Once again, the posters on the Russian Adoption Forum have put forth an interesting question: What did you ask for on your referral, and how specific were you?

I think that the hardest task I had--with both adoptions--was filling out the form for my agency about the type of child I was open to adopt. Nothing has ever made me feel more limited--or more shallow. After all, if I were having a biological child I might have had to deal with a host of unknowns. What was wrong with me if I had to say, No, I can't parent this kind of child?

There were, on my agency's questionnaire, a lot of questions about different medical questions that a child might have. Could I accept a child that couldn't hear? Couldn't see? What if the child's birth mother had been a drug addict or an alcoholic? What if there was a history of mental illness in the family? What if the child had been sexually abused? And that's all before you get to the questions of gender and ethnicity. (Faith Allen, who writes the Hoping to Adopt blog has a great series of posts on assessing the health risks of the child that has been referred to you that you should read.)

It was very, very humbling. I wound up convincing myself, that, as a single parent with no previous experience parenting a special needs child--a parent who needed to keep working after the adoption--that I was not going to be the best parent of a child who needed extra help. Would that really have been the case? I don’t know. Though both of my children fell into the "no known medical conditions" category, I have had to rally extra help for them simply because of where they started out in life.

When I was working on the adoption of my older son, the gender question had been a toss-up. I wound up answering "either" to the question, and was as surprised as anyone when I was referred a boy. I grew up with sisters only. Maybe I was a bit of a tomboy, but I am, to this day, clueless about the mechanics of sports like baseball.

But when it came time for adoption number two, I had to weigh the gender issue in a new light. There's that "one boy, one girl and done" thing in American culture, which had always baffled me. In the end, I figured that since I had already begun to learn how to be the mom to a boy, I might as well put that knowledge to good use.

Ha! My boys have some similar interests, but on other things they are as far apart as the Sun and Pluto. There are some things that no questionnaire will ever answer for you.