Love Letter To My Child

My sweet child,

I want you to know that you are loved.  You have occupied a space in my heart for the last eight years.  Even though I don’t know your face or your name, I have loved you since the day the decision was made to bring you home.

I want you to know you are wanted.  I pray you never spent a moment asking if anyone wanted you.  We have wanted you to be a part of our family for a long, long time.  You will always be wanted by our family.

I want you to know that I pray for you constantly.  I pray the Lord blesses you and keeps you safe and happy.  I pray for your caretakers and I pray for your birthparents.  I know God holds you in His loving hands, but I plead each day He continues to do so, and that he smooths the path to our meeting.

Each night before I fall asleep, I hold a stuffed bear in my arms.  One day, after I have seen your sweet face for the first time, I will send you that bear to sleep with until I can come get you and bring you home.  I want you to know that when I hold that bear, you are the last prayer on my lips at night and the first prayer I whisper in the morning.  Thousands of miles away, I pray you feel that love.

Waiting for you but loving you always,

Your Mama

Hope

Hope 

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The most commonly read post on this blog is this one.  I will specifically quote one paragraph from that entry that was particularly painful to write.

It’s not a good feeling, feeling that you’re not good enough to be a parent.  I will say with 100% certainty that being forced through this emotional wringer over the last eight years has made me much more acutely sensitive to my future child’s emotional needs.  There is pain in knowing that who I am so severely limits my possibilities for adoption.  There is pain in knowing that because of a diagnosis, we were not good enough to be Pooh and Tigger’s parents.   

Despite what people have said to the contrary, my all-time biggest fear was that we would not be looked at as good enough for a child’s social worker or for ICAB to sign off on a referral for us.  That they would say out of five potential families, we would consistently rank as the #5 – until forever, really.  You can say it’s silly.  You can tell me I’m nuts.  You can tell me that would never happen.  But that was my biggest fear.

We’re still waiting for a referral.  There is not a referral on the horizon just yet – we still have to wait our turn.  

But finally, finally – someone we can trust told us in the most concrete way imaginable that we were Good Enough.  And that is something that gives me an indescribable amount of hope.  Hope that there will be a child, and that someone out there knows I will be a good mommy one day.

What does 27 months sound like?

Well, if you were in our house today, 27 months sounded an awful lot like the vacuum cleaner running, the carpet shampooer cleaning, the washer running, the dryer running, feet pounding up and down the stairs in a hurry trying to get it all done in time – followed by bats cracking and six- to eight-year-old boys yelling and screaming at a baseball game.  That’s what 27 months sounded like to me, anyway.  Oh, and don’t forget the bickering.  Because I was in a VERY cranky mood today.

Gregg and I originally had our second homestudy update scheduled with the social worker for June 26.  Something – don’t ask me what it was – had me suddenly feeling all nesty and in the mood to clean the last week or two.  Maybe it was the weather.  I don’t particularly like to clean that much.  Imagine my delight in how clean my house was when we got an e-mail requesting that the home study be moved to tomorrow!  Still, we do have quite a few fur babies, and even though our social worker has told us every single time she has come to visit that she also has two large dogs and she is quite used to homes with pets, I normally prefer to go overboard with the carpet cleaner.  Just because.  By the time I was finished with the vacuuming and carpet cleaning (and laundry), I was pretty much ready for a nap but it was time for Gregg’s coach pitch game.  (Thankfully it was just one game this weekend.  The last two Saturdays were double headers!)  The boys play a six-inning game, and by the bottom of the fourth it started to rain. 

Gregg will tell you I’ve been bitchy all day.  I’ll tell you I’m tired and irritated.  And since it’s my journal, I can say that.  I’m irritated that it’s gotten to 27 months and is just going to keep going.  I’m irritated that I’ve spent the better part of a week getting ready for my third homestudy.  I’m tired trying to say “Maybe today will be the day” every single Friday so that I don’t let myself go down the path of believing that I’m going to be doing homestudies and fingerprints every year and a half for the rest of my life because this adoption will never ever happen.  (Which may be what Lakota thinks.  When we came home from church tonight, she had gotten her jaws on my copy of Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child and ripped off the front cover and shredded the first section.  So that’s what she thinks.)

So I’m tired.  And cranky.  And absolutely unapologetic about it.  But, hey – my house is clean.  And that, my friends, is what 27 months sounds like today.

Telephone Games

In the last job that I held, I managed a hair salon.  The phone rang all day long there.  At the time, it was something that I enjoyed very much.  I loved being able to talk to all sorts of different people all day long.  Granted, when I came home at night, I pretty much wanted nothing to do with the phone at all.  I had pretty much had enough of it after eight hours. 

With my current job, working from home as a transcriptionist, life is almost totally silent.  My job is done entirely through e-mail, so I have no need for work phone calls.  I hear from my boss on the phone maybe once a month.  If the phone is in use, it’s almost always an outgoing call, not an incoming call.

