able to parent?

Lane: 12:41

There was a certain amount of trauma that affected our older child because she lived through the first year of her life was with her birth mother, and then later in a temporary foster home from which we took her. And then unfortunately, some of the things that she faced during that first year continued to be reinforced while we still had visits. Those visits were not doing her any good, lemme tell you. And so, because our process which, described in the book with all its crazy twists and turns, took about three years. I was the primary person involved in the process itself. Dealing with the system, dealing with birth parents, dealing with attorneys, social workers, you name it. It definitely affected me too. It affected Jonathan to a lesser degree because I was in a way shielding him from some of that. Because I understood the system better and I wanted to protect him emotionally to some degree. I don't even know if it affected at all, at some level, but I'm still, I'm yet to see it. Our younger daughter whom we took in as a newborn. We are the only parents she'd ever known. And so she grew up with her sister, that's her biological sister, but she was a newborn. So has that affected my parenting? I would say that exactly because there was so much uncertainty, so much drama so much push and pull and not knowing. If we get to keep one of them, both of them get separated. What will happen the next day? I think I bonded even stronger with them. Exactly, exactly. Because I had to fight for them. And so at some emotional level which comes sort of like on top of just the parental bond that you develop with a one-year-old and also newborn. There's this fear, I guess of losing them. That has never really left me to this day, I would say,

Ashley: 14:30

which I think is completely understandable, especially when you have to live in the unknown for so long that it would be really hard to sort of recover from that almost PTSD in a sense. And to take it back a teensy bit before after you guys had decided that you wanted to foster to adopt and you decided to go through all the qualifications to become a foster parent. Mm-Hmm. What kind of came next? I know we had kind of touched on like the adoption fair,

Lane: 15:01

right. So we were certified, but foster care systems have so many children and such shortage of social workers that they contract out a certain number of cases. So in Los Angeles County, which, as I mentioned before, the largest foster system in the country has multiple agencies, which manage some of the caseloads, I would say similar thing to like, to charter schools, you know, which also Los Angeles has the largest number in the country. We began to receive matches. And then the matches were usually, let's say outside of the age range we're interested in, or gender or whatever else. So the risk was sky high and we knew we couldn't handle that, or there are all kinds of medical conditions that we knew we weren't prepared for. As part of the certification process, we filled out this questionnaire for the, potential children, potential matches we're interested in. And there were quite a few medical risks that we were open to, or at least willing to discuss. But neither of us is qualified, you know, in sort of like medical nurse-like capacities. So, we'll be getting as well, thank you, but we're just not the right type of family to take in that child.

Ashley: 16:05

Which I think is really important to admit to yourself. Yes. So that you aren't setting yourself up and a child up for failure, having to potentially send them back. I think that it's really good, although in some ways it almost feels like a dating app. It's like, we're gonna swipe no on this, but we're gonna swipe yes on this. But I think it was really good now, well, this was,

Lane: 16:24

this was probably at least a decade before the first dating app came out. Yeah. But, that's what's really fundamentally different between adoptive parenting and biological natural parenting, you know? Because basically you do get to choose the child. This is a benefit in a way that, that you do get to sort of set the limits, but that also because that offsets some of the risks that come with experience. So in a way there was a kind of a marketplace aspect to the whole thing. But we're still quite open and we started getting all these matches. And then, so sometimes we'll get like a few of them during the week, and sometimes the whole week would go by. We get no phone calls or emails. So there are multiple venues. We realized we wanted to get more proactive and so we heard about, for example, that the county had photo albums. Not the county. This is interesting. It was actually the state of California also had some agencies which dealt with some of the foster cases in Los Angeles. I hope things have gotten better, but the information about all these kids going in and out of the system, thousands, tens of thousands of them was so scattered. There was so much overlap and gaps and multiple players and all this. So we realized we really need to kind of expand and the agency told us about the adoption fairs and so the county would bring out the children, usually sibling sets that are harder to place, usually older as it turned out when we actually went to them, I think once a quarter to different places around Los Angeles County and do kind of like an arts and crafts and, you know, lunch activity for them while allowing prospective adoptive parents to come and see the kids. So we went to three of'em, and if you're interested, I can actually read to you a chapter from my book called Saviors, or Vultures which describes one of these fairs.

Ashley: 18:11

Yeah, I love that.

