one can hope!

Today marks 15 weeks since our Letter of Intent to Adopt. Next Friday we'll enter the "average time frame." For most waiting child adoptions from China, the time from the Letter of Intent to the receipt of the Seeking Confirmation from the CCAA is 4 to 6 months. Our able Program Coordinator emphasized this when I visited her, despite the emails I handed her in which she wrote otherwise. Ah well...

But this is about GOOD NEWS. In fact, TWO GOOD THINGS!! I want to savor them, to introduce them over two posts, but I can't do that to you--you without the tiny Youyou shirts and Carhartt jacket, you without the Youyou screensavers and purse-size photos, you without the Youyou action figure and licensed swimwear. I must tell it all at once!

The first thing was an email this afternoon from an adoption fund to which we'd applied in December seeking a grant. When the 60 day period passed in which they say they review all packets, I knew what my weekend would be like. I even had the new forms lined up and ready. Round 2 of gimme some money to get this child here!

Then the email came--our file is tentatively scheduled for review in March!!! They wrote to request more detailed information--and boy did I give it! Yahoo!!! To even get this far is a light in the tunnel!!

Next, one of the most amazing women I know called to check in. She is also in the middle of adopting a child from the waiting list of China's children. We commiserated, and I lamented something I'd learned last week. Sometime before we travel to China, Youyou will return to his official orphanage. This is so that when we arrive, we travel to that orphanage to receive him, beginning the last official leg of adoption in an official social welfare institute. I was devastated to learn this, because not only would it mean that I had to let go of dreams of videos of Youyou at his foster home and tearful departures with our son from his host of loving ayis, I also was afraid that he would be traumatized by suddenly shifting to a completely different level of care amidst a group of total strangers. How terrified would he be by the time we arrived, and how would that affect his reaction to us, and how sick would he be? I know that in spite of some very good facilities, China's state-run orphanages, much like their American counterparts, lack enough workers to give children the type of care they would receive in a home with parents. Add to that Youyou's needs because of his colostomy and urostomy, and I envisioned his tiny bladder, unflushed by sterile water and beginning to infect his kidney, not because any of his new caregivers were negligent but just from lack of resources.

And then this amazing woman asked me where Youyou's orphanage is. I answered, "Henan province," and found the name in a stack of papers. "Jiaozuo Social Welfare Institute." She sucked in her breath, and my heart stopped. "They have a special care unit!" she exclaimed.

As it happens, they do have a special care unit. It's an outreach of a medical foster home that we visited in Beijing last year, where I first began to think that adopting a child with special needs might be something we could do. Their Henan care unit is actually INSIDE this state-run orphanage!

Out of one and a half billion people in the world, I have already met and admired the very folks who will soon help care for my son. I'm gonna have to get a bigger boat--or a cup of hot tea.

fairy tale

Well, we did it. We found a photo “ball” at Brookstone. The sides include four photos, a speaker, and a control panel. We put in photos of each of us—Shane, me, Shilo,--and one with all three together. Then we recorded messages, including a barking one, for each side. When Youyou presses a photo, he’ll hear a message.

We took the finished ball to our friend, who traveled today to Beijing. I don’t know when he will hire a cab to take him to Youyou’s foster home, nor do I know when our little boy will first hear our voices say, “I love you.” When did I first hear my mother say it?

The story of “How we started our family” continues, and tomorrow I will again press it against the back edge of my consciousness, like a passenger in an elevator, and focus for eight hours on curriculum building at school. It is one more full day that was not on the calendar as inservice, one more day that I thought I’d be able to use for hiring out as a housecleaner or to make the children’s clothing I am hoping to sell to finish paying for Youyou’s passage into our home. Teaching part-time this year was secondarily an experiment—to see if it could be done. With the exception of a few weeks, I’ve worked full-time hours. At first, it was my initiative, but that paled as day after day of work was announced with little warning—a field trip, a curriculum day, weekly instead of monthly department meetings. When I attempt to negotiate, I’m told there is no such thing as part-time (although it still appears to exist when I get my paycheck). So the second job I planned to take this spring (housecleaning for $15/hr.) is moot-my part-time work precludes it.

So after eight years, I will leave the teaching of art to a flock of students for the sake of finding one little lamb, but not in the manner I had imagined. I don’t know yet how we will finance this, I don’t know what I will do to supplant the absence of income from teaching, and I suddenly feel overwhelmed by a lack of employable skills that could provide for our family. In the meantime, our first Caseworker has given us our Homestudy addendum—and we will contact her tomorrow to ask for corrected copies with our son’s actual age, our actual phone number, and the extra copy missing from this envelope she gave us on Friday.

