No Guarantees

Labor Day morning in 2005. The doctors call to confirm that the last egg is lost: our IVF process is finished. Quite unsuccessfully.

To say we are devastated is an understatement. It seems everything we felt we were entitled to was taken away. Having a child hadn’t been easy, and our IVF was our last chance to have a child. Or so it seemed.

We went through a really dark period after that. We were both pretty depressed, and it was months before A didn’t cry every day. Lots of questions swirled: how could others get pregnant so easily and not us? What about that mom who had kids standing in the backseat with no carseats around? How is that fair? I would have a carseat!

It was hard to escape all the thoughts running through our heads. It just didn’t seem right. We would be great parents, but it seemed to slip through our hands every time.

It seemed to be months of walking through that darkness before light started to break through the clouds. I was taking our college students from church to France over Christmas, and since we weren’t going to have a kid, and since that December was our 10th anniversary, we decided to make alternate plans. A would fly over at the end of our trip, and we would go to Italy to celebrate our anniversary. (When we used to check out at the fertility clinic, we used our credit card to accumulate miles, and I would always joke with the assistant: “We’re either going to get a kid or a vacation.” We got Italy.)

After a great time in Rome, we flew to Venice. We enjoyed the beauty of the place and the slower pace of life after the craziness of Rome. It was January so the crowds were thin and we could walk and look, take photos and talk, eat and relax.

One night in Venice, A looked across her plate of pasta and said “I think we’re supposed to adopt and it’s supposed to be from China.”

I said “okay.”

We continued enjoying our pasta and didn’t speak of it again until we returned home.

On February 16, 2006, we sat at our first meeting with our agency, and decided that yes, indeed we were supposed to adopt and it was going to be China.

We plunged into the paperchase…finally! A sense of accomplishment. We could do something that would result in a baby in our home and in our heart. We optimistically jumped in and finished quickly. We were logged in on August 16, 2006…exactly six months later. Plus! It was only an 11 month wait until referral.

Oh, 11 months? Now it’s 12.

Oh…14 months? Now 17? Now 21?

The eagerness and excitement wore off quickly. It seemed our adoption journey was like all the journeys we had tried before…pointless. Each month the referrals got pushed back was just like sitting in the fertility clinic getting a bad report, trying to maintain our composure, and then quickly checking out (and accumulate miles), then nearly jog to the car so we could cry by ourselves on the thirty minute drive home.

2008 rolls around and China has no end in sight. We were both pretty depressed about the whole situation again. China had recently chosen to change their rules: you could do an interim adoption since it was taking so long in China. Like countless times before, questions came more easily than answers:

But wasn’t our first child coming from China?

How will we afford another adoption while we still have China to complete?

Domestic adoption doesn’t seem comfortable to us, but where else would we go?

We weren’t terribly excited when we drove to our agency on February 15, 2008…nearly two years to the date that we started before and we were sitting in “so you want to adopt” meetings again. Seriously? Are you kidding?

That afternoon, only one other couple came to the International Adoption Meeting (the morning was in Domestic). They were only interested in Ethiopia, and that was what we were interested in, too. So, instead of the usual China/Russia/Guatemala/Ethiopia presentation, we spent the entire afternoon discussing Ethiopia. They gave us a handout with information and the picture of two little baby girls waiting for a family.

We decided to think and pray over the weekend, and on Monday we decided…we were adopting from Ethiopia.

Since we had just renewed our 171 and our homestudy (it had expired from China), we were able to quickly complete our dossier. It really only took us about a month to get it completely together, and we were grateful. We hoped that this will be the time. It was a new program, there were not many families involved, Ethiopia was just starting to catch on in the adoption world…maybe we would actually get somewhere.

We got an exciting call that our match meeting would be April 8th! We hadn’t even sent our dossier to Ethiopia yet, but since there were waiting children, it could happen! We went that day and heard all about our sweet E-Girl…and realized she was one of the beautiful babies who were on the sheet we were given on February 16th. Our daughter’s picture had been on our counter for six weeks.*

You can go through the archives and see how the journey went, but we didn’t get to travel to Ethiopia to meet our sweet daughter until October 30th. Like so many times before, things didn’t go exactly as planned. We actually met our daughter Saturday morning, November 1, 2008.

We’ve been home now for quite a while, and the one thing we can tell you is this: the road we envision for ourselves when we are young is very rarely (if ever) the road we end up walking.

If you had asked either A or I if we would end up having a daughter from Africa, we would have said “what are you talking about?” But adoption has been great for us. But…

Adoption isn’t easy.

There are things that are unique when you step into the life of a little one who has loved and known other people and places.

There are things that are unique when you look differently from everyone in your family.

There are things that are unique when you know your greatest joy springs from another family on the other side of the earth’s greatest pain.

But…it’s good. And we’re committed. But it’s never been what we expected. It’s better and harder. And more joyful and more painful. It’s a mix of emotions, but it’s working. We are a family. We couldn’t love our sweet E-Girl any more than we do. (I actually sometimes think that people who only go to hospital to meet their child are sort of missing out. Is that weird to say?)

In the light of all that’s gone on with the Russian adoption world, I wanted to write a story to let the world know that adoption can and does work all the time. This misguided woman in Tennessee has made a disastrous choice that has the potential to ruin the lives of thousands of American families…and thousands of Russian orphans.

There are no guarantees with adoption. You have no idea what the temperament will be of your child or how they’ll develop. You have no way to predict what the future holds. But there are no guarantees with children you birth, either. There are no guarantees anywhere when it comes to having children.

But…there are no return policies either. And I’m glad.

 

*The other little girl on the flyer we were given was adopted by a family in our church. E-Girl and her go to Sunday School together every week.

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