Lane: 18:13

Okay. The sun's wide disc was beaming with growing ferocity. The Milky Marine layer, all but burned off a dotted line of airplanes, like a map superimposed over the sky, was lining up to land at LAX down here in the dry hills of Kenneth Hahn recreation area. The air was warm and heady with a sense rising from the fennel bushes and the eucalyptus leaves crashed underfoot. Kids tots to teens were busying themselves with arts and crafts at rainbow-colored tables. A social worker stood guard looking on. This was our third adoption fair, a quarterly outdoor event to which the county brings out the kids available for adoption. Mostly sibling sets, which are harder to place. The previous two had been held in the far ends of the county in Sylmar and Arcadia in both places. The sun was so hot, I burned my neck just filling out the forms. This time, John and I were in the very heart of Los Angeles Between Baldwin Hills and Laudera Heights kids, social workers and the sun had been our only constants here at the fair. Adults were circling the tables, casting long looks at the kids, conversing in hushed tones among themselves and with the social workers. By now it felt almost natural to be squatting at a toddler table to color Barney cutouts, trying to make a connection, straining to observe as many details as possible. There was talk of lunch doubling as an opportunity to see the kids' food preferences and table matters. There was talk of a clown. This being our third fair social workers greeted us by our first names, we felt valued. A hot commodity, a double-income. No kids yet gay couple with a large house and an approved home study. Miles is such a great athlete. They talked this sibling's group of that and look at Taisha and her sisters. They've got such good chemistry, aren't they? Just adorable. I wondered if a child's natural beauty is the most decisive factor in being considered. The moment I saw him confided a friend who had found her nine-year-old, browsing the photos of adaptable Russian orphans. I knew he was the one. For the one, the blonde clear-faced handsome boy. She had traveled half the world and braved Russian bureaucracy. She was yet to discover that his true age was understated by two years. His smaller build was due to malnutrition and that he had a very mean temper, a result of the federal alcohol syndrome, compounded by years of abuse of the orphanage. Still, he hadn't displayed a hair lip or crossed eyes or hairy forehead did he? Beauty, however, isn't the only factor in the adoptive kids selection age. I learned matters too at these fairs. I read signs of resignation on the faces of older kids who knew the game and their dwindling chances of winning it. It was a knowing sideways glance that they gave you when your eye glided over them to younger kids. Some also knew they had to take charge. Life wasn't just going to hand them a permanent family on a plate. A girl, nine or 10, by the way, she looked, but with a prematurely sharp unsmiling expression, intercepted us as we were getting up from a craft table. Look, you like it? She jerked up a plastic bead bracelet to my face. Oh. It's lovely. I commented, taken slightly back. You like making bracelets. What do you actually like to do at home? Oh, many things. Her face relaxed a notch. I couldn't quite place her dark chestnut skin, red and black hair cropped in a bob. Yet her face looked oddly European. She could pass for South Indian or Sri Lankan, except are very few of them in Los Angeles and probably not in the system. I'm tiny. She said. I want you to see my brows. Come on. She grabbed John's hand and we followed her through the Dusty Park playground to meet a four and 7-year-old of a similar heritage. Probably a mix of African-American, and Latina. Andrew and Mario. Tanya hollered, not letting go of John's hands. Come say hello. Adrian and Mario obliged. They clearly looked up to her, the big sister. See, they're very nice, not fussy. Never ever. She informed us and we're good at school. This was heartbreaking. A nine-year-old playing mother to her shredded family, advocating for her brothers and herself. John gently extricating himself from her grip and walked off disappearing behind a row of playground swings. Listen Tanya, I said, we're really glad to meet you and your brothers, but can I talk to my partner? He isn't feeling all that well. We'll catch you later. Okay? She nodded, but didn't move with her two brothers standing sheepishly by her side. I found John sobbing by the park fence. This is too much lane. I can't do it. Let's get outta here. Can we leave now? I was moved too, but I wasn't about to lose it. We were all there for a purpose. All these kids trolled out by the county wanted to have a family just as much as we did. But if this wasn't traumatic, I don't know what is.

Ashley: 22:59

It really does break your heart the idea that they have to, present themselves as these perfect children in the idea that somebody might want them. That must have been really hard for you and John during that time too, of feeling like you're not sure, but also getting on the same page and really deciding whether it was going to happen for you and whether you wanted to keep pursuing it.

Lane: 23:21

It was, and also when you get a call, with a perspective lead or perspective match, they dump on you. Basically the drama that's going on in the family. So-and-so is in prison. So in drugs, you know, there's abuse of this kind. This went on that went on, and you find yourself sort of at the crossroads and someone else's mess, like instantly in it. You realize that, if you want to take in those children and if you hope to give them a, future, then you'll have to deal with that too. One place that we looked at, when we went to the state agency to look at the photo albums we saw this sibling that were kind of like John really kind of fell for, because he himself is mixed race. So there were three kids ages a one, four and five, if I remember correctly, that's in my book. They were adorable. They were mixed race and it felt like you were meeting John's family, and I know John's family pretty well. So that was on a Friday, right? And so on the weekend we went for a walk and we kind of began to sober up. I was like, John, you know, he realizes three kids we're going from zero to three. I don't know if we have enough space. You know, neither of our cars can take three kids. You know, might as if like kind of a, you know, sedan, you know, it's not, it's not a big car. How are we gonna manage it? Don't you think it's a little too much? So he was like, Hmm, yeah, maybe three is too much. On Monday I called the social worker and said, you know, I'm so sorry. You know, we said it would be interesting in potentially meeting these kids, but we feel like we're really not equipped for three right off the bat. It's just the two of us and we don't know if we have the resources to support that. And she said three who said it was, oh, she said, I just got more information. It's not three, it's actually four. That picture is years old. And the mother is pregnant with a fifth and at the last parent visit, she ran off with a child and there's a warrant issued for your arrest. Are you still interested? Like, okay, well I guess that was not the best match for us, you know, maybe for somebody else, but not for us. So you get into this very instantly, you know, and you have to deal with that.

