the end of the 'easy' wait

our referral day (august 2, 2013). aka the day we ate tacos, drank beer, and had a baby.

it was a friday.  big lou was out in virginia for a weekend full of fishing and throwing sticks and eating bagels in bed with his aunt and uncle and cousin.  which meant that dave and i had the entire weekend to ourselves to celebrate my birthday.  i'm not really a birthday person but having the weekend to ourselves was reason enough to party!  dave came home from work early and i headed off to boxing class at 5:15pm.  now, because this was a child-free weekend, dave had planned a lot of stuff -- mostly eating and drinking and, well, drinking.  so he wanted me to get to my boxing class and then come home as quick as possible so we could get to the happy hour oysters at a place nearby.  sometimes i linger after boxing class to talk or do more punching. . . so when dave showed up at the gym when i still had 10 minutes of class left, i figured it was to make sure i got out of there quickly so we could make it in time for cheap oysters (this might sound weird but in our family oysters are a high priority, especially at happy hour prices).  it was either that or something bad had happened.  seriously.  dave doesn't go to the boxing gym.  its my thing.  he generally avoids it under all circumstances.  so when he walked in, i was at first concerned but he gave me a thumbs up and then waited for class to be over.  

by this point, we'd been waiting for 2 years for our referral.  about a year ago, i made sure that the ringtone for our agency was annoying and loud.  that way, when they called we'd be sure not to miss it.   other than that, we hadn't really done much 'planning' about it.  a lot of folks in the adoption community have all these elaborate plans about what is going to happen when they get 'the call.'  plans about what if you're at work or someone is out of town etc.  we had no plans really.

so while i was at boxing, my phone started to make a really awful, annoying, and loud sound.  normally dave doesn't pay any attention to my phone but when it started to ring like that he looked to see who was calling and it was our agency!  he answered.  hellos were exchanged. they said it was our referral call.  a little 13 month old boy.  they would send an email shortly.  the end.

i didn't know it, but my husband has a solid poker face.   i had no idea he had just gotten our referral call while i punched and kicked the heavy bag with him standing near by.  so as we walked out of the boxing gym together, i'm sure i was talking (i usually am) about something inconsequential and then dave's face started to change from what i now know to be his poker face to something else.  something happy and sad at the same time. and he just said 'Holt called.'

and that was that.  i had a million questions, none of which he had bothered to ask.  hilarious! so we get back to our apartment and i call our agency and blubber off a few questions about his name, where he is from, and basically WHEN ARE YOU SENDING THE EMAIL???? i must have asked the poor woman at least 5 times when they were going to send the email.  i mean, you called us and said we have a baby boy.  why isn't the email ready?  right now? where is the email????

so we got off the phone with a little more information.  his name.  and where he is from.  and an estimated birthday.  we stared at each other.  i checked my email 7 times in 30 seconds and then we decided to get out of the apartment and go eat tacos!  we ate tacos.  and then the email came.  we walked across the street to a dive bar, got two beers, sat down and opened the email together on my phone.  and with that, we had a son. 

and that moment marked the end of the 'easy' wait and the beginning of the 'really REALLY difficult' wait. the wait to get our son home.

the funny thing i felt that night was sadness about that being our 'last' referral call.  we don't plan or expect to adopt again.  so there will be no more anticipation or mystery or i wonder when we will get the call and who our son will be. . . that is all written now.  i don't often have awareness in my life about 'this is the last time . . . . ' even when it is the last time.  but after that referral call, i felt sad that it was the last one.  but who knows.  maybe it wasn't the last one.  i know enough now about life that saying something is the 'last' or 'will never happen' is just plain silly.  so there you go.

it happened!

2 years and 1 week of waiting.  and then it happened!!!!

two whole years

okay.  well i gotta write something today because as of today, we have been on the wait list for 24 months.  2 freaking years! it seriously seems like 5 seconds and 100 years all at the same time.

ocho

after 23 months, we are now number 8 on the waitlist.  #8! woohoo!

22 months and a 4 year old!

this past weekend marked 22 months on the wait list!  and yesterday, our little ethiopian turned 4 years old. . . he is getting very excited about a little brother -- saving toys and clothes he thinks little brother will like.  but he is also a realist, practicing putting his toys up high and out of reach.  we are getting closer.  this might actually happen!

