The Long Wait

The Long Wait (TLW) as of May 2007

Well, for those of you out of the loop of China Adoptions, the wait times (from Log-In Date to Match) have been extending and extending far beyond our initial ideals.

When we first started the process, we were told it was 8-12 months til match. Then the official paperwork from our chosen agency was indicating 12-14 months. We were okay with that, so we started on the application and dossier process, which in itself could take 3-5 months (ha! It took us what? 7? 8 months? It's a blur.)

While we built our dossier, the waits started creeping upward. I was hearing rumors of two years fairly early (18-24 months), so I started telling people the wait could take up to two years, although that didn't stop some people from dancing about with glee and proclaiming it would take us "hardly any time at all" and that "the wait goes quicker than you think." ha! ha! Yes! They said that! hahhah

Okay, seriously, with times creeping further and further out, we are now hearing of possibly *three* years wait! I am trying to not feel too depressed about that. We have our spot in line and I'm holding on to that.

I do start worrying that the wait will extend to even longer and weird things will happen to the situation before we have our daughter matched and home. I have a dread of having to explain the situation to others. It's painful to have to somehow justify the long wait to others when we are even more frustrated and pained by the slow down. I am even more glad now that we haven't made any general announcements and having to deal with remarks from a larger pool of uninformed people. It's hard enough already with the people I keep in the loop asking "how the adoption is going." Well, I say, our paperwork is still sitting in a stack somewhere in China... Like, excuse me, it's not "going" anywhere; it's sitting there in line!!!!

* * * * *

On a related note, I have found out in the last couple of months that some of our friends who wrote us reference letters have not been keeping it quiet as I had originally requested. We have random people offering us "help" and even our car mechanic (!!!? WTF?!) remarking that they had mentioned it to him... They even mentioned something in front of another acquaintance that we would never go out of our way to share personal information with. This is very disconcerting. Do they not think that our information is worthy of discretion, especially since we asked them to be discrete? I start feeling very irritable and a little panic-y that the info is being flung willy-nilly around the area.

On top of that (being confronted with people we don't know being privy to our private lives), I don't know how to bring this up with our friends. I am baffled that perhaps, somehow, they did not understand that we were not sharing this at random and would prefer they NOT share this with other people. !!!! For God's Sake! Even if someone is pregnant, they don't usually (often) immediately share the news with the entire god-d*mned world. Wait, there was that one acquaintance who had to share to the ENTIRE world when she was merely a month pregnant--you can imagine my self-restraint at that announcement-- But anyway! :) hehehe

Anyway, we hardly see these folks in private... and our shared couple time has shrunk. So when do I have a spare quiet moment to say something to them?? I also don't want to hit them over the head with it. I just want to inquire about what they thought we wanted them to do with that personal information, and ask them, politely, to restrain themselves...

*sigh* It's not as if my mother doesn't also talk to her friends. It's not as if I don't also make my own decisions about who to share this with. It's partly that I *am* private about my life. I have had too much of people talking about my life as if it belonged to them. It's also that we will wait two to three friggin' *years* and I don't feel like putting up with sh*t from nosy people while we wait and wait and wait and ...

It makes me sympathize with all those famous people about whom it's said," they are a deeply private person." Yeah, I get it. Just because somebody knows who you are or thinks they know you does not give the right to every last iota of personal information about you. If you have been reading, you know I hit on this topic a lot. I'm sure this won't be my last. :)

But how to redirect my well-meaning but apparently clueless friends? Maybe they didn't get the memo I thought they did? Maybe by "not sharing it with everyone," they thought, like, we meant every last person on the earth. Only a few hundred or so... Okay, I know my secrets are *not* safe with *them*...


* * * * *

Nearly Fall And All That Paperwork

Long time no blog. I've been busy, and obsessed with other things. Also, I've been somewhat discouraged by reports that the wait times in China are slowing down so much. Ack. I have been readjusting my expectations, but not happily. 2 years, plus. okay... I might have been less enthused about China if I had been aware of this before we'd sunk so munch money into the process, but we feel pained at giving up our dream of a little girl from China, so... we move onward.