Ashley: 25:26

Is there a fear if you say no, that you won't get another call, or with the volume of children that just happened to be in la you didn't really have that fear

Lane: 25:35

at the beginning. There is like, oh my gosh, can I say no? Can I say no? Yes, you can say no. And if anything, actually it's kind like the other way around. The longer you stay in the pipeline, at least in Los Angeles County, the higher you are on the priority list, which happened to, in one of the situations when we were called about a newborn, and I called John to say, you know, do you think we should do this? And by the time I called back with a yes, somebody else was called, and then, they went to the hospital and there the social worker from the county met them and turned them away at the door saying, Hey, you know, we found somebody else higher than you on the waiting list so that couple will get the child. And then we were told the whole story and I told John, you know, that could have been us rushing to the hospital with a car seat and everything else just to be turned away at the door because somebody else, all of a sudden popped up in the system who was higher on the list. It was a like an uphill, I say it was a rollercoaster. It was a rollercoaster of, of, of everything. Yeah.

Ashley: 26:34

Can you tell me about how you got placed with Mariana?

Lane: 26:38

This is very, very interesting because she actually did not come from the county. We were certified by a foster adoption agency, which did some of their business was placing children for foster adoption. Some of it was pure foster placement. They had some homes which were specifically taking kids just to foster them on a short-term basis, kind of on an emergency basis. And it was in one of them that there was an infant who was put there voluntarily by her mother who was very young. And I don't want to give you more information about it because you will see this in the very first chapter of the book, how young she was and what the situation was. But California has a provision which allows a parent who for some reason is not able to take care of a child, to petition the county to take the child over. Without losing any of the rights, without placing the child in the foster care system for up to six months. during which time you push your life back together and you visit the child and you take the child back. That's exactly what it was. I think it's called the Petition N- 300 process. So there was a child who was placed in that emergency foster care at, seven months. And that was baby Mariana. The mother visited her a few times, irregularly and disappeared. So the child was basically left abandoned in the foster home. The county had no idea where the mother was. And we were told about her saying that, she was left. And basically she's abandoned and looks like, you know she'll be going straight up for adoption. Basically within days, the Department of Children Family Services will be petitioning the court to detain her. That's the term, to detain her means, like to put her under the court's jurisdiction and then decide how to, I'm using the legal term, dispose of her to dispose, mean to decide what to do with her legally, put her in long-term foster care, return her to the birth family. That's called a disposition hearing. And so we said, well, it sounds promising. Yeah, let's meet her. And so we met her at the agency where the temporary foster family, an elderly lady and her daughter brought her in and we saw her and she was absolutely adorable. She was such an adorable child with a round face. She was just a very cute little baby. She wasn't walking, and actually she wouldn't walk for another seven months. So she was crawling, but she was full of life and full of interest in things and toys. She, at that time, at the very first visit, we didn't hear her say any words. She was just kinda like grunting and making noises. But at the second visit, we finally, we heard the first word, and the first word was Elmo, she really, really loved Elmo, so we were really smitten, if you could use that word, we're smitten with her, and we said, yes, we would like to visit her again. So we started to visit her in her foster home, and we met her Foster, I would say Mother, which was the grandmother and her daughter, two foster mothers, if you will. We got to know her routines. We started taking her out to the playground. We brought her in into our house for four day visits. So things began to move I was worried because on two levels, on one level, because she wasn't officially detained, she was still fully under the parental rights and everything else that comes. Basically she was still officially with her birth mother even though the birth mother had been gone for two months at that point. And nobody knew where she was or two or three months. So she was not at the courtyard. So, I mean, that was wormy. That's when it was like kind, raising a red flag. What's gonna happen if the birth mother comes back. And on the other hand, I was also worried that this is just one child. And Jonathan would be reluctant for us to go back into the system and look for a second child later on. And I'll be honest, I'm actually very religious person, you know faith has been very important to me over the years. I've been getting stronger. And I felt that in a way she was meant to come to us. She was meant to come to us, not for our sake, but for her sake. It's not in the book. I'm not putting much of that in there. But I feel that she was meant to come to us because the Lord wanted her to have a stable home, which would allow her to, thrive as much as she possibly can after what she went through the first year of her life. In that sense, we were chosen. We weren't given that child. We were given to her more than she was given to us. Her sister is a different story.