21 months

we have been on the wait list for exactly 21 months.  since we started this adoption we have moved 4 times.  one of those moves was cross-country.  the husband has changed jobs once, and job descriptions 3 times.  i've gone from a runner to a boxer.   luther has gone from a mild-mannered 2 year old to an amazing and determined almost-4 year old!  life is good good good.  so i admit, those 21 months went by without much 'adoption waiting drama.'  but i will also admit, that during those 21 months, i didn't feel totally 'ready' for another kid.  i mean, i was game for it.  but not obsessing over it.  and now.  i feel ready.  we are ready to get this thing started.  luther is ready for a little brother.  we even have a 2 bedroom apartment!!!

my point is that i can feel my peace with this waiting-for-a-referral process coming to an end now.  i really want to be distracted and not think about it, but i wake up every morning, wondering.  wondering. wondering.  typical wait times for referral with our agency right now are averaging 20-24 months.  at the beginning of april, we were #16 on the list.  so i expect our wait to be closer to 24 months.  but still, i wonder.  who will be our little boy?

our (first) adoption story

it took me longer than 2 years. . . but i finally wrote our adoption story (well, at least the version i'm willing to share with the world).  here it is:


adoption. every time i sit down to write our adoption story i am immediately overwhelmed with the task. the emotions. the circumstances. what it meant. what it means now. what to leave out. what to leave in. adoption is complicated. dueling forces of loss and gain are always at play. my son is still young and i fear telling too much of his story before even he is ready to hear it, understand it, and own it.
however, i truly believe in the power of sharing experiences. especially in sharing all the truths of the story: the beautiful, the ugly, the unexpected, the failures, the successes, and the wonderfully ordinary.
during our adoption process i poured over other folk's adoption stories. i read many (probably hundreds) blogs. i read every adoption book i could find. because our adoption had not happened yet, i could picture myself in all the stories. i found peace and hope in other adoption stories. i remember really focusing in on stories about the challenges inherent in adoption. i read more closely those stories that weren't all "rainbows and unicorns." i read them slowly and with the expectation that soon, i would be in their 'shoes.'
i choose to share pieces of our adoption story here, from my side of it. however, the other side of it is my son's story. his is a different story. and i hope that someday, he will embrace it and want to shout it to the world with power and pride.
its hard to know where to begin. adoption is such a part of my life now, like my arms and legs are part of my body. i don't even know where it all truly started.
i can say for sure that the 'plan to adopt' has always been on my mind, since i can remember. my husband says the same thing about himself. perhaps, this is one of the reasons why it was such a natural decision for us to officially decide to adopt as our first choice for starting our family. we had traveled, and still do, all over the world, and so international adoption just made sense to us. to be honest, we figured we would first try to adopt and if that didn't work out, then we'd try to do it the 'old fashioned' way. we lived in a studio apartment and i was most afraid of the infamous home study process. looking back now, i laugh at that because the home study process ended up being the easiest part.
we completed our 'paper chase' and submitted our dossier to ethiopia in april 2009. at that time, referrals were happening pretty quickly with our little agency. one month later, we got "The Call." and then we began our wait for a court date. we received many, many photos of that little boy. we named him. we loved him. our families had pictures on their phones. they loved him too. we got a crib and set it up. we started to collect clothes and imagine our lives with this little boy as our son. but we never got a court date for that child. there was something wrong with his paperwork. we lost his referral on christmas day, 8 months after first seeing his face. we felt a lot of pain. a lot of grief. a lot of anger. we felt helpless and yet, that little boy was the one who was in the most pain. for countless reasons, it was infinitely more tragic for him. obviously. he was stuck in an orphanage. losing his referral was perhaps the most difficult thing my

husband and i had ever had to deal with. we had to accept the fact that the future we had imagined with this little boy was no longer our future. what we also had to accept was that we had lost an "imaginary relationship." but imaginary or not, it was a relationship that had developed over the past 8 months. and it still stings. it still breaks my heart to think about him. i still feel the loss of that little boy. but that little boy had no idea who we were. he wasn't aware (thank goodness) of this particular loss -- he had already lost everything and more. and it was and still is humbling to recognize the difference in the magnitude of what we call "pain and loss", compared to what children without families call "pain and loss."
i have always been the kind of person to find a 'silver lining' to every situation. i know that the loss of our referral better prepared us to empathize with our future adopted child. . . up until that point, my husband and i had experienced very little loss in our lives. you might say we lived charmed lives. i would say we definitely lived charmed lives! we had healthy, loving families. we had opportunities to travel, to study, to explore life with true freedom. we were (and still are) truly amongst the most privileged in this whole wide world. but loss is a absolute constant in adoption. for a family to adopt a child, another family must lose one. this is just plain mathematics. and after losing our referral, i want to think we became better equipped to relate to our future child, who would be losing everything familiar to him on the day he joined our family.
and so we returned to the "waiting for a referral" stage at the beginning of 2010. and everything felt different. i mean EVERYTHING. we felt more reserved. more cautious with our hearts. more careful with sharing news with family and friends. i packed the crib up and put all the baby stuff in a closet. i stopped my obsessive adoption blog reading. i wanted to start over. i wanted to hit the 'reset' button. i wanted to heal and to be able to take what i had learned from this experience and approach the second 'try' with more wisdom. but. but i also wanted to be excited again. i didn't want the loss of our first referral to diminish the joy and happiness i could send into the universe when we got our second referral.
in mid january, my husband was traveling for work and was going to be in the city where our agency was based. because of the specific circumstances surrounding our 'lost referral' we thought it would be good to just meet the folks at the agency. face to face. to sit down and have a chat. develop an actual relationship with them. one that didn't involve email and phone calls. it felt like another way to start over.
so my husband walks in and meets the director and they chat for a bit. and then the director shuffles some papers around and finds a profile for a baby boy. he calls to his assistant at a neighboring desk, also piled with papers, to make sure this particular child hadn't been referred to another family. then he passes the paperwork to my husband. and THAT is how we got our second referral. my husband was definitely in shock. and he went back to his rental car to calmly call me (this is hilarious to me. . . how calm he can be in crazy situations like that).

