Adoption Journey — Day 129

I have nothing new to report. Still waiting on the Japanese Consulate, still waiting on some medical stuff for BDH, still waiting for the homestudy report to be completed.

I’m okay with waiting, in this particular circumstance anyway. Normally, I am not a terribly patient person, but with this I am okay so far. Some people freak out when they have to wait, and complain and agonize over every little hiccup. I’ve seen on websites and blogs how people get all bent out of shape by delays and waiting, trying to micromanage the process and making endless calls and emails in an attempt to speed things up. Maybe that’s just their way of dealing. But we’re not like that, yet. That’s not to say that we won’t have those times too. But right now, it’s cool.

Perhaps the endless waiting and patience required with the infertility treatment process has trained us well. Maybe it’s the ease of knowing that, in all likelihood, there will be a child waiting for us at the end of all this, whereas in infertility treatment, it’s a total crap shoot. Those waits, those ups and downs, were agonizing. Horrible, emotional, frustrating times. (Times, you’ll recall, filled with much baking.) But now, with this, we know there’s something to wait for. We know it will, most likely, have a happy ending. So it’s okay.

What is still hard for me, what will continue to be hard, I know, is the pregnancies. All around me are women who are pregnant, and it sends pangs of sadness through me. I regret never knowing what it was like, never feeling a baby’s kick, never being fussed over like a new mom, never having had the same experiences as most other women my age. I sometimes feel like I have missed out on so much. I still sometimes feel how unfair it has all been. But those times pass, and they are fewer and farther between than they once were.

We are told as adoptive parents to embrace this wait time as our “pregnancy”. I struggle with that concept sometimes. It is not the same, and we are not treated the same, and we don’t feel the same. We don’t have a constant physical reminder of our soon-to-be child, to sing to and to talk to and to take care of and love. We don’t have anything but a paper trail. And having been pregnant and miscarried, and having tried infertility treatments and failed so many times, hope and anticipation are very, very hard to come by. So you just… don’t. You don’t get all excited and carried away.

But there are some things we do as we would if we were pregnant, and it helps pass the time. We prepare, tentatively, buying the odd thing here and there — clothing, diapers, supplies. We talk, ever so briefly, about names. We have a lot of paperwork, of course, and that makes time fly by. And, as we get closer and we know it really will happen, we’ll step up the preparations, and paint the nursery, and set up the furniture, and buy all the things we need.

Mostly, though, right now, life just goes on and we live it. We don’t get wrapped up in the baby stuff. We don’t watch the calendar about the adoption stuff. We just live from day to day. It’s out of our hands, out of our control, and we just have to trust that everyone is doing their jobs properly.

We have time and we take time to breathe, knowing that in the end, our patience and hard work will be rewarded.

Adoption Journey (a.k.a. The Mystery Baby Marathon) — Day 117

Our last home study appointment is DONE! *big sigh of relief*

I think we ROCKED last night’s appointment, I really do. It was on international adoption — what we’ll do to help our child learn about his birth culture, issues we think we may face, bonding, that sort of thing. It was a topic we’ve done a lot of reading on, and the course we took helped us get some ideas and background as well.

Before we went, we reviewed our notes. We had been gently chastised one night for not doing our homework, so this time we were going to be prepared. And we were prepared. Bring it on, ladies!

We had all sorts of ideas to help with bonding, ideas about helping our child learn about his cultural identity, thoughts about how we’d handle being a multiracial family and all the issues that come with that. We were as prepared as we could be.

I think we did really well. We wanted them to know that this was something we had given a lot of thought to, that adopting from Ethiopia was something we took very seriously and that I had wanted to do for many years so we had not taken the decision lightly. We wanted them to know we WANTED this baby. We also wanted them to know we were able to handle whatever was thrown at us, and were not some silly little young couple whining over every hiccup and every delay and setting unrealistic expectations and hopes. We wanted them to see we were grounded and prepared and would bring to bear whatever resources we had to be the best possible parents for Mystery Baby.

And I think we did that.

I don’t think anyone doubts how much we want to bring Mystery Baby into our lives, our family, our home.

I don’t think anyone doubts that we will do our absolute best as parents and that will love this baby with our whole hearts.

I think we passed.

Adoption Journey — Day 116

Well, the finish line is in sight: Tonight is likely the last of our home study appointments.

I cannot believe how quickly time has been flying in this process. It just seems like yesterday when we were starting out on the paperwork road, calling the agency, finding an adoption practitioner. I remember the first time I spoke with our adoption practitioner, and she told us she would not be able to work with us until May. It seemed like a long time away, like we’d have tons of time to get ready before it started, like we’d have everything in order.

HA!

