For Your Eyes Only, Adoption Bloggers!

I've been spending alot of time lately reading other people's blogs.  Mostly, this is because Ruby has to be rocked to sleep, but I can't just sit in her room rocking her or else she'll suspect that I'm trying to put her to sleep and get super-mad.  So, I wander around the house holding her, sometimes talking on the phone, but more often reading stuff on the computer, until she crashes.  Then, sometimes, I can put her down.  My arms are getting pretty strong, which is a silver lining to the dark cloud of bad sleep habits we're creating (I know, you don't even have to say it).

Anyway, reading all these other adoption blogs has been really inspiring.  Families go through so much to bring their children home.  Obviously, many people go through hardships to have biological children, but it's a different process, and I'm sure there is a whole world of blogs about that stuff too.  Luckily for us, both of my pregnancies were relatively straight-forward - once the bun was in the oven, everything was pretty much on auto-pilot.  On the other hand, I felt that adoption was such a conscious process, where you have to make choices and take action at every step of the way.  If you just stop doing it one day, no baby.  So you keep moving forward slowly - sometimes making a phone call to a doctor's office for an appointment for your physical is all you do towards it in a whole week.  But you keep going, and then eventually - a long, long time after you started said process, you get a phone call asking if you would like to accept a referral.  And you choose yes or no.  And then you might lose that referral, so you can't really get excited yet, but you do anyway.  All the while, friends keep asking you if you're still pursuing adoption, or if you have any news.  But it's really hard to explain to people who haven't been through it, and you can see their eyes sort of glaze over when you start using words like "referral" and "embassy appointment."  Plus, you still have to keep living your everyday life, but no one is giving up their bus seat for you because you don't have a big old belly.  But that's okay, because, like I said, it's more a cerebral process than a physical one anyway, so instead of getting hemorroids and stretch marks, you've got a sore neck from holding the phone up to your ear with your shoulder while you spend hours on the phone making plane reservations and paper cuts from filling out yet more forms.  You have to keep doing all this stuff, it doesn't just happen to you.  All this is not to say that having a baby isn't hard - I've had two babies the old-fashioned way, and it's no day at the park either, but there is certainly not as much paperwork involved.

Then, finally, finally you go get your child, and you come home, feeling like a huge chapter of your life (possibly titled "Waiting") is over.  And that's great, because starting the next chapter is what it's all about, but at the same time, that wait was a part of the journey too.  I feel it doesn't get the respect it deserves in the world.  There are approximately 3 million books about pregnancy on the market, but not so many about waiting during adoption.  That's probably because it is so different in each case, and it's not that funny to make witty suggestions about what to wear to cover up your new big butt that you got from sitting in front of the computer researching adoption while eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon since, unlike pregnancy fat, no one thinks that's cute.

I think non-adoption people - meaning most everyone - have no idea what the process is like.  They see you with an obviously adopted child and think it just landed at your doorstep.  When people I don't know ask me whether Ruby is a "Haiti baby," and I want to yell at them that actually, no, I didn't just rush down to Haiti following the January earthquake and swipe a baby off the street, I don't.  I don't tell people that it wasn't "nice" of me to adopt a baby, it was a [expletive deleted] of work and money to get her.  I just say "well thank, I am a really nice person."

So, this seems to be veering off into a rant-ish post, which was not my intent when I sat down.  My intent was to say thank you to all the bloggers out there who share their adoption journeys.  The online adoption community fills in the gap on the shelf at the bookstore.  Reading other people's stories during the waiting phase and now that we're home has been at times addictive, at times really hard, but mostly just really helpful.  Fellow bloggers, your honesty and humor have kept things in perspective for me, so thanks for that.