Our Time Will Come
This adoption is so much harder than my pregnancy with twins. Imagine being eight months into your pregnancy and at a check up with your doctor who walks in and says, "unfortunately, there's a shortage of labor and delivery nurses, so there's going to be a slowdown in deliveries until we can get some new ones trained. Hopefully it'll just be a couple more months, but only time will tell. Hang in there. Your turn will come."
That's pretty much where we are right now. We've been waiting for almost 20 weeks to get approval from the Indian government to tell us we are eligible to adopt. This is a step that typically takes a week or two, but with staff turnover and retraining, the wait is up to 4-5 months. And while we're not alone, and I've "met" (through facebook) so many wonderful families who are going through the exact same thing, it's still a lonely process.
For me.
For a bottler of emotions. In fact, I talk so little about this adoption with anyone besides my husband and my India Adoption facebook group, most people have stopped asking about it. They've either forgotten that we're going through it or figure we've just given up on it. I haven't written a post on this blog in months, not just because nothing has happened, but mostly because I don't want to remember what this feels like. I don't want to remember the disappointment of waking up every morning to check my email and see if India has given us approval to move on. I don't want to remember the holidays we're missing with our child or children who are sitting in India without a family. I don't want to remember the days I've wasted worrying about something I have absolutely no control over.
So I pray. And for me, prayer is more like meditation. I have these long conversations with God about what I'm doing wrong, and how I can learn patience, and how I can accept suffering with grace while knowing my suffering is nothing compared to what others are asked to endure. And how I can gain perspective of what I feel is being asked of me, and with confidence know that our family will be complete when the time is right.
But it's so hard. And I'm so bad at this. Sometimes I actually feel jealous of other families who are being approved and matched with kids before us, and I have to force myself to remember that these are children living in orphanages who are going to be united with families, and my reactions - as human as they may be - are selfish.
Our time will come, and the timing will be perfect. I know this. But as much as I know this, I just can't seem to get my heart to believe it.
