The wait is aggravating

Well the title says it all. We are now into mid-March and this adoption process is still ongoing. Not to say it hasn't been moving along. I just had no idea that it would be this involved. I thought once we had the dossier in place, and got the referral, got him a visa to enter the country, got approval from our government to adopt, got approval from the other government to adopt, that we'd be good to go. But nope. still waiting for more approvals to adopt while our baby has become a toddler. It's really left me full of angst. I feel so helpless. I know these are very formative months/years for babies and I have no idea how much stimulation he's getting right now. Someone said to me (out of love) that this is like a pregnancy. Nope. It's not.

REFERRAL!

We have news. We accepted a referral today, the same little guy who appeared and then disappeared in July. We now have a lot of paperwork and a lot of waiting ahead of us but our lives have taken on a new meaning somehow already.

I keep hoping this is real and is not going to slip away somehow. After 2 miscarriages, many failed cycles, and over 7 years of trying to have a baby, I am scared of being disappointed again. But I'm so happy right now!

Let's hope for a very satisfactory situation by the middle of 2011!

Status update

We've had an emotional week but we have crossed another hurdle for now.

First of all, the emotional week stems from having a referral slip through our fingers. The bottom line is that Intended D and I had yet another realization that every step in this process is a growing experience.

It was too good to be true, and it worked out best for the little guy, which is what we all want.

And today, I finally put the dossier in the mail today! I know this sounds backward considering I'm talking about referrals and our dossier is just barely getting out the door. Well I'm going to avoid trying to explain it because I can't really explain it. It was an opportunity and it's gone.

Anyway, I had been waiting for our dear lovely friends to get me their letters, which all 3 provided very quickly. This has made me treasure these wonderful friends even more than I had before. I know that all 3 of them moved really quickly to make this happen because they all know how long we have struggled and they want us to be successful. Maybe they want us to stop complaining, I don't know. But Intended D and I are so lucky to have these people in our lives! So we got last of the letters last night and I was able to put it all together!

Our adoption agency wants 3 original copies of the dossier (and several photocopies of it!) and compiling the dossier was extra excessively time consuming because stupid me got all our forms notarized without having them fully completed. We were rushing because Intended D was going out of town for an extended period of time and I wanted to get the dossiers out to the agency before he got back. So what did this stupid act mean? It means:

1) I had to write each individual document 3 times by hand

2) I couldn't screw up or I'd have to do it all over again once Intended D returned

I also had financial documents and I had to block out the account numbers and again, in my haste I didn't do this before I made photocopies. So yes, I got to do each copy by hand individually. After I borrowed a black sharpie from someone else in my building. Yes it just kept getting better and better.

Well I'm so happy to say I put the dossiers in the mail today. SO happy. Yes it was a pain in the ass and it's possible I screwed something up and will have to fix stuff. But it's done for now. Another step forward. Bring on another referral universe! We're waiting!

Short and sweet

This is gonna be short because I only really want to post an essay I read the other day. It's basically about how much a person learns about themselves going through infertility and striving so hard to become a parent.

I really love it.

Here it is: How infertility has improved my life by Maude Allen

Collecting documents

We are gradually moving forward in this process of adopting. Today we spent $60 getting our police records and another $10 for the bank to send a silly letter indicating that we are their clients and how much money we have in which accounts. Talk about nickel and dimed. God forbid we just get into our account online and print up our balances. Too simple. The gentleman said he couldn't do it himself but somebody in India (yes, outsources!!) had to fill out an electronic form for us, "and it costs $10 to do this..." My response was almost "of course it does..."

Need to keep a running tab of all these expenses. We had a new friend at support group talking about how EVERYTHING in the adoption process costs money and at the time, it seemed like they were just complaining and they should suck it up. Well I'm now joining in on the complaining!!! And yes, because we are infertile, we have to suck it up. It just gets really old to have to keep sucking it up. I'm thrilled about the prospect of adopting. But I'll say what has been said time and time again. I'm frustrated by how unfair this process is. "Well, you could always adopt..." "fuck you."

OK now I've said it. Deep breaths and now we move on.

We have submitted our I-800A and are now we're getting our dossier ready to go.

