4 month waitaversary

That's right.  Today marks 4 months of waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting.  How many more posts like this will there be?  I won't predict that.  No sense trying. 
We started our 4th month with a celebration of Brian.  His birthday was on Thursday, and for a few months, I was busy planning a surprise for him.  Wanting it to be fun, low key, relaxed, and social, the plan was to go to a minor league baseball game with an all you can eat buffet.   It was a day full of surprises.  Brian's nephews, his brother and sister-in-law came up from Virginia and met us at a local restaurant.  Brian had no idea, and it was a really great surprise.  That would have been enough, actually.  He was pretty happy.  But, then we went to a bakery to pick up a chocolate chip pound cake that he also didn't know about.  From there, back to our house where Stacey, my parents, Brian's cousin from Pittsburgh, our friend Diana and her son Carlos from D.C., our friends Joan and Jim, and our friend Val were all waiting for us.  Terri joined us later.  Brian had no idea!  It was awesome!  I was a bit nervous... Brian's not one for a big surprise like that, feeling unprepared, having all of the attention focused on him, etc.  But, he was happy and he handled the unpreparedness exceptionally well.  The problem was that yesterday was a major storm... monsoon, actually... and the game was called off.  It was so disappointing, and for me, a bit stressful.  I hadn't come up with a plan B (yep, I'm an optimist!), and I hadn't gotten any food, snacks, drinks, etc. to have on hand just in case, because I couldn't have explained that to Brian.  "Well, Bri, we don't drink soda, but I just thought I'd buy a few cases of it at the store for no particular reason whatsoever.  I also just stopped and got some beer just in case we're inspired to drink some, which we never do."  Right.  So, once we  got home and Brian got his shock of the day when he walked in and saw a room full of people waiting for him, I ran off to the store to get some snacks and sodas.  We called Dominos for help with feeding the hungry crowd, and we spent the rest of the night hanging out, watching sports and "X-Men" on TV (well, the guys and the boys did), and talking.  It was a lot of fun.  Carl, Ana, and the boys along with my mom and dad spent the night, we enjoyed donuts and bagels for breakfast, and then after my parents left, the rest of us went to Valley Forge National Park to walk around. The boys played some Neanderthal baseball with a large stick they found in the park, and after that we went and got sandwiches and cheesesteaks for lunch.  Jaime got an 18 inch cheesesteak... can you even imagine?  I feel sick just thinking about it.   Are you sensing a theme here?  Eat until you're sick... that's how it felt, but it was fun.  It was so nice spending time together.  Made me realize again how many wonderful people we have in our lives... how people are so kind, caring, flexible, and supportive.  We couldn't feel luckier to have each and every one of you. 
Having everyone around this weeknd, and the planning that has taken the better part of two months, was also incredibly helpful in temporarily forgetting about the wait.  Well, we never really forget about it, but it was helpful in putting those thoughts on the back burner rather than in the forefront of our minds.  I did think, more than once, that it would have been a pretty incredible birthday present for Brian if the call had come yesterday amongst the chaos.  We could have handled it... really!! 
So, now the birthday celebration is over, but we're going to try to reschedule that game, and we'll do that while we continue waiting.  We'll continue to do the little things that we do to prepare... collect more baby things, however small, read all we can, attend our seminars that Open Arms offers, go to the coffee talks and stay connected to the people in our cohort.  Maybe next year's birthday celebration will include another face.  A newer, sweeter, and lovely face.

The gift of going through the process

Today is April 14, 2011 and that means it's Brian's birthday... thank you, Mary, for giving life to this beautiful person who means so much to me!   His light stretches far and wide, and I'm so glad to be inside of it!  To match that light, the weather was just about perfect today, with lots of sunshine and warmth.  Too bad we missed it.  We both had to work, then head into the city for an adoption meeting about PA and NJ law.  First, though, a very romantic, celebratory birthday dinner at a food court under construction.  Yum... Chic Filet!  We enjoyed a spectacular piece of the best, most moist chocolate cake compliments of Wegmans, too! 