Boy, was I wrong. Our social worker’s schedule freed up fairly soon, and we started a full two months sooner than we’d thought. Through bureaucracy and procrastination, we were in no way completely ready with all our documents and such. And we were still all naive and dreamy — “oooh, we’re adopting, and one day soon we’ll have our Mystery Baby blah blah blahity blah” — and had NO idea what we’d be needing to do. And now look at us! One appointment left. (Probably. If we don’t talk too much and need to do another one to get it all done.)

That in no way means we’re DONE, mind you. That just means we have this part of things done. The interview phase of the home study is done. It’s still a big milestone, though, because the interviews and so on can be stressful. You want so much to do well. But after this, our social worker takes the information and writes up her report to send in to the Ministry. And that will take some time yet.

We still have one or two documents to come in before our file is complete with our social worker. That will also likely take some time. And then, once it’s done, we get to read it over before it is submitted to the Ministry, and discuss it with our social worker if we have any questions or concerns. And after that, we must wait on pins and needles for provincial approval, which can also take some time.

But in the meantime, we’ll have LOTS to do. After this part is done, we begin getting paperwork together for the agency. That is the kind of stuff that needs a lawyer, like wills and agreements and the like. But also, it’s some fun stuff too, like our photo pages and a letter to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Ethiopia discussing our motivation for wanting to adopt from Ethiopia. And then we get THAT file complete to be sent off to Ethiopia. And then we wait some more.

So there’s a long way to go yet.

But STILL. After tonight, we’ll heave a big sigh of relief that one big milestone has been passed. In a process so long and involved, it’s nice to celebrate each time we have finished one of these mini-races. It helps get through the Mystery Baby Marathon.

Adoption Journey — Day 109

Right now, my front porch is crawling with student painters. A lovely bunch of kids. They’ve been hired to paint my porch, rails and trim for a ridiculously low cost. It’s a job I did not want to do, and it had to be done. So, thank goodness for Student Works Painting!

Me, I am catching up on two days’ worth of chores not done while we traipsed to and from Toronto. Yesterday’s trip was much more successful than Friday’s, and so we’re moving ahead once again in the paper chase.

Before heading out yesterday, BDH called the Japanese consulate and confirmed EXACTLY what we needed to process our request for a police check. We were told to bring a passport and a letter from our social worker. We had both, plus letters from the agency and myself as insurance. We were COVERED, dude. But one unexpected bonus was that the woman on the phone said there was no charge for the police check! Better than fair, I thought, given all the money we’ve had to spend to get this one stupid document, but I’d believe it when I saw it. I was half expecting we’d get there and they’d charge us something for it. Paid by money order. In YEN. Skeptical much?

So we set off, late again due to an appointment to get some maintenance on the big car. We took the little car, which usually only gets driven to and from the grocery store and little errands like that. It needs some work, but we can’t afford it right now. Like A/C fluid. And some other minor repairs. And new brakes. Meh, so it was going to be a little less than a luxurious ride.

We once again took the GO Train to Toronto. We had to run for the train, but made it. And this time, mercifully, BDH didn’t forget his wallet at the ticket counter. (Although I did ask him every five minutes all day long where his wallet was, so…) And once we got to Toronto, it took us 5 minutes to walk up from Union Station to the Consulate building. We thought, if we can get this done quickly, we can catch the next train home and still have the bulk of the day to ourselves.

The woman who was working the wicket at the consulate was remarkably efficient. The letters we had seemed to be just fine, although Mr. Crabby Civil Servant from the other day OF COURSE saw us and had to come over and inspect everything — for the love of dog, if we were up to something, trying to pull something over on someone, why the heck would we be asking for a POLICE REPORT? Sheesh. Anyway, we filled in some very simple forms and signed them in triplicate, and then we were sent to a little room to do fingerprints.

Fingerprints at the Japanese consulate is sort of a loosey-goosey process. For instance, they tell you how to do it, from behind glass, and you do it yourself. Seriously — you do your own fingerprinting. No police-trained police-type person comes in and guides your hands and makes sure it’s done right. And this means there are likely smudges and errors, and the person checking them over is just a civil servant with likely no knowledge of the intricacies of fingerprint identification technologies. So in my mind? It’s just a formality. Because foreigners going into Japan to live (at least when I lived there) got fingerprints taken so they’ve got a decent set of fingerprints on file somewhere that they could use if they really needed to. Because honestly? The ones I did were a mess, and yet they passed muster with Mr. Crabby Japanese Civil Servant just fine.

So we were done. They told us they’d call us in about 6 weeks when we could come back in and pick up the completed report (yay! 6 weeks is way faster than I thought!) and so we were free to go. Off to the train. We had a little wait time, so we picked up a teddy bear for Mystery Baby and some Cinnabons for the agency staff. And then the train came and we headed for home.

