Adoption Truth Part III: Adopting Again

Let's get this show on the road, yes?
I'm sorry for the long delay in posting. I was in Haiti. Again.

Thank you for reading, commenting and reposting parts I and II. Your comments, even when questioning, were so full of grace. I try to remember to give more grace when I am the recipient of so much.

Thank you for recognizing that the stories I'm telling here are glimpses. Snapshots. Thoughts in time. They can never be our full story and will never reveal more about our daughter or son than we think is acceptable to share publicly (which we recognize is walking a very fine line.) It is a thin line that I'm walking only because I believe with my whole heart that truth and light can dispel darkness and create change.

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Adoption Truths Part III: Adopting Again

If we were so concerned with Ariam's mother's story, why on earth did we start a second adoption?

In fall of 2011, while we were still putting together puzzle pieces of Ariam's story and wondering if this story was an anomaly, we began to discuss a second adoption. We sorted through our desires, a potential second child's needs, Ariam's needs, and all of the options for expanding our family.

I think that whether you have adopted or not you will probably resonate with our reasons for adding a second child to our family.

Reason 1 - we wanted children, plural. We wanted to be a family and we wanted Ariam to have a brother or sister. We did not want to rescue a child, be "saviors" in the eyes of our community, or do some act of charity. It is a selfish reason to adopt - wanting a child. But if done right, there is actually no better reason, in my opinion, to adopt than *wanting* a child. Wanting to be family for and with a child.

Reason 2 - We didn't want Ariam to be the only person of color in our entire family. We were reading more writings from teen and adult adoptees and unanimously they felt that being the "only one" (adopted, with special needs, different ethnicity, whatever the case) was hard. Uncomfortable. An extra burden.

I won't forget the day we were with our extended family in a restaurant, all of us white as white can be, and I realized that all eyes in the restaurant were on Ariam. Talking, laughing, animated. She didn't seem to notice. But I did. And I don't want that for her. I want her to have siblings with whom she can share this unique experience of being adopted in a transracial family.

The day we told Ariam that she would be a big sister to a little boy she asked "will he be chocolate like me?" (She was 2.5 and still thinking of skin as a color not a race or ethnicity yet.) I know her well enough to know that she would love any baby. But her reaction to the knowledge that yes, her brother would look like her, was confirmation to me that we had made the right decision for our family. And for our children.

Throughout the year she has checked in on this with us. "Will he be brown like me mom?" "Is he definitely going to have black hair like me?" "He and I will be the same just like Mia and her sister are the same and like Roan and her brother are the same!"

She has never wavered in her love for this little brother. Across time and space, across more than a year of her young life, through confusion and delays and questions he has been the dream she holds most dearly.

(Transcribed by her preschool teacher. We have dozens of these type of letters.)

There have been moments in recent months when we have thought we would need to break it to Ariam that this little brother of hers, held so close to her heart, would not be coming to live with us.

We made the hardest decision I think any adoptive parent has to make (and yet at the same time this seems like something so very basic and obvious to anyone who is not adopting!) We needed to find out if this little boy's living birth parent had been coerced to relinquish him for adoption.

We are waiting for the end of this story. It is not quite finished yet. (Sometimes truth, when dealing with cross cultural communication, requires the allowance of time and patience.)

I hope to share more of this journey with you at some point in the near future. Not because I have any interest in exposing our most personal fears, stories, or our child's life details with the internet community at large. But because this entire story sheds light on aspects of adoption, agencies that masquerade as "Christian" and the dangers of group think that we all need to be more diligent in discussing and working to change.

And because we have come to this exhausting but liberating realization..
until we can lay down our hopes, dreams, desires, image of our family, and even the child we hope will be ours on the alter of truth, we will never actually be capable of fully seeing truth or acting on it. (This is the hardest realization I have ever come to. Ever. It should be so simple, but it is not.)

~A

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” -- Bonhoeffer

We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality. -Dallas Willard

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. ~C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

Adoption Truth Part II: Where do babies come from?

Ariam likes to talk about where babies come from. Specific questions have included "is the belly button like an exit door?" and  "how does the baby get in there?"

She does a lot of thinking about babies. How they get in there, where they were before they were in there, and what they like to do in a uterus. She is 3. Sometimes she pulls down her shirt and pretends to breastfeed. She says she plans to be a baby doctor. She believes this means she will have a lot of babies and play doctor on them.

Not having ever carried or delivered a baby myself our conversations are usual very theoretical. If I'm being entirely honest, Ariam probably knows more anatomical names for lady parts and baby birthing than I do.

Until this happened recently...

This brave first time mama let me be a part of her 3 hour labor and delivery.

After delivery she struggled with bleeding. I was scared. I am sure she was scared. But she came through it and is doing okay. Raising her sweet boy.

This entire experience made me think.

Maybe, along with our adoption training, every adoptive parent should be required to attend a real life labor and delivery. Complete with pushing and vomit and tears and sweat. The ring of fire and tearing. Placenta and umbilical cord and more tears. Relief and more relief when the baby finally proves he won't be staying inside forever.

A new perspective:

Look at the strength it takes to bring forth life.
Look at the power of the female body and mind.
Look at the love and connection that rushes through those first few minutes - mother still connected to baby through their umbilical cord. (I had no idea what that would look like!)

I have been filled with a sense of awe ever since. It was so redemptive to see a mother struggle through delivery and to know that she will be supported and cared for as she learns how to mother for the first time.

Where do babies come from? Every baby comes from his or her mother. They are not created out of thin air. They are brought into this world in a flood of blood and pain and joy and sometimes sorrow. But they do not appear magically and they are not created in a womb as a mechanism to supply children for adoption.

