Scared

I'm here. It's late, I can't sleep, and the usual adoption coping mechanisms of continuously hitting refresh on our creche's photo update facebook page, surfing posts in the Haiti group for tiny bits of adoption news, and chewing my lip to shreds are not working. So. Here I am.

What was I thinking with all of that zen talk? This time around is very different, but no less stressful. With Ariam I worried a lot about *us*. Would we get to be parents? When would it happen? What would it be like? What should her room look like? Would she like us? I suppose in comparison I am zen. I am not worried about us. We'll be fine.

But I am finding that with Mr. Dimple the anxiety is very high because I am so much more worried about *him*. While we enjoy summer in Colorado and our days fly by, he is living without parents. His life without parents will last much longer than Ariam's did because the process to adopt from Haiti takes so much longer than from Ethiopia. Now that I know how much a baby and toddler needs his/her parents, because I have been a parent for 2 years and seen it firsthand, my anxiety is entirely for this little guy.

Tonight we got word that Mr. Dimple is not well. He has some medical needs we knew about. But now he is pulling his hair out. And it didn't even take a g.oogle search for me to know that hair pulling is a sign of stress.

I know exactly what large group care does to children. This shouldn't surprise me. What should surprise me is how little impact institutionalization seems to have had on Ariam. I need to be more realistic that she is the exception and not the rule.

Even the best of institutional care is not natural for a baby - who yearns to be touched and looked at and deeply intimately seen and adored.

Months and months and months are what we have left. HE has so many months before he'll be part of a family. It makes me sick to think about it. Sick and scared.

~A