We stopped off at the agency to bring the cinnamon buns (which I am sure they make with crack because they are SOOOO delicious and after you have one, you crave more forever after) and to say thank you for marshalling the troops and getting a letter done for us on Friday with such short notice. I take it the cinnamon buns were a hit, because we got an email about much love and sugar highs about two hours afterward.

And then we went home and crashed in front of the TV with our own personal box of cinnamon buns. It was, with all the running around both yesterday and Friday, and all the yard work we did on the weekend, a very busy few days. We needed to unwind and decompress.

Nothing says “mission accomplished” like sticky cinnamon sugar all over your hands and face.

Adoption Journey — Day 107

This was a week where we hit some of the bumps in the road we knew would be waiting for us on our adoption journey.

We were cruising along so well, it was inevitable that things would eventually be a bit rough. I don’t much like it, I can tell you, but you just grin and bear it sometimes. Because in this process, you are at everyone’s mercy. It’s one of the hardest things about adoption, really.

On Friday, we went to the Japanese Consulate to get a police report ordered for my time in Japan. This is part of the standard paperwork for adoption — you get police reports done for every country you’ve lived in since the age of 18. A few months ago, I called all the offices I needed to for police reports — the local police station, the State Police for my time in the U.S., and the consulate. I wrote notes on what I needed for each, and I got everything prepared for each office on that day. For Canada and the U.S., you need fingerprints and money. Not for Japan. For all of them, you need to write a letter saying what it is you need and why and where to send it. And for Canada and the U.S., you need a money order — for Japan I would assume so as well, although they did not say so.

So BDH took Friday off, and we made plans to go down and get this done, the last of our “official”-type documents from some sort of government office. We thought we’d take the GO train to Toronto, get the paperwork done, and make a little outing of it. Although we almost missed the train (BDH left his wallet at the ticket counter, and we were running late), everything worked out fine and we got on the train and got to downtown Toronto. We got a little confused trying to find the building among all the many skyscraper office buildings, but we did. Up we went.

We got to the wicket and told Mr. Japanese Civil Servant what we needed and why. He asked for the paperwork. I gave it to him. And then he said, No. You need a different letter.

I told him, no, when I called, this was exactly what the woman on the phone told me. He insisted, No. You need a letter from the agency. Then he changed his mind. No, the social worker. It was clear he did not know WHAT I needed. We argued that we had called and checked, AND checked with the agency, and this is what we were told to do, and we had spend money and taken time off work to do this. No, he repeated. Social worker. Or agency. No, social worker.

In fact, he actually had to go look in a book. And even THEN he was not sure.

So, very angry, we decided to walk away.

I had forgotten just how annoying Japanese bureaucracy can be sometimes. I had dealt with civil servants in Japan and this sort of scenario was commonplace. Unwritten and even written rules that changed from day to day. Rules that changed depending on who you dealt with. Misinformation.

So we left, and went down and called both our agency and our social worker. We asked them if they could do up a letter on short notice and maybe fax it to us. They were both so wonderful and willing to do so. Whatever they had to do to get this sorted. It was comforting.

We went back to the Consulate. BDH asked in VERY. CLEAR. LANGUAGE. exactly what we needed. Mr. Japanese Civial Servant still did not seem to know, but we clarified as best we could. And once we found out, we left again. And went for lunch.

Our lunch was in a cafe of sorts on street level of an office building. The food was excellent. Our waitress was lovely, and I said to BDH, “I recognize that accent. I bet she is from Ethiopia.” We chatted with her a bit, and as it turns out, she was from Eritrea (so I was close in my guess). We mentioned the adoption, and she told us how much we would love visiting Ethiopia. It was really nice to chat with her, and reminded us why we were putting up with the stupidity of bureaucracy upstairs.

Over lunch we cooled off, and decided that we would get letters from BOTH our agency and our social worker, just to be safe. And then we decided to just have lunch and go home, and try again on Monday.

On the way home, we emailed a sample letter to our agency, and drove directly there from the train. Now at this point, I must mention that our dealings with the agency have been minimal. We are not far enough into the process yet where we work a lot with the staff there, and we don’t want to be one of those couples who is always calling them about everything and annoying them and taking time away from someone else’s file with endless questions. At this point in the process, that’s what our social worker is for — she is guiding us through what we need and answering our questions. So this is really the first time that we had dealt with the staff at our agency directly for anything.

We got to the office and met several of the staff, since our file has been sort of passed around a bit. (It’s part of a reallocation of workload, but they like to tell us they are fighting over who gets to work with us, which made us laugh and really helped make us feel so much better about bugging them!) I have to tell you, they were all so knowledgeable and friendly and just really lovely people. Right then and there, they helped us write up a letter, they chatted with us about the process, and they spent a fair bit of time just talking with us and explaining things. It made us feel so much better about what has been happening, especially after the frustrating day we had just had.