Ashley: 31:18

I definitely agree with you in that sense that it's like kismet that what is meant for us will come to us. But I also think that it's such a blessing that she did end up with you and your husband because she also got the opportunity to be with her sister. Yes. Whereas. If she had ended up with somebody else or if the situation with her mother or her birth parents had been different, that may not have been the case.

Lane: 31:42

There are all kinds of possibilities that could have come in. I mean, the courts do try to keep them together, although as we also learn, they can also split them apart, especially if they're half siblings, as was the case of our kids to me they're full sisters, but legally they're half siblings. They have the same mother, different dads,

Ashley: 31:59

which I definitely agree with you that it really should still prioritize because half doesn't really make you any less the family. But for the people that don't realize when they are half siblings and say with Gabby's situation, which is your youngest daughter, the dad was listed in that case. Whereas for Marianna, there was no father listed. So when the dad was interested in Gabby. Potentially their relationship was prioritized and instead of keeping siblings together, is that correct?

Lane: 32:31

That that is correct. And at some point it was prioritized disregarding her having a half-sister disregarding the fact that she'd been with us since birth and disregarding the fact that, I don't know if I should say now, but I guess I will. That without getting too far into the complications of the case, the father was an adult when the child was conceived and the mother was not, and she was almost 10 years younger. Wow.

Ashley: 33:06

It's also one of those things, so kind of taking it back. Into the beginning. A lot of things I think people don't realize if they've never dealt with the system. I think that TV and movies make it seem like the best interest of the child is prioritized, which in some cases, like yes. But when you get into the paperwork or the bureaucracy of it all, it really does become this weird paper trail of like not it kind of thing. If that makes sense. And so when we're talking about how Mariana's birth mother had willingly put her into foster care and then kind of disappeared, that the system wouldn't necessarily take that time that she had been in the foster care. That

Lane: 33:48

is correct. That is correct. It's not really until they started the clock from zero, only when they finally detained her. So the fact that prior to that she had been in foster system for seven or eight months, didn't matter. Didn't matter, which is also so

Ashley: 34:04

frustrating and like so mind boggling that they wouldn't look at it as a whole, especially developmentally that she would go through so many changes in those first like, 6, 7, 8 months

Lane: 34:14

that I don't want to generalize that the children's best interests are not always at the center of every case. I'm not a social studies scholar, but I will tell you that from my perspective as adoptive parent of these kids and from everything we've seen through our own case, through the case of our kids, their interests were never, never at the, what was at the center was the birth parents. And then. Whether they will be able to reunify, whether the county will be able to send the children one or two to the birth mother or one of them to the birth father. Or at some point they even came up with a crazy idea of sending both siblings to the birth father of only one of them, even though he had absolutely no connection to the other child. And that's also in my book, so everything was really about birth family. And when I started looking kind of deeper into this, what I discovered is that, you know I wasn't born in the United States. I was born in the Soviet Union. My, you know, I came here with my family we came as refugees. So I am American and this is my home. This is my country. But, I also come with a whole other sort of set of cultures and expectations and knowledge of the world that tells me I. That things that we take for granted here in the United States are not necessarily the ultimate truths. So the idea that the child is a property of their parents, that in a way a child is written as chattel as, property of, the adult, as much as everything else in the household. That actually goes back to the first statutes defining adoption, which were developed in Massachusetts in the 1850s. Before that, actually none of the American states or prior to that colonies any, had any statutes of what to do with children. They're kind of automatically taken. So that's where it became enshrined, the idea that the property, and you start with the birth parents, and as the adoption laws began to spread throughout the country, they were based in many ways on the Massachusetts precedent. Which enshrined that one. That their children, are the property of the parents. Secondly, that a judge will decide what to do with that property. The judge has the ultimate responsibility, not the social services that know the parents know the family, the social service, children's services. They testify before the court, but they can make recommendations, but the judge can easily overrule all all of it and go with what they believe is right.

Ashley: 36:37

Which is terrifying. It's essentially, it's like rolling dice. You really can never predict what the family court.