in the meantime, i was at home trying to distract myself because i knew my husband was at our agency's office. i was anxious to find out how the visit went. i was hoping to hear some news about how long our wait for a referral might be. i was also actually working on my resume, thinking that i might as well try to get a job after all since who knows when this adoption thing was going to happen. . . . so when he called me, i immediately answered the phone. his voice was calm, very nonchalant. he told me that they had given him paperwork for a little boy. he said the child's name and i immediately knew who he was. (i was a member of an online group with people adopting from our agency and whenever folks would travel to meet their children, they would post hundreds of photos of the children at the care center -- so i was quite familiar with the children waiting to be matched with families) my husband was being very reserved and collected. i was not. i was, well, overwhelmed. like REALLY overwhelmed. our different responses were simply part of our personalities and are probably why we get along so well. i tend to respond to things with giant, multiple, oversized exclamation points while my husband tends to pause, use a semicolon, and then maybe an ellipsis. my husband used his phone to take a picture of the photo on the child's paperwork. he sent it to me. there he was. it was the baby that we had nicknamed 'baby rhino' because of the fierce look in his eyes. and that is how we got our second referral.
we then settled in to start waiting again. for a court date. we had been in this position before. waiting for a court date. ugh! every day i wanted to believe that we would get a court date, and yet every day i was filled with fear that there would be paperwork problems again. even after we got our court date, i was terrified that we wouldn't pass court. then we passed court and, still, we were uneasy. about the whole thing. international adoption is a huge leap of faith. you have to trust in the process. you have to trust in people you will never meet. you have to simply sit and wait and hope. and that was very difficult. it was exhausting. it made me eat lots of chocolate. it made me drink too much beer. it put me in a constant state of stress. but it was also magical!!! because when we finally passed court and officially became parents, it was the same day my sister gave birth to her first child. my sister and i became mothers on the very same day. it was incredible in so many ways, especially when you consider the complexity of each of our stories that delivered us to that day. simply amazing.
and then, we booked our tickets to ethiopia. and we met our son. i doubt very much that i can convey the amazingness of that single moment. there was joy and there was fear. it was exuding from the three of us. we huddled together for the first time as a family of three. we were totally in love and our son was absolutely terrified.
that day, when we finally came face to face with our son and held him in our arms, will forever be one of those defining days of a lifetime. i know this for sure, even with more life left to live in front of me. it was shocking. it was fabulous. it was really, well, strange and magnificent and disorienting. it redefined me in ways i never anticipated.
i will not say, like i have heard other adoptive parents state, that all the pain of the process was erased at that moment when we met our son. the pain lingered. fear and

uncertainty had a very strong grip on us. the next day when our driver said we had to make an unplanned visit to our agency's office, my husband and i looked at each other, and without using words i knew we both felt it: total and absolute terror that something was wrong. i am still thankful i didn't barf all over the car at that moment. that 'unplanned' visit turned out to be a meeting with the director who wanted to give us our child's passport and paperwork, which had been completed earlier than expected. . . we were on edge the entire time we were in ethiopia. it wasn't until we made it through customs on U.S. soil did i feel the weight begin lift.
and just like that, we were on the other side, staring parenthood in the face. it was scary and confusing. but, mostly, it was just breath taking. and it continues to be.
when i think back on our time in ethiopia, it seems like a dream. i know that is totally cliche, but that it how it feels. and it was a dream. our actual dream come true. i remember my husband and i kept looking at each other during our trip and saying "is this really happening?"
that was almost two and a half years ago. our son is easily, without a doubt, the most incredible thing to happen to us. even now, looking back through photos of our trip, of our first moments and days with our son, it seems even more dream like. our memories get fuzzy. but the hundreds of photos we brought home tell our story. the good days. the scary days. the magical days. and so i will leave you with the one bit of advice i feel comfortable giving to potential adoptive parents: take pictures. lots and lots and lots of pictures.