The meeting tonight was very overwhelming.  Learning all of the in's and out's of adoption laws in PA and NJ is no easy task.  It's complicated.  It's stressful.  It's scary.  There's so many scenarios that could play out... if the birth father is known, if he's unknown, if he could be one of multiple men, if he's interested in parenting, if he's not, etc. There's the issues surrounding when the birth mother can sign consent and when she can't, what the window of opportunity is for her to change her mind, what if she's on the fence, etc.  Then there's tax issues, and health insurance issues, and just plain issues.  I had this moment during the seminar when I thought to myself... I change my mind.  I don't want to do this.  It's too scary and we're too vulnerable.  We're at the mercy of too many other people and not enough in control of our own destiny.  I want to turn back the hands of time and change history.  I want a simple experience of being pregnant and giving birth, so that the baby is ours from the get go.  It's not questionable, it's not challenged, and it certainly wont change.  I can't begin to imagine the experience of receiving that baby into our arms and our hearts, bringing him or her into our home, loving that baby fully and deeply, and then having to return that baby to birth parents.  It's a small, small possiblity that this would happen, but even a small chance feels like too big of a risk.  Our hearts are so incredibly breakable, and they are so hard to mend.  They are fragile.  Do we want to mess with this and risk breaking our hearts more than they already have been broken?  Of course, in reality the answer is yes.  This is one risk that is so worth taking, and in the end, our hearts will be more full than they've ever been.  The moments when we question this process are few and far between, but it wouldn't be right not to acknowledge them.  Doing that doesn't make them non existent.
This process... this journey...it's such a beautiful thing. And it feels so right.  In a way, it feels like an honor to be going through it, and I almost want everyone I know to experience it, too.  It feels like an honor for reasons I can't fully understand or describe.  It sort of feels like we're "chosen ones", both literally and figuratively.  We will be chosen, by the birthfamily.That is special.  I feel like we're in on something that only a select group of people get to be in on.  It's brought people into our lives that we wouldn't ever had in our lives otherwise.  We have an understanding that's unspoken with these people.  We're a part of an exclusive club, and though that never was my thing (to be exclusive or a part of a "club"), this feels important and special.  It's given us a grace that we wouldn't have otherwise known.  I guess there will be moments that are so frightening and overwhelming that we want to run and hide, but we wont because our baby is counting on us to be there when he or she arrives.  We're meant for this, and the path may not always be easy, but it'll still be our path.  It's a tremendously important gift that we've been given.  We have to cherish and appreciate it each and every day, even when it feels harder than anything else we could ever imagine. 

Becoming Connected

Today, we went to a potluck picnic that was hosted by Open Arms, our agency.  It turned out to be perfect weather for a picnic.  It was held at a community center in a planned community in Bucks County.  All of the families that are working or have worked directly with Open Arms were invited.  There probably was about 30-40 families there.  A great turn out.  We were really looking forward to going to this.  Open Arms offers a lot of opportunity for families to connect with each other and find support.  There were all kinds of families there, and people in all stages of the adoption process.  There were many, many families that have already adopted, and a handful of us who are waiting.  We're starting to get to know some of the people that we see over and over again in the workshops that we go to, or at the Coffee Talk.  It's reassuring to have the opportunity to ask questions, hear stories, and learn from other people's experiences.  It's actually also nice to be a few steps ahead of some other people, and be able to offer them words of wisdom or reassurance that they'll get through each of those steps eventually, too.  It makes us feel good to know that maybe something we've done already will help someone else.  Becoming connected feels important right now.  We've done so much to prepare, and there's little left to do but wait.  We've found the day care, the pediatrician, and the nursery furniture.  We've gotten some diapers and a couple outfits.  We've got some books, rattles, and onesies.  We've got the car seat and practiced putting it in the car.  So now what?  People keep telling us that you prepare as best you can, and then you wait, and you feel like it's never going to happen, and then suddenly you get the call and life becomes chaotic and out of control in an instant.  Suddenly, it's on... full speed ahead.  Waiting for that moment, when life becomes chaotic, feels like torture at times.  Becoming connected helps. We're finding people who know exactly what we're going through, how desperately we want it, how sad we feel at times because it's been such an agonizing struggle, and how impossible it all seems, though we know it's not.  Today one person, now a mother, said that when waiting, she felt like they'd never get picked because there was nothing special about them... they were just an ordinary couple leading an ordinary life.  They didn't do any world travel.  They're only moderately cultured.  They hang out at home and do house stuff.  We get it.  We feel like that.  When you're one couple in a sea of hopeful parents, and you read their "hello letter" and it sounds so similar to yours, it's disappointing.  You worked so hard to make yourself stand out while being true to who you actually are, and now you find that there's people out there who're just like you, or who seem better than you in some way, and you wonder, is there something here that's going to make someone pick us over them?  What is it that makes us special to someone else... someone who will pick us to raise her baby?  We let these thoughts run through our minds, because they will, like it or not, and while that's happening, we fight with ourselves to just let it go, let things unfold as they will, and as they're meant to unfold.  We're reassured over and over again that once that baby is in our arms and in our hearts, that all of this will melt away... all of the time, energy, anxiety, worry.  All of the agony of the wait will vanish, as if it never happened, and everything will make perfect sense.  All will be right. Becoming connected to people who try to believe that, too, and to people who once tried and now know it to be true... that's what helps.  It feels good to be building those relationships, to be making new friends, to belong to this incredible world of incredible people and children.  