The fact that things are so quiet around the house and the house phone almost never rings makes things that much more stressful on Thursdays and Fridays when it does ring first thing in the morning.  The rest of the week, it pretty much doesn’t faze me in the least.  Our agency does have a liaison in the Philippines, though, and we are always able to get news first thing in the morning.  In the past, we have been able to get it immediately – Thursdays or Fridays. 

So the point is this, I guess.  Telemarketers:  Here’s a reminder.  We are on the “Do not call list.”  If you really want to push that button, don’t do it on a Thursday or a Friday before noon again, or next time you’re going to get an earful. I promise you that.  To the nurse from our doctor’s office who called this morning:  I know we needed to hear from you, but boy, I wish you had called later in the day.  I almost needed to stop back for another visit for the palpitations your call at 9:15 this morning caused me.   

I’m certain that at 26+ months there will no longer be a point where I’m not expecting the call to come.  Even though it feels like it could keep dragging out forever, it would be nice not to have the instinct to dive for the phone saying “is this it?!?” every Thursday and Friday when it rings before noon.   

26 months - Three times, now

It looks like my gut feeling about a referral at the end of April was off.  How far off, of course, still remains to be seen.  Today we hit our 26^th month of waiting (and waiting, and waiting some more). (The majority of voters voted for a tie between April 30 and Father's Day.  Since April 30 didn't work out for a referral, I'm hoping Gregg has a nice Father's Day this year!)

If there’s one thing I can say about the month of April, it’s that it sure was rainy and very busy.  I had such high hopes of getting my flower beds taken care of, but every time the weekend rolled around it was either raining or we had somewhere else to be.  Not too conducive to getting outdoor work done.  I finally got all the old growth pulled out of the beds on May 1, though, and now it will just be a matter of bringing in dirt and transplanting flowers.  (Easier said than done when it comes to me, Mrs. Black Thumb.)  On April 30, Gregg’s little league team played their first game and did really well.  He’s so proud of them.  I didn’t get to see that game (I’ll be at the next one, though!)  That day I was in New York City with my parents seeing Catch Me if You Can on Broadway.  I had gotten tickets from my neighbor, and they came with me for a day in the City to celebrate Mother’s Day/Father’s Day early, as the actual days have been difficult to observe.  (Hey, Hallmark, I’m sure one of these days I’ll be OK with your commercials again, but right now I’ve had it up to HERE with the sappy Mother’s Day commercials.  Just saying.)

Earlier in April, we received a lovely packet of information in the mail from our agency telling us that our I-800A will be expiring in July.  In order to prepare for this, we need to have an updated homestudy (#2!) and do all of the terrific stuff that goes with it – doctor appointments, fingerprinting, criminal/child abuse checks, notarizing all sorts of fun documents.  Currently, I’m just waiting on the child abuse clearances to arrive in the mail and we need to make a stop at the bank to have some documents notarized.  Then we wait (some more).  This is the third time we are undertaking this project.  The first two times I was very happy to get it done as soon as it showed up in the mail.  This time?  Not so much.  It was really just a heartbreaking reminder that we have been waiting so much longer than we ever thought we would.  So, hopefully next week I’ll be driving the paperwork down to the office and waiting for an appointment to go to Philadelphia to get fingerprinted (again, for the third time).  What is it they say about the third time being the charm?  Because – seriously?  If I have to do this FOUR times?  Oh.  My.

Here’s hoping for some beautiful sunshine and those May flowers we’re promised after all that April rain!  

25 months: I'm ready to play!

What a crazy month March was.  With the weather, we sure saw it come in like a lamb and go out like a lion.  On a personal level, it was just the opposite – in like a lion, out like a lamb.  I spent the first two weeks of the month sick as a dog and barely able to crawl out of bed and the third week frustrated with everyone and everything.  By the last couple of days of the month, I got some answers to some questions I had been waiting on for some time and that put me in a much better mood.  Now I’m ready to have March behind me and bring on April!  Bring on spring and the nice weather!  It’s been entirely too long of a winter, and I’m ready to start getting outside and doing things again. 

Gregg is involved for the second year with helping to coach baseball for the little ones in our town.  He’s assisting our neighbor, who has two boys on the team this year.  The kids on the team are between 5 and 7, and it’s a mix of T-ball and coach-pitch level kids.  He had so much fun doing it last year and is really looking forward to the weather cooperating this week so they can get started.  They were supposed to have their first practice last Friday but a freak snowstorm forced it to be canceled.  I love going to the games and watching him with the boys – it’s such a great visualization of what a good dad he will be.

We’re also trying to get some home improvement projects done before little one comes home.  Of course, nothing ever goes quite as easily as you’d like it to on the first shot.  One step at a time – it’ll get done eventually.  I’m looking forward to trying one last time with my flower beds this year.  I have a couple of ideas on how to improve them.  I told Gregg if it doesn’t work this time, I’m done – we’re filling them in with concrete and putting a little bench on top of the concrete pad.  So wish me luck – I’d much rather see something grow after all my years in this house!

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention…if you’ve talked to me at all recently you know that I’ve got a feeling about this month…  So keep thinking happy thoughts and we’ll keep praying :)  “Put us in, Coach!  We’re ready to play!”