The plot thickens

I consider myself to be a somewhat patient and mostly reasonable person.  Actually, I was pretty certain I had it together, but after this last month I'm not so sure.  We decided early on in this second adoption to not go public with any announcement that we were going back to China until after we had been matched and gotten PA (pre-approval).  It's not that we felt any less excited about this than last time, or that we were worried about people's reactions, but I know people's patience for this tedious process is pretty thin.  Eyes glaze over when you have to respond with acronyms and various steps when they just want to know if you have a picture of your baby or when you are going to bring them home.  The fact is, if I had been blogging about this before there would have been a lot of rage, frustration, and acting like a big baby.  No one wants that, at least without an immediate resolution to the story.  I guess what I'm saying is this post could have been a lot worse.

I'm not going to go into a whole diatribe, but I have gotten some questions about why a boy and people who are surprised that boys are even available.  When people think of China adoption they think of girls.  The one-child policy combined with cultural preference for boys made for many orphaned girls.  Things have changed a fair bit in the15 years, though.  There is another side to China adoption, and that is all the boys who wait.

The waiting child program is designed to help special needs kids find homes.  Now, what China considers special needs is a bit different than what we do.  There are, of course, the more demanding needs like Spina Bifida and Down"s Syndrome (I know there are many people who consider these totally doable needs, and I am not disputing that, it's just an example of some things that people tend to think of when the special needs tag gets used, apologies if I have offended anyone), but there are also things like cleft lip and palate, or birthmarks that can be repaired or don't affect daily life.

The thing with special needs is that, generally, they affect both boys and girls.  For whatever reason (and there are many, but I won't go into it here) most adoptive parents chose to specify they would like a girl rather than a boy.  I've heard different numbers, but the stats my agency gave me say that for every 4 families who specify a gender preference, only 1 will be open to a boy.  I'm sure there's all sorts of math that could give a better idea of what the result of this is, but the quick answer is that many, many boys sit and wait for a family and their gender is the biggest strike against them.  Nora's friend from Eagle's Wings who came home last year had almost the exact same medical condition she did waited 18 months longer than she did to be placed.  Kids that don't fit the requests of the families our agency has get posted to their website in the hopes that a family will be found for them.  Recently, a little boy who is only 6 months old has been sitting for over a month.  It's pretty depressing, actually.  Knowing what we do about the situation, I couldn't state a preference for a girl.  We left it open to either, knowing we would almost certainly be bringing home a boy.

I spent the time during our paperchasing checking the waiting child page on our agency's site.  I looked at pictures and brief descriptions and felt strongly that this time around we would have to do more than just sit and wait for a phone call.  Sometimes I hate to be right.

We were, as I said in the last post, about a month from DTC (dossier to China) and we saw a picture and file that looked really promising.  He had a different need than what we had originally planned on, but it felt quite manageable.  We let ourselves hope and wonder if we had found our boy.  We felt good about it and it seemed like God was letting us know we were on the right path.  The next day I called the agency hoping to get more information.  I was not prepared for that phone call.

You see, China gives the agency about 60 days to find a family for the kids they get sent.  After that the file must be returned to a list that allows every agency to look at and lock a file for a family (meaning they can decide to move forward or not, but until they say no, no other families can review the file).  This little boy, let's call him T, was going to be returned to the shared list very soon.  Since our dossier wasn't yet complete, we were not eligible to review his file.  This sweet little boy who had been sitting on their site with no one requesting his information would now be moved when a family was actually interested.  It seemed so unfair!  Could they ask for an extension? No.  Was there a chance we could find him on the shared list?  Slim, but yes.  The problem is our dossier still wasn't done and he would have to sit there for another month before we could review his file. She would keep an eye out for him, but he would likely be matched quickly since the pool of potential families was so much bigger.   She was so very sorry, but there was nothing we could do.

Three days later T's file was returned to the shared list and we lost all hope of being matched with him.  Our agency couldn't find him and could only conclude he had, in fact, been matched.

I was devastated.  I thought he was our boy.  We both felt drawn to him.  He seemed like a great fit.  It didn't make sense.  I thought of all the weeks we lost waiting for our social worker to get paperwork done and realized that if we had been faster we could have reviewed his file.  It was an ugly time for me.  I felt toyed with.  I was pretty unpleasant to be around for a little while.  I had to try to keep it together while Nora was around, though she did occasionally find me crying and would put her arms around me saying, "Mama, don't be sad.  It's ok.  Be happy."

Two things made me feel like things would work out and I shouldn't give up hope.  I knew that Nora was the absolute perfect child for our family and that no other little girl could have been a better daughter for us than her, so the same would be true of our son and we would eventually find him.  I also realized that perhaps our boy had a different need than we had planned on and we needed T to help open our eyes to other possibilities. 

I eventually began looking at the listing of children again.  I did it haphazardly and without much enthusiasm for a little while, but soon we were so close to having our dossier ready that I thought I was ready to open my heart to some kids again.  I want to state, for the record, that I do not for one second regret a single tear I shed over T.  These kids deserve families.  They deserve to have someone fighting for them.  They deserve so many things we can never give them.  At the very least I can make sure he was wanted by someone.

I felt drawn to a number of children and had a really hard time figuring out what that meant.  I guess the best conclusion that I can come to is that there were many cute kids and I liked them all.  Kevin and I talked often about children we were interested in learning more about and who we felt we could provide a good home to.  We jokingly talked about brackets and front-runners because how can you possibly "choose" your child?  It was exciting and horrible at the same time.  What made it ok was knowing that we were only deciding what children we were interested in looking at their medical files.  We knew that if the child in question was "ours" we would get a confirmation of it like we did with Nora.  That made it a bit less horrible.

Finally we had all of our paperwork done and sent our dossier to our agency.  I called S, the same woman who called us with Nora's file almost 2 years ago, and asked her what the possibility of reviewing a file soon would be.  We had two boys were were interested in looking at (though you can only look at one at a time) and were very leery of having a repeat of the situation with T.  She said she wanted to get our dossier in hand, give it a quick once-over to make sure all was in order, but then she'd be happy to let us review a file so long as they didn't have to return it to the shared list soon.  Things were finally looking up.

It was a short-lived happiness.  Without going into it too much, we thought we were going to be able to review a file that weekend, S confirmed it, then S emailed the next day saying our dossier needed to be fully reviewed before they would consider it and the two files we were interested in might both have to go back before our deadline.  This couldn't be happening.  I was a MESS.  Full ugly tears sobbing mess.  I couldn't handle this again.  We waited a few days and despite our complaints the agency wouldn't budge.  After many conflicting stories about what could and could not be done, it seems they made up their minds.  They wouldn't let us see a file until our dossier was sent to China, having been fully reviewed by our agency.  Dossier review takes 9-10 business days.  We were over two weeks from looking at files when we had been told it would be a day or two.  That was a bad weekend.

The long and short of it is I had to find a peace about it.  We confirmed with S that at least one of the files, but possibly both, should still be available and we were at the front of the line to review.  At the very least, we could still be matched with one of these boys, we'd just need to be patient.   I was ok with that, though I wasn't sure how it would turn out, and I still wasn't letting my heart get involved at all.  A wall of protection was up and I wasn't taking it down until I had a file in my hand and the agency saying we could move forward.