We learned, however, that some of what we’d learned and what we’d been told was wrong. We’d been given misinformation. For example, the document that tells us that we must hold our passports for 6 months before we can apply for a VISA to Ethiopia is wrong. It SHOULD say that we have to have at least 6 months left on our passports — which, you’ll admit, is a hugely different thing. Also, when we were told at our adoption course that the Ministry has hired new staff and is getting their file turnaround time down to 1-3 weeks? Wrong. Currently, it’s taking 6-8 weeks, and the agency staff don’t see it getting any shorter. So, these and a few other things that we thought we knew turned out to be false.

But the biggest disappointment, I think, is that we probably won’t have Mystery Baby until the new year. With all the misinformation we’d been given, our rough timeline that we’d made for ourselves had us hopefully travelling to Ethiopia before Christmas. And that just won’t happen. It’s fine — it is what it is — and we’re not that upset by it. Just a little disappointed, is all. We had had some hopes of a really magical Christmas. We’ll just reset our expectations, is all. It just feels like we could sort of see the little light at the end of the tunnel, and now it’s just further away again. The misinformation we’ve been given is costly in terms of time.

So, it was a day of frustration. A day of relearning what we thought we knew. A day of chasing paper. A day of disappointments. And tomorrow, we have to head right back down to Toronto and fight with the stupid consulate staff again. Who, we hope, will not come up with some other new and novel way to screw us up.

But, on the positive side, we met some wonderful people who assured us we are making good progress. They restored our faith and our optimism a bit. They made us feel connected to the process again.

And we got to eat some Cinnabons, as a reward for surviving the day.

Adoption Journey — Day 102

Still lots of paperwork to do to finish our homestudy and get our file ready to send off. LOTS. TO. DO. We have another meeting with our social workers this week, and we want to get our paperwork as up to date as we can. So, we’ll be handing over some more of the documents we have done and in file, but also, we have to plan to tend to a few things for which we need specialized help.

One of the things we have to tend to is kind of weird. We need to get papers notarized, but at the same time, we have to get a will made up. A will. It’s funny to think about. Jeez, never in my life did I ever think I’d reach an age or a level of responsibility that I would need a WILL! I mean, when I was a kid, I thought 26 was just as old as you could get! (I remember that because I had a Barbie doll who was CLEARLY older and more mature than my other Barbies so I decided she was 26.) And now, here I am, planning on seeing a lawyer to write up a will.

But, seriously, it’s a smart thing to have, now that we’re adopting. We need a document that will indicate that we have someone to take care of Mystery Baby in the event that “Elvis has left the building” — if we die (although I don’t plan to… EVER). Fortunately, we have chosen a fantastic legal guardian, and she and her partner have agreed to raise Mystery Baby if we die, and to be that special presence in his/her life as he/she grows. All kids need to have a special person that they can trust and they know will love them and take care of them no matter what, outside of their parents, I think — and these two people have that quality in spades. Also, we need to show that Mystery Baby will be taken care of financially as well. Not like we have tons of stuff to squabble over, mind you. But still. So, we need to see a lawyer and make sure it’s all spelled out, with no questions.

The lawyer will also notarize some “power of attorney”-type documents for us, so that we have legal representation to act on our behalf in Ethiopia. These documents were sent to us by our agency, along with a few others that tie up the legal work that will be required for us to complete the adoption work. So, I will be asking the lawyer for a few things. Hopefully, they are not too expensive. But they’ve got to be done, and they’re all part of the process, so we’ll just add it to the running tally.

Another thing we have to do is get some life insurance. We have some, through BDH’s benefits plan, but we will want to get some more. We just need to ensure that our child or children are well taken care of, should we need it. It’s something required on our financial paperwork to submit to the social workers, but also, I am sure it will be something we’ll need for the will.

Early on, as we were just getting started in the process, we asked our adoption practitioner if she thought we should retain a lawyer who specializes in international adoption. And she told us, quite frankly, that it would be a waste of our money. Now, as we move through the paperwork, I am so grateful for that bit of advice. In the beginning, we were really intimidated by all the paperwork, and we had no idea what was in store or what we’d need. Now, we see that our agency is so efficient and well-organized that they’ve got everything under control for us. Similarly, our adoption practitioner is very experienced and knows our agency so well that she is able to advise us on many things as we go along. They’ve made the process relatively easy to complete — they do a lot of the thinking for us! And you know, when you’ve got so much to do and so many stresses as part of the adoption, it’s nice to let yourself be guided along a little bit. Someone to do that bit of planning and organization for us has been wonderful.

So, we need to make arrangements for the future of Mystery Baby. Yeah, it’s a little freaky talking about our deaths. But on the other hand, we’re proactively planning for our child — and suddenly, we’re talking about OUR CHILD, and OUR FUTURE. And it doesn’t seem quite so far away or as much of a dream as it once did.

Suddenly, it feels like parenthood might just happen, after all.