Written by Alissa Kay
After months of paperwork and the like, we became officially approved in October of 2008 to adopt a baby. Let the wait begin! We knew it could take weeks, months or even YEARS (if ever) before we’d bring home our baby. The unknown was hard. I like to plan and with adoption, there just isn’t much room for planning.
When you get pregnant, you know you have about 40 weeks (give or take a few) before the lil’ one makes its debut. There’s a deadline. Assuming, you’re lucky enough to have a successful, healthy pregnancy you know that you will have your baby by a certain date. Obviously, there are still a lot of unknowns with pregnancy… but having never been pregnant; I’ll leave that topic alone.
It was a little hard to know we were *ready* to be parents and that we wanted to start a family, but yet, we really had no control. The thought of waiting years, terrified me. I had a plan. I was going to have kids at a young(ish) age and be done by thirty. HA!
This is when I learned I really had to give up my plans and have faith that everything would work out.
Full disclosure: I still struggle with this. I can’t stand the unknown. Hate it. I would be a lot more at peace if I knew what the plan was. Even if it wasn’t my plan, I’d be okay if I knew the outcome. I’m totally one of those people that like to know how the movie ends. When we started our wait, we were so excited to know we were “technically” expecting… we just didn’t know when. To know we could become parents any day! Our profile books were done and they would be shown to expecting moms & dads. (I’m not sure if I mentioned profile books earlier, that’ll have to be a post for another day.)
In the beginning, we were hopeful & optimistic. Especially my husband. He’s generally the optimist while he says I’m the pessimist. I say I’m a realist.
I day dreamed often about our baby… would it be a boy? A girl? What would they look like? When would they be born? We had so many questions and no real answers. We discussed names. But again, I had been discussing names since I was a young girl. My husband was such a trooper and put up with all of it. He might not admit it, but I’m pretty sure he was doing plenty of his own day dreaming. He was born to be a dad and he was just as excited as I was. He did a better job controlling his emotions though. I was downright giddy at times and other times down in the dumps because we hadn’t heard anything despite it only being a couple of weeks. We had a room picked out to be the nursery. We kept the room empty. I did however start to buy some baby items. I picked up a few gender neutral things of the clearance rack. Somehow it felt a little more real to be buying baby things. I didn’t go crazy (which is hard for me since I might have a slight shopping addiction) because I was scared that we could be waiting forever and then I’d have a house full of baby stuff. And no baby.
Every time the phone rang, I’d let myself get so excited for that second before I noticed on caller ID that it was my mom calling and not the adoption agency. The phone ringing was one of my favorite sounds. Knowing it would eventually, hopefully, bring me the news I had been waiting for made my heart skip a beat every time it rang. I was clinging on to hope and dreaming big.
In November, the phone did ring. And yes, it was the adoption agency…