The homestudy is done (and was submitted with the I-800A) and was really a relatively easy process. I think this is attributed to a really stellar agency that we worked with for the homestudy. I would send ANYBODY to these guys. They made it really unoffensive and as simple as possible. Although when we were in the thick of getting the homestudy done, it felt ridiculous. We started with getting fingerprinted at the county courthouse. Which was just about the most offensive event I could have imagined! Time to report our progress to date:

Homestudy began in mid-April. We had to get fingerprinted, go to the homestudy agency to get interviewed, have the social worker come to our home, get physicals for the homestudy (and the dossier), submit copies of our birth certificates & marriage license. We had to take 10 hours of courses online, and have background checks in every state we've lived in since we were 18 years old. I think that's it but I'm not positive.

So that homestudy was put in the mail with our I-800A form and on Friday 7/16 was sent to the US Citizen and Immigration Services office (part of homeland security) along with a check for $830. They have to approve that we are eligible to adopt internationally.

So now we are compiling our dossier which is composed of a statement from the bank indicating our finances, other info on our assets, tax information, personal references, medical history, plans for child care, criminal history clearance, birth certificates, marriage certificates, photographs of us and our lives, and all sorts of notarized documents which I do not understand but will sign where I am told. I know there are more, I just don't have the list in front of me. So today we got 2 more things crossed off the list.

Part of me knows to just keep moving forward, cross things off the list, and get to the finish line so we can hurry up and wait. But there are those brief fleeting moments when we think about what we have to go through and it just feels so unbelievable. yes, unfair, unfair, unfair. First infertility treatment, now going through the process of adopting. It's not simple.

Intended D and I were talking the other day and it made us feel better to really think about how we are literally working with our country and the adoptive country's governments to get a child U.S. citizenship. This is no simple matter and it makes it understandable why there are so many hoops to jump through. It's definitely a big deal. First our government has to find us eligible to adopt (this is the purpose of the I-800A) Then the adoptive country has to determine that we are eligible to adopt (using the dossier). Then the adoptive country gives us a potential child and then our government has to decide whether it's ok (the I-800). And then the adoptive country has to go through the process of placing their native child into foreigners' hands. Pretty intense and no surprise that it takes months and up to years to get this managed.

It's just tough. Ultimately we are very happy about this path and cannot imagine it any other way anymore. But losing my ability to imagine the simplicity of conception and childbirth is what I privately mourn in moments of weakness.

Letting our guard down...

We've been in the process of moving to a different apartment and we are finding ourselves talking about the prospect of our child who will be our new apartment with us. It's been a strange experience. To be honest, I am a little scared about this new shift in our thinking-- what if we are disappointed again? How would we handle that? When we first started trying to conceive so many years ago, I planted tulips in the fall anticipating when they bloomed we'd be expecting a child and that was 7 years ago. Are we setting ourselves up for failure again allowing ourselves to be hopeful that we will actually be parents?

All our friends who have adopted continue to tell us that we are now embarking on a path that won't fail as long as we remain determined. We are letting our guard down little by little...

Another article about infertility...

It seems weird to me that seemingly all of the sudden salon.com is publishing articles about infertility. All the articles I've seen so far have been basically of the "here's a funny/cynical/hipster-infused/heartfelt perspective on infertility". There's one today about jerking off into a cup to produce a sperm sample.

Again, I somehow couldn't relate anymore. I only vaguely remember giving my first sample and I did have a lot of these feelings: I hoped not to get stage fright on the big day, was wondering what the room would be like, videos or mags or what,...I just had no real idea about what it would be like other than stuff I saw in movies (like the scene in She's Having a Baby for example). Anyhoo, all in all it was easy for me. I for some reason don't get to embarrassed about it and was able to view it as pretty much a mechanical thing I had to do. Unlike the author of the salon.com article I viewed my "job" in the fertility corporation Intended Mommy and I were running as the easy part. She took shots, spread her legs, was generally poked and prodded and looked at with a spot-light in a room of AT LEAST two relative strangers. I jerked off in private into a cup. How bad can that be? Not so bad in the grand scheme of things. Hell, most guys actually jerk off on their own time for no particular reason other than some quick pleasure! No woman volunteers to go to the Dr's office, put her legs in the stirrups and have a vaginal ultrasound with a big wand that is digging around looking for ovaries. It's not fun. Plus, it's almost always followed by a blood draw. Sweet!

Lastly, DO NOT read the comments to the salon.com article! People on the internet (most of them at least) or some of the nastiest most purposefully hurtful people. It brings to mind an old phrase in my mind where the only response to these people is "what makes you think anybody gives a shit about your fucking opinion on something you obviously know almost nothing about."