Lane: 36:42

Right, right. And we have friends who have gone through the process relatively painlessly. We also have friends who had much worse situations than ours. And that's described in the book too. And in our case, what I saw was basically the battle over trying to keep up reunification for what seemed to me were completely unreasonable. Times then really bend in the law. The law, I thought stated there. Clearly, if the C child is admitted under the age of two, the reunification is supposed to be cut within, you know, they should only be six months for reunification. And we saw in our case, like I said, it dragged out for almost three years between the two reunifications combined. So all these things were sort of being bent and like, you know, postponed, postponed, new things come in, things get restarted, like nothing happened before. It was unthinkable. Just unthinkable. And in the end, to me, who would've suffered the most from losing us? Oh, absolutely. Who would've suffered? When the children's attorney, tells us after we've been raising Gabby the newborn for a year. That's the first year of her life. Who do you think she knows as parents tells us like, oh, well if we send her to live with her birth father, with her, you know, biological father, then, a year or two down the road and there'll be another drug bust and she'll be back in the system. We'll give you a call. How can you think of a child in those terms and I told her, I said, she is not going there from, I mean, if, well, what can I possibly do, powerless as I am. But I knew that this is not a kind of scenario. I'm gonna try and play along, you know, because to us, when you raise a child, you know, when you raise a, you know, 1-year-old or newborn, whatever, you attach yourself to them, you bond with them. You know, you don't see yourself as foster parents. You just see yourself as parents. It doesn't matter to us what the judge would rule 20 miles away in the courtroom. The judge that by the way, will never meet this kids, the children's attorneys that never met the kids during the process, that they make decisions based on what's in the file to them. They're 2 dimensional, basically reports to us. There, the kids that we're raising around the clock 24 7, day after day, month after month, year after year. It's one of the huge ethical dilemmas of the process where basically if the court decides to, terminate, to cut the parental rights before that, you're supposed to be able to be ready to give'em up at any moment. After that, you're supposed to raise'em as your own for the rest of your life. Like something has happened here in our house between them and us. But nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. We're prepared to sort of like the, various sort of schizophrenic, if you will, way to punctualize as two completely different sets of parents to these children. If, we weren't, but if we did act as if we're ready to give'em up at any moment and keep our distance, can you imagine that would've done to their attachment? Like, you know, I love you, but only up to this point for sure. I'm not gonna let myself to get, there's a term for that over attached to you because I should be ready to give you up at any moment. And you should be able to move on to the next basically, destination in your life, you know? So that whole setup isn't working. I'm telling you it isn't working and my book kinda shows, the emotional. Costs. I would say there are also financial costs to that. I think if you look at that from the social standpoint, the statistics of Los Angeles County's department Children and family services put out the year that we took our kids in show that only forty-five percent of them were able to reunify. Well, that's wonderful for that one out of two children who gets to go back to the birth parents, although, you know, makes you wonder what exactly they're going back to if they were taken out of that to begin with. But let's say things are great, wonderful, they're back with the birth parents. What about the other child that you put through this process and that you still weren't able to reunify? What about that child living in the sort of like in-between situation, between the family they're with and the birth family with whom it's not working out. It's not working out. It's not working out. In the meantime, the child is growing. Yeah, even if you don't think about us adoptive parents, because we're really completely marginalized in this process as sort of non-entities. Think about the child, think about everything that they have to go through during that reunification, which may or may not be successful.

Ashley: 40:57

With what we know now even about mental health in the last 20 years, what we've learned. Mm-Hmm. You would think that the psychology of it and how it does have that toll on the kids and what long-term damage that you are doing teaching them that you're stuck in limbo. Maybe somebody wants you, maybe you'll go here and not really have that safety of knowing this is my home and this is potentially my parents that should be factored into it more. And it is just, it's mind-boggling that somebody that is appointed to speak on behalf of the children wouldn't even have to do like a one-on-one meeting with them. And I get like with a one-year-old, you could necess met necessarily, like do that in the same sense. But to have that connection of. Really taking it back to like a person-to-person issue instead of this is the paperwork, this is the rules that we're gonna follow. It is what it's,