When I was a child, I believed that I could walk into the ocean if I needed to, retrieve what was necessary, and return to land unharmed. I never tested it, because I knew that I would be able to do it when the time came.

Perhaps this is that time.

Aww, you shouldn't have

No, really. I shouldn’t have. I went to St. Louis to follow up an email I sent to our agency's headquarters.

I was encouraged by the presence of the China Program Director, Program Coordinator, and our contact, an Administrative Coordinator. Two had copies of my email, which voiced concerns from lost paperwork to rotating caseworkers to conflicting information.

The Program Director left early to get her kids. The remaining Coordinators took polar roles. Administrative C was concerned but outranked by Program C, who remained impassive. It was up to me to initiate each point of discussion. I realized we are on our own. Agencies are liaisons who facilitate adoption. That’s all. Though never stated, it was clear from Program C’s dismissal of each issue. I was the classic anxious adoptive parent, and my questions, world-shaking to me, are the latest trivial moments she has heard in 12 years. She countered each sentence of mine with one that made light of or didn’t address my issue. I’d respond, and she’d restate her words. I’d take my point further, and she’d echo her first sentence. It was not unlike talking to a road sign. The 2 Coordinators shifted conversation after a while to making jewelry, their effort to offer me an exit without further embarrassment. I didn’t press the issue—I actually just watched, as if in a lab, to see how trivialized my words could become.

The staff at our agency have bios online. The one for Program C states that seeing children find a home is her ministry. It is doubtless a demanding one, but she has focused on the children to the exclusion of parents. The passion to rescue children hasn’t grown into a partnership with families. It’s a subtle distinction in words, but a giant one in actual support, not unlike the difference I’ve seen between my school and other private schools who want to be “Christian” schools.

Thanks be to God for a supportive community of friends. The ones without mission statements seem to help the most.

good night, and good luck

So, now I'm grabbing a few hours' shuteye before I take off for St. Louis in the morning. The reason? Small but dangerous.

What is this trip in aid of, gentle reader? Well, after Friday's what-have-you, we got an email this afternoon from Caseworker #1. She conveniently sent it 12 minutes before her office closed to say that before she could send our homestudy addendum to St. Louis, would we be so kind as to refresh her memory. She could not find the information on the child we wish to adopt, the medical condition of that child (note ambiguous gender), nor the social welfare institute that child calls home. She even left blank the space for our last name, just so we felt helpful.

Now, I don't know if she wanted us to feel a sense of ownership, or if she's too meticulous to call St. Louis and ask them for that information, but I figured out why she can't access it onsite. When, way back in crisp November, Shane happily carried our Letter of Intent to the Brentwood office to let trusty Caseworker #2 send it to St. Louis (and from there to China!), he realized as he did one last careful triple check in her office that I missed a signature (stupid!stupid!), and I couldn't get there before closing. She helpfully suggested that he forge my signature, but because he spent days (which he will never get back) in assorted police and visa offices in Chengdu, China, last year, watching me jump through hoops to avoid the Chinese gulag and get a passport replaced, he said no, he'd just as soon I signed the form, as the Chinese happen to expect honesty in these matters. She pressed him a second time, and he decided that since we were taking students to St. Louis the following weekend anyway, we'd just take a detour to the home office and deliver it by hand, with my signature. Thus, that entire set of papers never was privileged to be copied in Brentwood, nor does it grace their files now-I assume.

But what am I complaining about? It was a mere $1800 for the Homestudy process, and this is an addendum, for which we paid no extra. You get what you pay for. Don't you?

At any rate, we're at an even dozen now for gigantic gaffes, so I figure a field trip to St. Louis is in order to clarify my position about wanting to start a family is in order.

We welcome prayers. Really. We do.

what they do to you

There is no photo here-only angry.

I got an email today from our agency's St. Louis office. It cheerfully informed me that a new batch of Seeking Confirmation Letters had arrived and the recent speed of waiting child adoptions necessitated a new policy. Our homestudy addendum was needed in St. Louis so they'd have all paperwork before finalizing travel.

I panicked. We must have gotten our Seeking Confirmation Letter!! We asked Caseworker #1 on October 29 for the homestudy addendum, after confirming that we wanted to adopt Youyou. She told us she'd get it done right away.