Well, we have completed the homestudy visits. It wasn't bad. They kept encouraging us to eat dinner while we talked, to the degree that we started to feel that they wanted to *watch* us eat dinner to see what we would do! Ok, so we ate dinner! I was picking basil out of the garden for pesto when the social worker came up. I made pesto and tossed it with pasta and vegetables. Yes! Let me show off my womanly homemaking skills! lolol Too funny.

We did clean house, but we didn't get to clearing the baby's room (which we keep calling something else from its earlier days). I decided to just not worry about being super neat. Let's be realistic, here; we are not all that neat. The social worker just laughed when she saw the room. "Where are you going to put all this?" Sell, reorganize, redistribute. Worse case, we'll put it in the basement. She didn't even seem to notice the various annoying flaws of our old house. OK, we have no known hazards in the house. :) Plumbing functional, not too many dust mice it the house, etc.

But we haven't gotten word that the draft is back as expected. I am just assuming that if there was anything they objected to that she would have told us... Maybe that is an erroneous assumption. Maybe they would route a rejection through the agency. God! Something else to worry about! After I blabbed at boring length about my childhood and relations with my family, sisters, etc, I started to feel rather overexposed. Again, oh well! It's over and done, so I try to not waste energy worrying about it.

But in better news, we finally got our appointment to get fingerprinted in the big city next month. It's on an inopportune day for a variety of reasons, but I am glad my husband has proclaimed it a priority. Yes! We will go and do the thing!

Since my trip to New England last month, I have been immersed in other things. It's been hard to get my head back into the process. Just today, my husband asked what else we needed to do to progress with the paperwork. I had been wondering just how fast we would be progressing if I wasn't taking charge of so much of the organization, so I was gratified that he had started to be more present to the process. So we reviewed our list of items and tasks to complete, and he is motivated to work on the things within his range. It's more motivation for me, too, to restart tracking down all the little details. Oy! How this drags on!

On the other hand, we have time to do things like learn Chinese Mandarin. I was teaching some of what I know to M tonight on our walk. I am actually really happy that he is interested. After grades are in, he wants to look at books on China and adopting, etc. I am currently compiling to a list of books I want to read on adoption, parenting, transracial adopting, all of that. I don't want to have to buy them all (not wanting to spend money like we have gobs of it), but some of them might be worth it. Hopefully I can track down some of them in the library. Not that I want my name attached to records on this topic. (Hellooo record-trackers!) But again, oh well.

I have also been finding and reading yet more blogs on a variety of related topics. So much good writing out there! Maybe someday I will get my act together (and conquor shyness) to provide linkies to some of the blogs I most enjoy and admire.

* * * * *

One weird story recently -- somebody at my sister's church had terrible news about a local family who had just internationally adopted two children, then ran into some tragic health news. That is just stunning enough, but my sister was thinking, well, what if they needed to give up their children? (She thought of us as possible parents to "step in" and be new parents. !! Ack!!) She was obliquely feeling them out on this idea. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the tragedy of the situation, much less even considering taking on their children! The last thing I want to do is snatch some poor people's babies away from them! Plus, if there were a real need, they would have already designated guardians. That's why they have the guardianship requirement, afterall.

Oh my God. I'm feeling rather embarassed that she would pursue this line of thought. I'm so glad we don't know this person however distantly. I can't honestly imagine that a parent would ever give up their new babies, and how awful for the babies, too! I would not want to "benefit" from somebody else's tragedy. ... Although, how far removed is it from the whole adoption scenario? Baby is abandoned, adoptive parents step in. I have mixed, mosly sad feelings about that too. I guess if there has to be sadness and grief, it's at least one positive step to have a stable loving home at the end of it. But it doesn't take away the grief of it.

* * * * *

Ni hau ma? Wau hen hau, xia, xia.

My Mom says: maybe she is being conceived soon. But I say: No, she will be conceived next year. And then I have to wait for my baby to be abandoned by her first mother. How sad is that? Waiting for sadness, waiting for happiness. I want to wrap her up and cuddle her and keep her safe, to make her know how beautiful and special she is and that we will always love and cherish her. That we will never leave her. Who do I send this message to now? Some anonymous mother-to-be who will not want to keep her baby. I want to say: I'm so sorry. And: we will keep her safe.

Wau-duh bao bao. My treasure.