Scenes from the pot luck picnic

Lots of fun for the kids

Two of the children at the Picnic having  fun with the beach ball

This is a copy of a post that our agency copied into their blog.  Hits home.

Archives

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April

March

The Weight of the Wait

Posted by: Stefani Moon on Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 2:06:57 pm

This article is re-printed with permission of the author, Julie Corby, a parent by adoption. When it was first written Julie was in the midst of her waiting process. Although her adoption journey was an international one, difficulty waiting can be universal to all adoptions.
 What are your thoughts? How are you coping with your wait?
-Stefani Moon
The Weight of the Wait - by Julie Corby
I am sitting on my couch in my pajamas. I pop another Hot Tamale into my mouth. Wads of used tissue and empty candy boxes surround me. My two pups bolt from the room to avoid hearing the strange sounds emanating from my chest. It is 8 a.m., and I have spent the last 90 minutes watching adoption videos on YouTube, and crying.
At the end of 2007 my husband and I made an adoption video of our own. It was taken the evening we filled out our application to adopt two children from Ethiopia. I am uncharacteristically giddy in the video. I speak, very animatedly, to our future children. I tell them that we love them, and that we can’t wait to meet them. We toast to our future, and to what we hope will be a happy ending.
My husband and I have spent the last nine and a half years trying to become parents. We have battled infertility. We have had four short-lived pregnancies, and I have had a bout of thyroid cancer thrown in for good measure. International adoption, we thought, would at long last bring the pitter-patter of little human feet to our Los Angeles home.
On January 10th, 2008 our adoption agency approved our application. We became “officially waiting” and were told to expect news of our children in six to nine months. At last we had our resolution. I would be a mother to someone who did not have fur, and my husband would be a father to someone who did not eat Milkbones. Happiness would inevitably ensue.
Sixteen months later I am chin-deep in my adoption wait, and struggling to remain above water.
Under Pressure
The wait during any adoption—international, domestic, foster-adopt—is weighty. It weighs on your mind, on your heart, and on your spirit. It takes you to exhilarating highs, and pushes you down into some deep, dark lows. The emotions are intense, and the happy ending feels like it just may end up being another thing that doesn’t work out.
The wait gives you plenty of time to consider every aspect of your adoption. It causes you to examine your own motives and needs. What may have started as a joyful journey to family becomes something much more complicated. The doubt and uncertainty of the wait, for me, is compounded by feelings of self-loathing and guilt as I realize I am waiting for someone else’s tragedy to unfold. My future children will have lost everything. I will take them from the only lives they have every known and plunk them smack down into the middle of mine.
Adoption is about loss—loss for the birth family, and loss for the children. With that in mind it seems unconscionable to use the word difficult when referring to what a potential adoptive family goes through during the wait. But there’s no denying that the constant uncertainty and lack of control do make it a challenging time.
Ann Alden of Washington, DC, has been waiting 20 months for a domestic adoption with no matches. “I wish that I had better coping strategies. It’s so hard to wake up every day and wonder, is this going to be the day?” she says. The daily disappointment with no definite end in sight makes her wonder whether she can go on. “At this point it’s very tempting to just quit completely, not because we don’t want to be parents but because it’s too hard to deal with the uncertainty.” All potential adoptive parents wait, knowing that at any time the whole thing could fall apart. In international adoption, countries close down, and adoptions stop. In domestic adoptions, birth mothers change their minds. In foster-to-adopt adoptions, children are reunified with their birthparents. It is all heart-wrenchingly precarious.
Many potential adoptive parents reach the lowest levels of despair, according to Carole LieberWilkins, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles who counsels people in all stages of the adoption process. Unmet expectations and lack of structure are the hardest parts of the wait, according to LieberWilkins. “Not knowing when something will happen leaves us feeling like it never will.” It can be hard on couples, too: Both men and women experience fear, anger, and frustration, LieberWilkins explains, but they experience it differently. “Women are ready and they just need a baby in their arms,” she says of the clients she’s seen. Because men and women do not experience the wait in the same way, LieberWilkins emphasizes the importance of respecting each other’s feelings.
Wait Training
The wait definitely gives you a lot of time to reflect, educate yourself, and gather resources. I have had time to research and select the best elementary school for our kids. I started an online book club featuring books about adoption, parenting, and Africa. I have gathered a blogroll of smart, adoptive families who are handling challenges like attachment and racism in ways that I would like to emulate. I have started to learn Amharic (the main language spoken in Ethiopia). Over a year ago we started attending a monthly gathering of adoptive families, whose support has been invaluable. We have made some incredible friends and met some truly astonishing children. Everyone who manages the wait finds his or her own ways to do it, but here are some particularly helpful strategies.
•    Stretch your spontaneity. Seeing an impromptu movie, sleeping in, going away for the weekend, and staying out late are all things that will be more difficult when your child comes home.