Lane: 41:45

this system is very biased because people that are in it have their own biases, agendas, attachments, and desires. This is what people don't realize about children's court. And Children's Court, by the way, is closed to public. So my book is, I think probably is one of very few opportunities if anybody's interested to see what's going on behind the closed doors of the children's court. It kind of gives you a glimpse you know, kind of gives you a peek into what's going on. What is going on is that you've got multiple parties in the room. Each of them has their own agenda. The judge doesn't want the cases to be remanded and the judge has their own beliefs, right? The judge may be pro-reunification, as was our case. The judge may be anti-reunification. The judge may not care or care too much, you know, oh, the judge is a human. And the law can be interpreted in many different ways. True. The law, like I said, the law is six months. However, you can do exceptions. Well guess how many exceptions can you pile up or you might not grant an exception. So you as a judge have a lot of, leeway into how you decide on the case. I also feel certain amount of compassion for the judges because they are overworked. I looked up the statistics. A judge is supposed to have about 170 cases in insurance court in California. They have up to 600 cases. Can you imagine? No. Can you imagine? I would probably guess the majority of the larger the system, the more the cases. So when after everything we went through and we are at the finalization hearing, and the judge looks up and says, oh, today we're supposed to go through whatever the adoption of Elizabeth. I'm like, what? Elizabeth said, oh. No, it's a different one. It's, oh, Mariana. And then she did remember that was was Mariana, but she said, is she the daughter of, that's who she remembered. And to me, it told me one more time, this was never about Mariana, this was always about the birth family. So you've got the judge, you've got the county council who represents the interests of the Department of Children Family Services. What's her job? Her job is to protect the county from being sued for any sort of wrongdoing that might have occurred while the children are in the custody of the state or, in any way that the birth parents' rights were abridged or because of the county. She's not protecting children. She's protecting the county itself. Then you've got the birth parents. Each birth parent has their own, of course, you know, desire, but also their own issues. They've got their own court orders. This wasn't our case. Whether they comply or not comply, they've got their own attorneys. And then we've got the children's attorney and the children's attorney. We had two could be. Very caring about the children and really fighting for them. It could be kind of like, we'll see where the cards will lay, you know, we'll see how things will pan out or what I do know is these children's attorneys are also overworked and in our case, at least, our children's attorneys, both of them never met the children. They receive a stack of files, they receive reports from here, there, you know, they sometimes send a court representative to report on the conditions in the home. I think once every six months. Those visits would last about 15 minutes. Right. The report back to the court. Yeah. I saw the children. They're alive, they're fine. You know, they're unblemished. They seem to be well fed, but they don't see them, so they like, okay, open the next file. Open the next file, open the next file. So, as it happens. You throw in another, let's say if one of the birth parents herself is in the custody of the state and also under the DCFS, you've got a whole other layer of complexities there. And so these people change. Social workers, as we also saw change, they come in with their own biases. Which is very well described in my book, you know how they bring their own take on what's the best for the children or, how they treat the, you know, we did get a very strong homophobic vibe from one of the social workers, you know, they change, they can drop you in the middle of the case challenge, you know, children's attorneys may change, which also happened. So with all that, what I began to see was. I began to sort of learn about these agendas. I began to see this sort of shifting in alliances and hostilities in the courtroom. And I began to learn how to use the information that was stricken down to me in a way that would be helpful too, as far as I was concerned to the kids, how old are your girls now? They're 17 and 19. They're young ladies. The older one graduated from high school. She had many issues later on. Let me just. That, that stand from a very dysfunctional first year of her life. We did our best to give her the best, you know, childhood. She possibly could have, you know, she is a very gifted person. she was able to graduate from high school. And at this point, you know, when the book went to print she was starting college. At this point right now, she wasn't able to keep up with classes, but she's living independently. We're still helping her. We still found, we just set of Shabbat dinner last Friday. She was over. So yeah, we're still, you know, very much continuing. But I would say my primary goal with her. Given everything she she'd gone through was to see her to independence. She is living independent with a certain amount of support from us, but she's living independently. She's working. I would say she's in a good place. Her sister who is 17, she's a senior high school. She applied to UCS only because she has a very high GPA. She's like 17, going on 30. She's keeping us in check in a way. She's a very safe, secure, confident, young woman, you know, and I really want to say, you know, in many ways she's very much adult and we'll see her, I'm sure she'll get accepted into a few campuses given her community service, given her academic achievements. And so I'm beginning to really grieve her moving off to campus later this year.

Ashley: 47:47

I know there is that saying, my daughter's she's gonna be 17 this year. But it's like that saying that the days are long, but the years are short. It really does kind of go in a blink that they're babies and then all of a sudden they're just outta the house.

Lane: 48:01

And I should tell you that they just read the book. Actually our younger daughter is reading it now. She really had no interest in her story. Over the years I've been opening the story more and more to them, you know, age appropriate, of course you won't tell a five-year-old that she can tell a fifteen-year-old. Right? For sure. So I was opening up the story more and more so they do know a lot of it, but not of course in the detail that you see it in the book. The older one just posted on her Instagram that she finished the book in one night and that she cried and she put there how much she loves us. I think she understands so much more now what we went through in those years. And during the process. I also hope, and she understands some of the struggles that she herself went through years later that sort of stemmed from that experience, you know, that we tried to mitigate the best we could. I would also tell that, you know, we have a few of our friends adopted, you know and the foster care experience leaves a mark you love them and you try the best you can to, mitigate it and it can fade, but I don't think it ever goes away,

Ashley: 49:06

After their adoption was complete, did the birth mother ever come back into their life or she kind of left you guys be?

