There are some things in the adoption application that need more consideration than others. One of those things is your references. You and your spouse need to sit and make a list of your friends. Look at the list and give consideration to any marital problems, work problems or any recent disagreements that you have had with that friend.
I mention this because of a problem that we encountered with one of our references. The agency sends out request to the people you list, we used friends from work and our personal lives. In the letter from the agency they request that they send their letters back to them directly. All 5 of ours came back great. The letters were very complimentary and they all said we would make great parents. However, a few months later the adoption agency received an anonymous letter that had them greatly concerned.
There were only a few people who knew what agency we were using and that was the 5 people we used as references so it was easy to narrow it done. We requested a copy of the letter and when we received it the writer was very clear to us. One of our references was a co-worker of mine, she and her husband were great friends of ours (or so we thought). She wrote the letter and faxed it to them from our work fax. The things that she wrote were so horrible that I would not have given me a child. Why would she do that? Well she got in trouble at work and thought that I told the boss that she did it. Sounds like a perfectly good reason to ruin a friendship and potentially stop a couple from becoming a family doesn’t it?
This is why I say that be sure that you fully know the person, that you can trust them and that they are not a little off in the noggin. I did confront her, she did admit to doing it because she was mad. When she was told by the boss that I was not the one that got her written up she did apologize. Did she really feel an apology would make it all better? The things she wrote in her 2nd letter were horrible.
Luckily we were able to possible to counter some concerns of the Social Worker who was processing our application. It did help that she wrote them a retraction letter saying she did it because she was upset but, that did not solve the problem completely. It took a lot of work and more reference letters to balance her 2nd letter.
I truly hope that this happens to no one else, but it does point out the importance of your references.