December 06, 2004

Waiting

Adoption is a process of waiting. It is the proverbial hurry up and wait experience. To begin the process you need to complete a home study. You fill out reams of paper work, get interviewed, evaluated and exposed to analysis you would not normally allow. All through this stage of the process you are anxious and nervous about what is to come, a life, a child, a life time of commitment. Once the home study and paper work is finished you wait, wait for your child. Sometimes you wait for months, maybe years and you have absolutely no control. Every time the phone rings you hold your breath. Then one day it rings and the voice on the other end says they are about to change your life. This thing, your child has been chosen. Joy and exhilaration overwhelm you and you study the picture you have been cherishing for months wondering who they really are. Sometimes the child you have started to fall in love with disappears and the waiting begins again, except this time it is waiting seasoned with pain. The pain of the child lost the one you never held, the one you never spoke to or touched. So you wait again, months, days, weeks pass and you wonder if it will ever happen. You may even quit unable to endure the roller coaster of emotion and waiting. You stop gasping each time the phone rings, you stop thinking each and every minute about your child. Yet, late at night you wake unable to stop thinking about your daughter who never was. You go about your life working, living, loving enjoying the routine of life because it keeps your mind busy. Then one day you check your email and there is a picture of a child, you open the attachment and read that he is your son. Everything you have worried about, everything you doubted, everything you hoped for has been finished. Then on a rainy November day you watch your wife and your child walk down the airport passageway and you begin to cry, cry uncontrollably unable to stop. You hug your son and you know that all the waiting all the pain was worth it. A life together has begun a life that will be filled with more waiting, more learning, more pain, more joy. Yet you know that the waiting, a waiting filled with activity, is worth it. You know it each night you tuck your son into bed and you say a pray for him and for the daughter who never was.

posted by John @ 10:33 AM

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