Lane: 49:15

Ours is a closed adoption, so I would say the contact with the birth mother and the birth father of our younger daughter ended at the time of the termination of their. Parental rights. The visits with the birth mother continued all the way to the termination of parental rights. They had been no contact to my knowledge. And we're talking about years ago when the cases ended. They both left the state for various reasons. I do not know where they are. I really hope that things worked out for them. They were both young, especially the mother. What I will tell you is that the one thing that has changed for me over the years is at the time when I was in the process, you have to realize the process was not between us and the birth parents. The process was between the birth parents and the court. We. Were never in the courtroom all the way until we're called in for the adoption hearings. As far as the process itself, we went in asking for the de facto parent status, like about like sometime early on, but we're thrown out.

Ashley: 50:23

So can you explain what that is for anybody who might not know?

Lane: 50:26

Okay. So after Mariana had been with us longer, than she had been with her birth mother at that point, you know she was close to be two years of age. We hired a lawyer and we petitioned to be granted the de facto parent status, which meant that we were her de facto parents, like, acting as her. Factual parents as we had been at that point for eight or nine months around the clock. And so we could be part of the case, like being in the case, this had actually no effect on, the parental rights of the birth parents. But this would've allowed us to be part of the process to testify in the court and know what's going on and all that. We paid quite a bit for the lawyer. He was supposed to be the top lawyer in the whole children's law milieu. And we were denied the petition very quickly. And once the petition was denied, we were asked to leave the courtroom immediately, which we did. So all this 50 page depositions with pictures and all that was basically was just routinely. Denied, and we were very kind of heartbroken over that. But then I also realized it wasn't entirely over because we kind of made a very strong claim for us as the concurrent track with whatever was going on in the courtroom. And that fifty-page, you know, deposition actually traveled around everybody's hands. They now knew for sure what was going on in the household where Mariana was, and that we were providing a very, very good narrative alternative for the future that Mariana might have if she stays with us, as opposed to going back to her birth mother. But I'd like to go back to the birth mother, who, like I said, was extremely young at the time, at the time we were in the process, I was very, I was, I would say, very angry with her. For what she was putting the kids through and me as well with the visits and the claims and, all these things. It was very immediate to me. And this was, by the way, the whole, I mean, as I was taking notes and'cause I thought, you know, I should really write about this, but when the cases ended. I realized I can't, it was so raw. I was hurting so much and like, I couldn't even face those boxes of documents. It took me four years to get to the point where I was like, okay, I think I'm ready now to see what's in those boxes and see if I can sort of reconstruct the case. And then it took me another eight years to write that because I could really only write during the summer when I'm not teaching, you know? I have like summers off with the kids and so that would be with the kids and also writing that's what I was doing. But during the writing and doing sort of reconstructing as I was moving further and further away from the process, the more I would say my compassion for the birth mother really grew. I could see her more as a person and as a person who was so traumatized on her own. And of course she had. No business, you know, trying to be a parent for these kids. I mean, it's pretty clear to, anybody who will read the book and see what's happening there. I could also see how hard it was, how devastating it was for her to see that there might be going away and how deeply attached she was to them. So I, I really felt so much sorrow, and I still do, I mean, if there's one person that I, is, the birth mother for everything she went through and for her loss, I really do, empathize with her.

Ashley: 53:51

I think that does come across in the book. So I think your

Lane: 53:54

book does. Okay. I'm glad. I'm glad.'cause I did. I didn't want it to be in any way. You know, I'm trying to describe the events and the events are not very positive for her. But it's like, I'm not trying to put her in a negative light. I'm just retelling what I witnessed. But I didn't want to do any sort of snar No, no, no, no, no, no. Because she was hurting and it was coming outta many different ways. But I also realized she's still is hurting. She must be. She must be. I'm glad it came through in the

Ashley: 54:22

book. Yeah, it definitely, it's very like, this is what happened. You can tell that your emotion is raw, but like you said, it's not snarky. It really is factual and to the point. And what I like about your book is that it is so raw and vulnerable that it does touch on your relationship with your husband and what was going on between you guys during this whole process. Right. Your connection to your daughters and like milestones and what was really developmentally going on for them. About like the system and how you guys were dealing with it, and again, what was happening with the judges, with the lawyers, with DCFS and all of the players and part of that. And then also the biological fathers family and all of the other people that kind of were coming into it. I also really liked that it touched on the fact that, you know, politically what was happening with gay rights and what was happening with gay adoptions so it kind of ties it all together and it is something that, you know, is heartbreaking and devastating, but also is like as a parent to be like, I can remember the teething, or I can remember the potty training, or all of those kind of things. So it really is heartwarming in a nice way as well as being sad.

