A reason to be patient

I’m really not good at being patient.  Never have been.  But I’ve become more patient during this adoption process.  I was excited about the prospect of getting my referral, but I didn’t count the days.  To me, the referral process brings up conflicting feelings.  In order for me to receive a referral, a little boy had to be either relinquished or abandoned by his birth family.  Think about how horrible that is.  I’m constantly amazed that people seem to turn a blind eye to that. 

I posted the news of my referral on my agency’s Yahoo! group.  I was a little surprised when all of the individual email messages I received focused exclusively on two questions – 1 – what was my LID and – 2 – when did I get my referral, the information needed to see how long I waited (information I don’t think is appropriate to share en masse).  I get that if you’re in month 18 of a two year wait that you’re destined to be tired of the process, and I get it if you’re near the point when your agency typically gives out referrals, but when I see people who are still paper-chasing trying to calculate the number of days until their referral, I’m stumped.  I’m even more confused by those desperate to get their referralwho, evidently, won’t consider adopting a boy.  Go figure.

To me, the focus of adoption should not be (and is not) finding a child for a prospective parent.  It’s about finding a family for a child who needs one.  As a result, we shouldn’t be hoping for a lot of referral’s in a month.  In fact, one would hope that we’d be hoping for none.  Not going to happen in our lifetime (or perhaps any), but it would be fantastic if there were no need for adoption.

An orphanage is not a baby store.  The wait to referral is not like waiting for a special-order product to be made for us.  These are real babies with real families, going through what I can only imagine is a personal hell, making a life-changing decision to give up their child.  So, to me, saying that we want to see a lot of referral’s in a given month is akin to saying we want to see a lot of babies abandoned in the prior month.

Perhaps, in this Adoption Awareness Month, we can all try to focus on the reality of adoption.  I think sometimes we get lost amongst the trees, focused solely on our feelings about our adoption.  I don’t think that people really hope for children to be abandoned or relinquished (I hope they don’t).  It’s a difficult balance, waiting for a referral, yet not wanting another family to go through what has to occur for us to get that referral. 

What I found helped me in finding patience in my wait was thinking about what the child I hoped to adopt was going through.  Looking at his beautiful, sad face in his referral photo brings me to tears, and not all of them the happy kind.  I am so sorry for what he’s gone through already in his young life.  What he’s lost.  The fear he’s had to experience.  While I know it was inevitable, I would never have wanted to accelerate that pain.  I don’t think others waiting would either.

November 7, 2007 - Posted by Oscar and Etta's mom | Adoption, Waiting