•    Exercise your libido. Several therapists advised me to have more sex, and my friends, now home with their children, corroborated (adding, “Do it now, while you still can!”).
•    Run it down. Kathie Krause of Chicago, Illinois, spent her wait training for a triathlon. In the six months between her immigration approval and her child’s referral, she completed five sprint distance triathlons and lost 40 pounds. “It definitely filled the time and gave me something else to   focus on,” she remembers. “And now that I’m carrying and chasing a 25-pound 13-month old, I’m glad I lost the extra weight.”
•    Be the change. Volunteer; find a cause to get behind. Meghan Walsh, of Madison, Wisconsin, raised $16,000 dollars for Doctors Without Borders while waiting for her son Zeke to come home from Ethiopia.
•    Practice. Offer to baby sit. Take a CPR class. Childproof your home. Learn about strollers and car seats. Find a pediatrician.
•    Join the club. Find a group to join, online or in person. In some cases you may find that the only thing you have in common with the members is the desire to adopt; in others you may find friends you feel you’ve known your entire life.
•    Keep track. Start a journal. This can be the most private written record, or a very public online blog. It may be something that you will want to share with your child when they are finally home with you.
Second Wind?
It seems like the strain of the wait would lessen once you’ve been matched with a child, but LieberWilkins suggests the wait may actually become more unbearable when there’s a face attached to it. When the parents receive a photo or a video of a child, this person they’re waiting for is no longer a fantasy for them but an actual person, and they begin to bond. “That truly becomes their child,” she says, “and the adoptive parents feel like their child is somewhere without them.” Jess Vogel of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a mother-of-four who is also waiting for her daughter from Ethiopia, agrees. “When I tuck my kids in at night and give them a kiss, I wonder what my child is doing, and if anyone has kissed them today, or said I love you. I am reminded of all of the little things, likes coughs and colds, ear infections, scraped knees, fevers, bad dreams, and I worry about how my child is doing, and if they’re scared or lonely. It’s hard not to.”
Not all people have had such real-life reminders. Tucking a child in, reading him a story, or kissing him good night are things that many people have only experienced in their imaginations. LieberWilkins says that for these people, once that match is made, the wait may be a bit easier because something is happening, and with a picture in hand, they can now start to visualize these loving events occurring in their own lives. The match can engender a hope that had, until now, been too tenuous to hold onto.
“The wait before and after was filled with elation, uncertainty, anxiety, guilt, and fear,” says Nancy Meyer, of Evanston, Illinois, who is finally home with her three-year-old daughter Makena from Ethiopia. “But through it all there were lessons, and there was hope. Hope was a constant companion, and one so alive that it worked like a mediator bringing a daughter and a mother together. And once we met, all the time in between was vapor. All the panic in the wake of waiting—it completely dissolved.”
Training for a marathon, wrestling with ethics, reading about attachment, visualizing a child in your arms, or even inducing lactation are all ways to cope with the wait during the adoption process. In what I hope is my home stretch, I’d like to tell you that I am lacing up my running shoes while loading the pod cast, “Parenting with Love and Logic” (in Amharic) onto my iPod. The truth is I’ve got a hot date with YouTube and a family-sized pack of Twizzlers. Craig and Susan are about to meet their baby Dawit in Addis Ababa and I don’t want to miss one tear-soaked minute.
Julie Corby writes about her life and her adoption at http://theeyesofmyeyesareopened.blogspot.com/. She has written articles for Adoptive Families, and is a columnist at In Culture Parent. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, and her two children adopted from Ethiopia in 2009

All ready...

It's here!  The nursery furniture is not only here, but in place and ready to go!  It was an exciting day waiting for it to come, watching the delivery guys take it up the steps, waiting to hear them say it's ready... It looks great, and we can't wait to use it!  Did I mention that we found a pediatrician and have a day care center identified?  We have a pack of diapers and some onesies to get us started, too.  So, everything that's vital is ready, we just need the baby.

We went to "Coffee Talk" the other night.  That's an informal support group at a restaurant in Philly which is offered by Open Arms (our agency) about once a month.  People in all stages of the process come and hang out, get to know each other, and get to talk about anything and everything related to adoption.  It's been fun getting to know some of the other families going through the process, and some of the families who've been where we are right now.  This time, there were about 20 people there, and 5 of the families had already adopted.  Three of them brought their babies (all under 20 months old).  One who didn't bring her kids had adopted three times, and one had a 6 month old at home.  One family only waited a month, and another woman and her husband are still waiting, a year later.  I hope that the beautiful crib upstairs will not still be empty next year at this time, but the reality is that it very well could be.  As hard as that is to think about, going to Coffee Talk and meeting that woman who's still waiting and still hopeful a year later brought it back to earth for us.  We don't know how or when this is going to play out.  We just have to be thankful and appreciative that it will.