Lane: 55:30

It's eerily, relevant because in some ways 20 years later we are dealing again. It's like it's a new turn of the spiral. With a threat to the LGBTQ families, as you know because things basically at the time when we finalized our adoptions, we were still nobody to each other in the eyes of the federal government because of the Defense of Marriage Act. In 2008 same-sex marriage became legal in California, and we had a very kind of laid-back cool, cute wedding in San Francisco, which is in the book. I should say this was after we had been together 11 years, and the kids were two and four, right? But then later that fall, Prop eight came down, Proposition eight, which froze same-sex marriage. We added up among those 18,000 gay couples, gay and lesbian couples in the state who were married in the state of California. We were nobody to the federal government. And then others couldn't get married. And they couldn't get married all the way till 2015, if I remember correctly, when the Supreme Court in the United States finally ruled that, marriage between two adults is marriage between two adults basically. What your sexual orientation is, doesn't really matter. So, during that time, we were involved even during, in 2008 you know, I was involved in, in Marriage act which would protect, same sex marriage so, we did, we submitted a written testimony. It's part of the congressional record, which was depicting how we were being mistreated at that time, being a married couple with two kids, with two legally adopted kids who are nothing in the eyes of the federal government. We're like two single adults raising two sisters it was bizarre. The phantom taxes, all of that. But then of course after 2015, you know, it looks like we've got full marriage equality and, our families are doing great. I see this new generation of LGBTQ kids grown up with that, with a sense of acceptance and I want to just scream at the top of my lungs. You can lose it all like this. It was very hard to get, and it's very easy to lose. Look what happened to the abortion rights. It can be changed, it can be left up to the states, and we'll be back in the situation where you can't adopt in the state or you will lose your parental rights when you cross the state. And there are all kinds of crazy stuff. So, because family law is still state prerogative.

Ashley: 58:13

It really should be federally regulated.

Lane: 58:14

I see the first sign of that with a, so-called with a case in which we also submitted amicus briefs, friends of the court letters which is Fulton v versus city of Philadelphia, in which a religious foster adoption agency refused to place kids with certified LGBTQ families parents. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the agency. That was just was it a year or two? Two years ago. I think it was now, two years ago. 2022. And I think it created a, very dangerous precedent, which basically says that we can place with you if it fits this. We don't have to. If it doesn't, you know, I see the sort of like eroding, of rights. All these bills coming up all around, the country. Threatening LGBTQ rights. I feel like we might be back to where we were and we'll have to be out on the streets again and fight again and do all the things we kind of forgot how to do

Ashley: 59:10

there's not even a word of like how incredibly stupid it is that we do make all of this progress. And then it's like, just kidding, we don't have enough to fight about. Let's keep creating issues instead of pushing things forward. And it's like you see that, like don't say gay things coming up in Florida or that people are having to flee states just to keep families together or have the opportunity to create a family. It's terrifying and it's mind boggling.

Lane: 59:35

Let's define what's good for the children. Let's start there. In our particular case or cases, it was not about that. It was about birth parents and let's see if we can build them up. And get them off. Basically get'em out of the state system because we got thousands more to deal with. You know, that's how it was. But it was not about the kids. So that's how they felt too. We're. As functional as any other family you can think of. So, absolutely. People may be politically on, different parts of the spectrum, but you know, let's set it aside and let's think about the children.

Ashley: 1:00:07

Absolutely. I think that everybody, like you said, that is a functional adult capable of, giving love, right. And providing a safe home. I think they should be able to, regardless of what their gender is, regardless of what their age is, regardless of who they're married to, I think that the more happy families that we can create, the better. I think that we need to stop putting limitations or make it harder for those functional adults to be able to have families and I just think that we need more of it.

Lane: 1:00:39

I agree. I agree. I hope things will continue to develop in this regard. I'm being hopeful here, being very hopeful.

Ashley: 1:00:45

Well, and I think that the media is quick to divide, but when you really do get down to that human-to-human level, we do realize that we are, in most cases, we are so much more alike than we are different. That I think having conversations where people can hear different opinions and that they're actually hearing what the person is saying Mm-Hmm. Instead of putting their assumptions of what that person might be like makes such a difference. So I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me today.

Lane: 1:01:13

Thank you. And thank you for reading my book and reaching out. I mean, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm so happy that I was able to come on your show and speak about it.

Ashley: 1:01:21

Oh, thank you so much. Can you let everybody know. If they're looking for you online where they can find you?

Lane: 1:01:28

Oh, sure. I have a website, which is lane i goodin.com. And I'm also active on social media. You can just look up Lane, LANE, Igoudin I-G-O-U-D-I-N on Instagram or Facebook. That's probably where I post the most. And reach out, you know, if you have questions, if you'd like to talk, by all means, I'll be happy to share what I know. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lane. Thank you.

1:01:59

Thank you so much for joining us today for this episode of The Filled Up Cup podcast. Don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a review. If you like what you hear. You can also connect with us at filledupcup.com. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode.