After you finalize your adoption, you may experience “paperchase withdrawal,” a sense of anxiety and depression that you trace to the fact that there are no more forms left to procure, complete, or file. But there’s hope — if you adopt from South Korea and you live in Massachusetts, there’s another lengthy bureacracy tour in store for you. You still have to get your child’s birth certificate, passport, Social Security card, and Certificate of Citizenship. The order outlined above is crucial to the success of this enterprise.

The birth certificate is a US document that gives the vital info on the child’s birth but lists the adoptive parents as the parents of record. You need the birth certificate, plus the adoption decree, to obtain a US passport. Why do you need a passport if you’re not planning on traveling internationally? Although the passport agency accepts the adoption decree as proof of citizenship, because the law provides for citizenship upon adoption, the Social Security agency does not; therefore, you need the passport to obtain the Social Security card, which of course you need to claim the little shaver on your taxes.

Once you have your Social Security card, you can apply for the Certificate of Citizenship. Here’s where the bureacratic waters get a bit murky. The Certificate of Citizenship (eponymously) declares that your child is a citizen. By my logic, the adoption decree should be proof of citzenship as long as the law equates “adopted” with “citizen.” Failing that, the passport serves as proof for all of us native-born folk. But for some reason this expensive, paper-intensive application persists. It seems to be a holdover from the days when children had to be “naturalized” post-adoption. One of the adoptive moms on the Bethany board, who is a Korean adoptee herself, has a horror story about what happened to her because her parents never completed the naturalization process or obtained this certificate (scroll to bottom of the page). It’s hard to imagine that this could happen with the automatic citizenship law, but the general consensus (and recommendation of the adoption agency) is that we should obtain this “just in case.” You can download the form here. There are 8 pages of instructions and 7 pages of documents; submit with $200 (hey, another tax writeoff!) and 7 to 8 supplementary documents, depending on the situation.

Aitch and I are currently halfway through the four-step process. Now, I consider myself something of an expert on negotiating bureaucracy. I once obtained a work permit in an Arab-speaking country from men who thought that single women had no business living alone without male protection, let alone holding jobs. I’ve learned to leave no stone unturned in ascertaining requirements for paperwork. No question is too stupid, no answer too obvious to obtain in advance of hauling your ass all the way out to the next office. But I guess that lesson has faded over the years. We had to make two trips to the Social Security office (a half-hour drive) because it didn’t occur to me that we would need to present Aitch along with all the requisite documents. And when I went to City Hall to get his birth certificate, I assumed that “It should only take a few weeks” meant “We will send it to you in a few weeks,” not “You should pick it up in a few weeks.” Luckily, City Hall is only a few blocks away, so it was easy to rectify once I made the phone call to ask where the form had gone amiss.

When I got to City Hall I looked over the birth certificate to make sure all the information was correct, and I was horrified to see this:

no apostrophes

Oh, Commonwealth of Massachusetts! Seat of Harvard, bastion of the humanities! Playground for the great linguists of MIT! Custodian of the public school system to which I have entrusted my children’s academic development! Forsake ye not apostophes, those indicators of possession. This is a simple matter. We’re not talking plural possessives, or possessives of singular nouns that end in S, or possessive nouns whose number is in question. We’ve got one mother and one father, and some personal data belonging to each. Take Strunk and White as your guide; they’ve set it down so simply that a second-grader could understand it — and that is, according to this curriculum summary, the grade where one learns these things.