After overcoming the pain and what-ifs of infertility yet again, I felt reassured by the answer to my prayer to stick to our plan of waiting until the beginning of 2012 to move forward with another adoption.
Easier said than done.
I was in contact with our former caseworker and I learned that the adoption agency we used with Jocelyn and wanted to use again, was full. They only represent a certain amount of families. To their credit, I think this is one thing that makes them exemplary--they never spread themselves too thin and always offer their families the best service. But they were at capacity in the spring of 2011 with a waiting list to get on their adoption waiting list.
This threw everything out of whack! We wanted to be on that adoption waiting list in 2012. But would there be a spot? Should we get on the pre-wait list? Surely if we got on the pre-wait list, we would get a spot by January 2012. But what if we got on the list too soon? What if it happened before we were ready emotionally and financially? There was no way to know how fast the list would move, and no way to plan when we would get on the real list.
Thinking about this pre-list/list thing drove me crazy. We sort of landed on getting on the pre-list around June, giving us six months to move onto the actual waiting list by January. I hated not being able to plan everything.
Last June, I discovered that my coworker was a very talented, budding photographer. He had done a lot of still photography and wanted to venture into portraiture. I asked if we could be guinea pigs for him sometime in the upcoming months. Some nice family pictures would be good for our adoption profiles in January. He was excited and said he would love to and after checking his schedule, he wanted to do the pictures that week. Like three days after I asked him. He had some family events and his wife was super pregnant and they would have a baby soon, and he wanted to do it right away. I told him we could wait - we could wait three or four months even. This wasn't urgent by any means. He insisted. Our pictures are breathtaking. I knew they would be the icing on the cake for our adoption profile.
When July came we were ready to get on the pre-list with our adoption agency. I let our caseworker know our intentions.
Still, I had doubts in the back of my mind. Was it too soon? Not soon enough? We didn't have enough money. Maybe we should wait. Maybe we needed to go on faith because we never would have enough money. I prayed but no discernible answer came. My head and my heart were jumbled, but logic is given to us for a reason so I did my best to use it.
A week after getting our family pictures taken and a day after telling our caseworker we wanted to get on the pre-waiting list, our caseworker told us that a spot had opened up at the agency and it was ours if we wanted it.
I felt a little blind-sided. All my careful planning, all my focus on January 2012, seemed to be thrown by the wayside. We had two options: either say we weren't ready and hope they would have a spot for us in January OR get on the list and just go with it.
I struggled with the decision. In my experience, when things are meant to be, decisions come easily, naturally, and peacefully.
I was struggling.
Why had the answer to my prayer been to wait until January if things were moving now, in July?
What was I supposed to do?
No comments:
Post a Comment