But this email, arriving near the end of the school day, made it seem that the addendum was lost. I tried to find Shane, thinking, "What if they haven't even looked at our file and there it is and it stands in the way of us bringing our son home?!"

Somehow, we made it through that last class and then rushed home, making frantic phone calls. The first was to the home office for clarification--I left a message. Shane made the second one to our nonplussed Caseworker #1, who seemed unable to remember the addendum. The home office rep called me back to say she'd just heard from Caseworker #1, who HAD NEVER EVEN DONE OUR PAPERWORK!!!! The reason? The process from letter of intent (where we ask China for Youyou) to the Letter Seeking Confirmation (where China acknowledges our request) normally takes 4 to 6 months, so SHE THOUGHT SHE HAD MORE TIME.

I was calm. Dead calm, in fact. There's no Seeking Confirmation Letter waiting for us, it so happens--the email was just a friendly way of telling all the waiting child families that the agency wants to be sure we all have our papers in order, and we apparently were some of those who did not have all our paperwork completed.

A deep breath, and a pause.

If I'd known at the beginning that we would be yanked around like this at every turn, I would NEVER have begun the adoption process. I would have concluded that God did not intend for us to have children. Ever. The irony of it is that we were so prepared for difficulty from CHINA!!! It has instead been THE AGENCIES, from start to finish, which have been horrible. Horrible. There is one conclusion to be drawn from this.

ANY agency, no matter how it throws the name of Jesus around or Bible verses or phrases about "having a heart for children," is no more than a business whose market is prospective parents, many of whom are infertile. And that desperate wish to have children makes those infertile couples especially prime, worth at least $ 22,000 each.

I thank God that I did not see this tunnel and out of fear turn away, because I would not ever know this little boy who will be our son. But if anyone wants to ask my advice on adoption, now is not the time.

far away, so close

Just when you thought it was the wierdest, something new happens to make this journey ever strange.

The friends with whom we traveled to China last year are returning to Beijing next week. Last year's trip began with an artists' conference, at which we were the guest speakers, and moved on to include a visit to a medical foster home (where our hearts changed forever, sans sentimentality), the opening ceremonies of a training center for worship leaders (very hush-hush), and of course seven days near Tibet (where it would be nice to start an apple-canning business).

This year's trip has a different itinerary, but the one item that keeps this blog by invitation only is a jaw-dropper. They're going to Youyou's house. THEY'RE GOING TO YOUYOU'S HOUSE!!! The guy with the tickets and the itinerary is from Singapore, as is the woman who helped start YouYou's home, and when it first seemed that we'd be traveling "in February by the latest" to get our little boy (how I remember those days), this guy decided to schedule this year's trip to coincide with our own adoption travel, just because he wanted to share in that moment. Turns out, we don't know when we'll be going, but his group is traveling next week, and since they'll be passing "the Riviera," the area immediately outside of the Beijing airport which is filled with expatriates and has Youyou's home on its fringe, they're just going to casually drop by...

...and meet our little boy.

across four aprils

Ok, so there's this thing about having a child on the other side of the world that makes a body uncertain. Sure, there's the "almost & not yet" chorus in my mind, but there's also increasingly on my part a growing realization of my cognitive limits. Of course Chinese New Year brought with it some more fresh yummy pictures, and Youyou is indeed the most adorable little guy, but I don't even know him yet!! There is no rush of fond emotion, as in, "My son!"--there are moments when I am soooo very thankful for his caregivers, women who must love him immensely to connect with him in the manner they do when armed with a camera. Just look at that photo! It's the kind of photo I would want to take of my son, and there it is, and it's been taken by a strange woman who will always be his first love. It's so strange to think now that when he does get here--and by the way, April certainly seems to be the earliest that could happen at this point--he'll cry at some point for want of his ayi, his first day-to-day mother. And this new mother will be at a loss. Yikes!

The couples who have been fortunate enough to request waiting children through the new electronic process don't know how good they have it. Yesterday marked 12 weeks since we sent our letter of intent requesting our little boy. It also brought a fresh newsletter from our agency, in which they happily proclaimed that two couples who requested children via the new CCAA system submitted their letters of intent on January 24 and have received their Seeking Confirmation letters just 2 weeks later. They're slated to travel before we will. That little boy, born in April 2005, may well be three before we see him.

God grant me patience.