It seems like an eternity. You know, from November when we first "went live" on our agency's website. It actually hasn't been an eternity - I was using hyperbole - but it still feels like these threeish months have really dragged on. Remember when you knew your boyfriend/girlfriend was coming to visit you and you were waiting at home for them to show up and they said they would be over in like 15 minutes? Remember that excitement? The butterflies in your stomach? The nervous cleaning of your house so that everything would look perfect. All of that? Yeah, now stretch those 15 minutes into 3ish months, so far.
This is hard. Don't let anyone tell you that the process of adoption is "easy and fun" because it is not. Actually, I don't think you will find a soul that would say something crazy like that. Why? Because it isn't fun. And it isn't easy. Let me break it down for you how this process works on any given day. I wake up, check my phone. I have our adoption email synced to my phone. Then I check the facebook page to see if anyone contacted us overnight to ask if we wanted their kid. I get in the shower. On my way to work, I check the google analytics to see how many people looked at our profile over the past 24 hours. When I get to work and start dealing with all of the work junk, I open up the adoption forums - a place our agency has set up for adoptive parents to talk - online support group. I don't know why I didn't just say that, you aren't children, you know what a forum is. At some point, usually by mid afternoon, my brain is fried from work, so I mindlessly head over to our adoption agency's webpage to see how many couples recently adopted - there are actually a lot and our agency actually updates it too. Then I head over to the waiting families. There are anywhere from 436 to 442 families waiting. Yes, I have these numbers memorized. I have to, I need to know where we are on the list - somewhere either on page 26 or 27, depending on who many matches there have been. Then, my heart sinks because I think, "who is ever going to get through 26 pages of faces before they get to ours?" I also take this time as an opportunity to see if there are any changes to the order of people, or if there have been new "matches" (when a birthmother and the adoptive families decide to officially proceed - its like asking your boy/girlfriend to go steady). I know the differences in order because I go there every.single.day. It soothes me. Then when I am on my way home, I frantically check everything I had already checked all day. Then, I check our phone as soon as I walk in the door, just in case someone called during the day with a baby they want to give us.
Can it be fun? Yes. I sometimes really enjoy seeing that someone who has been waiting for so long has a big "MATCHED" stamped across their picture. Its proof this process works. It is also enjoyable to have some sort of support on the forums.
I am sure at this point you are saying, "but you have only been waiting 3ish months and pregnant women have to wait 9, quit the griping." You are right. But wrong. Okay, so here's the thing....pregnant women get to see some sort of changes to their body - the cravings, the exhaustion, nausea, swollen feet, cramps, whatever. You know what we see? Empty email boxes and silent phones. "But the women don't know everything about the baby!" Right. But you are wrong. They get to go and have sonograms and even those creepy 4D pictures from the mall of what their baby looks like (Side note, it is creepy that you can get a Wetzel's Pretzels and then walk next door and get a 4D sonogram.). We get random hits to our profile and an active imagination that takes off on where we would stay in that small little town in the middle of nowhere for two weeks before we can come home with our baby.
We are nowhere near even the average wait time for our agency (14 months). We are nowhere near the wait time of some of the people who have waited the longest at our agency (upwards of 3-4 or more years). But, I do not think of us as average. And I am sure all of you reading this, as our friends, wouldn't think we are average either....right??? It is so selfish, I know, to want the baby and want it now. I am sorry if, at this point, you are ready to throw your electronic reading device across the room in frustration at how I could be so selfish and demanding. It is hard, though. The wait, the unknown. It feels like high school gym class - well actually, I can't use that analogy since I didn't actually take a gym class in high school and opted for independent study - but it feels like what high school gym class looks like on TV. I don't want to be picked last. I want to be cool enough to some girl that we are chosen quickly. I want to be above the curve, not at the tail end of it.
So with all this excess energy and waiting, I created a facebook page for our adoption endeavors. Had a great rollout of it with tons of people excited and cheering us on. It has been great! I have loved the answers to our questions about diapers and baby books and all kinds of stuff - trust me, there will be more questions. It has turned into quite the nice little community - with the help of our friends and the epic power of social media, we have almost 400 followers! Holy smokes! It's pretty awesome and now its a challenge for me to get even more, because it only takes the one person to see our page and tell their friend who is pregnant and considering adoption to give us a call. There have been harder moments on the FB page - not gonna lie. It started with just one person saying something mean. There have been several others. I just delete them. I try to not take it personally, but honestly, it makes me sad. Not sad for me, but sad for these people that they have so much hate in their lives that the one thing that can give them some sort of satisfaction is to enter a page like ours and spew some nonsensical hate about us as people, when they have no idea who we are. But, we plug on because there are 400 people there that are cheering for us!
So the wait is hard. I wish it was over. But in the end, I am reminded that our child just isn't ready yet. If I pushed too hard and forced a situation, the child wouldn't be ours. There is a reason we wait, because the child that will be perfect for our family just hasn't arrived yet. But I'm not gonna lie when I say, I hope that our child's mom and dad are at least working getting that child to arrive.
