The Zen of Adoption

This lovely quote by American writer, Anne Sexton, expresses how I feel right now, a year into our ever-lengthening adoption wait.

It is strange to think that even though a year has passed, we are likely further from meeting our child than we thought it would take in it’s entirety when we started. Being told 12 - 18 months, and then watching it stretch to what may be a 4-5 year wait is hard to adjust to, but we were prepared for uncertainty when we chose this path. In the short term, we are faced with updating our paperwork, which means more visits from social workers, more notarized letters, more fingerprints (which, am I crazy, or is there little-to-no chance that these changed in the last 12 months… what are they checking for exactly?) No fun, but worth it in the long run…

There is a lot of speculation over whether things will continue to slow down or speed up, how attrition will affect the wait time, as people leave the program to add to their families in other ways, or if the writing is on the wall and China’s international adoption program is winding down. Two sites that offer a lot of opinions about what may happening are http://research-china.blogspot.com and http://www.chinaadopttalk.com but the bottom line is, no one knows for sure.

In the meantime, it has been an interesting year, full of challenges, excitement, changes, and adventures… who knows what the next twelve months will bring, it really doesn’t matter to me as long as they bring me closer to our little one.