Waiting

Yep - that is about it - Waiting. No waitlist movement in 26 days.......bummer

Thankful for people to hold up my arms

This week was really hard for me. Everyday is an excercise in choosing trust, faith and patience for me, even when things are going well. So this week when things were not going well I fell to pieces. I know that I'm supposed to choose optimism, but it just didn't happen this week.

Thankfully I had two great friends to lean on, Kevala who tried her best to bust down my wall of grief despite my continued efforts to fortify, and Joan who has been through the trials and tribulations of international adoption and so poignently pointed out to me that the craziness, the governmental changes, the worry, the helplessness - this IS international adoption. I signed up for it and I need to accept that. Neither conversation was easy to hear, but it was needed.

All women should take the risk and build real, vulnerable, intimate relationships with other women. I don't know who or where I would be without them.

Thanks Ladies - Exodus 17:12

Just Breathe

Changes in Ethiopian Adoption Policy

Changes in US Embassy Policy

All in one week.

Waiting, Trusting and Letting Go

There really isn't an easy step in the adoption process yet. Every step along the way is fraught with fear, frustration and impatience. Well at least for me....

I learned this week that for Mike it looks a lot more like....trusting everything is going to work out, and we will cross that bridge when we get there if it doesn't.

Wow, what a frustratingly male perspective that makes me feel so impatient with him. No, not really. Really hearing his feelings only strengthens and secures and guides me on where I need to go in my head.

The very day we were celebrating being added to the waitlist was the very day that I started to really worry that something might not work out, and somehow we would find ourselves at the end of this journey without our angel. This is very scary to me. I am so committed and dreaming of our daughter already that I feel so vulnerable not being in control of the process. I feel so distrustful of the two large governments who will truly be in charge of whether or not I will have a little girl placed into my arms. Being the type of person who likes to see the tasks before me and work at my own pace to accomplish them it is VERY HARD for me to just sit and wait.

However nothing has really happened to give me any indication that anything bad will happen. Everything has moved along on schedule or sooner. Every week we creep slowly up the wait list. All of our paperwork has been making it slowly through the process. After we were placed on the wait list I spent two weeks stewing in my head about all kinds of things and wrestling with God, "how can I get you Lord to do what I want?" and I feel like his response to me was "I am" and "patience my dear". So the continuation of the theme that I have much more of an intellectual grasp of patience than an emotional one. But it is a seed that I'm cultivating and I'm given opportunities every day to choose patience, or not. (Including self control over how many times per day I check my agency's blog to see if there has been any movement on the wait list or not).

Finally after two weeks of driving myself crazy I realized I hadn't asked Mike lately where he was, how he was feeling. He is always such a steady rock sometimes I wonder "is he just holding it all in?". So I ask him and he replies, "I just trust that everything is going to work out. God placed us on this journey, why would he stop it now?" Trust. Hmmm, so that is where my impatience comes from.

Everyone always tells people who are in the midst of trying to control something out of their control, "Just let go and it will all work out". Or for my beautiful friends who have struggled with infertility, "just stop worrying about it and you will get pregnant". Yeah, not the easiest thing to do and I guess it is because of TRUST. It is so difficult for me to "be and not do". When I do, I feel in control (filling out paperwork, getting notarized, making appointments). To be means to just be still and trust that it will all work out. So that is where I am, praying for perseverance, trying to let go, hoping to grow trust, submitting to the process......quite fitting for the Easter season if you think about it.