I knew this logically and rationally. And I know you do too. But our hearts and our actions need to reflect this. All choices made around a child's care and future needs to reflect this reality.

My important adoption truth - babies come from mothers.

Thanks for taking this journey into the truth with me. Your supportive comments and privately shared stories meant a lot yesterday. I have never clicked refresh on my inbox that many times in one day.

~ A

Adoption Truth Part I: I have changed

Thanks for joining my recap of 2012. It was necessary for me to post. A reminder that in the dark and hard places of our life there is also light and beauty and so much love.

And now, to start the story. I need to ask for your grace. This blog is about to get a lot less rainbows and unicorns and pretty photos. I am not perfect and certainly don't have all the answers. What I have to share is deeply personal and it scares me to put it all out here in this way. Please be gentle with me. And with yourself. More than anything I am aware that adoptive parents read this blog and that words have a powerful way of touching places in our lives that we didn't want to disturb or consider too closely.

Thank you for coming back after I've been gone so long. Thank you for caring.

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Part I

I am not the same woman I was when this blog was born. Our adoption of Ariam has deeply impacted and forever changed the way I see the world. Reading my blog from inception to present, in preparation for reopening it, was so eye opening.

The most significant change I see is in my perception of the adoption triad (in our case, to keep it simple)– birthmother, adoptive mother, daughter. Daughter to two mothers. Mothers sharing daughter. Across time, space and beyond all comprehension, we are sharing.

We became parents to the most amazing, fantastic, joyful, loving, funny, animated little girl on planet earth in June of 2010.

And at least once each week I look at this little girl of mine and think about the girl who gave her life.

And Ariam asks about that girl-woman regularly. We talk about how we’ve heard that her nose was so similar to Ariam’s. How she also had light coffee colored skin. We talk about how sparkly her eyes must have been. I am deeply moved by this woman who connects us and I know that Ariam is as well.

We searched for her and that search turned upside down everything I thought previously about adoption. It is very clear to us that adoption was not Ariam’s birthmother’s plan. It has ended up as Ariam’s best second option. But it was not predestined, it was not “meant to be” and it most definitely damaged an inherent human right. The right her mother should have had to be involved in decision making about her daughter’s care. 

I am going to share something here that has forever damaged something in my soul and for which I hope Ariam forgives me someday for sharing. Because it will change you too. And you need to hear this before I can move on to part II of our story.

We learned that when Ariam’s girl-woman birthmother learned she was gone from the place she had entrusted her and gone from Ethiopia. She lay on the floor and cried. She cried for ‘days’.  

that is not ok. That image of her haunts me. It will not be ok with Ariam. It is not acceptable in our book and we don't think it is in God's plan for his creation. It was the consequence of a choice her birthmother made. But it was not the logical linear consequence. It was not a consequence that would have occurred if the local orphanage had taken the time to investigate. In the same situation, it was not a consequence I would have had to pay for a youthful mistake. And it was a harsh penalty a young woman paid for some poor decisions - made with very few alternative options.

I am changed. I am humbled. I am seared to the core. And I can never go back and be the same person I used to be. She can never be the same person she was growing to be.

As for Ariam. She doesn't know all of this story yet. So we won’t share more here. But she is a deeply thoughtful, caring, and empathetic little girl. She is the girl who rubs her friends’ backs at preschool when they are sad. She is the one who tells me she will hold her little brother to her heart when he is scared. She is the one full of love, hope and trust. She writes us love letters and brings them home from preschool daily.

Someday her heart will break when she learns her complete story. How could it not? 

This experience has shaped our family. It has shaped the way we view adoption. It has profoundly impacted our view of birth families and our appreciation for the difficult choices they make. And the ridiculously unfair and unjust "options" available (or forced) upon them.

We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt based on our experience, that orphanages can create “orphans” and that adoption can create orphanages. And if neither existed many children would remain in some form of family care either with their parents or extended family.

And yet we also know that, without adoption as an option on the spectrum of care, many children would grow up alone, in institutions, without a family.

HOW to reconcile these two?

We are complicit in this system. A system that provides families for some children who are very much in need and that creates “orphans” out of others who have living, caring, and with some support entirely capable birthparents.

We are complicit because we want to be a family. We want to be parents. We want to bring Ariam’s little brother home from Haiti. As adoptive parents, it is incredibly hard to overrule wants/emotions with sense, logic, justice, big picture thinking. I know it is excruciatingly hard because I live this.

Let’s start here. Let’s start this blog over with the premise that we have arrived at the awareness of this tangled complexity. And that we have come to some conclusions based on our ongoing experience with adoption. 

We as a family are awakened to the knowledge that we are complicit in a system that does not always serve those who most need it.

We have been complicit. But no more.  

Done with the group think.

Done with feeling emotionally held hostage.

Done thinking of our wants and needs and placing the highest priority on those.

Done turning a blind eye to red flags.

Done stepping on egg shells with agencies and their leadership.

Done worrying about the public opinion of other adoptive parents. 

We are in no way “anti-adoption” but we are fully awake to the fraud, injustice, and perpetuated cruelties of the “system.”

So.

On February 26, 2013, with final adoption decree in hand, we removed our son from the agency and orphanage that had been overseeing his care in Haiti. Putting our own adoption (our ability to get a US visa to bring him home) on the line and in jeopardy for the sake of the truth. 

I began this blog by wanting to add something to the story. When it seemed our adoption in Haiti could be on the line and we had to make some big choices, I was too scared to continue writing.

But no more.

For Ariam. For AJ.  I love you both. This work is my gift to you – your past present and future. This is our new beginning at the Watershed.

~A

New Year, Fresh Start

You know its been a while when...

you have to type in your entire blog URL because your new computer (the one you bought months ago) doesn't automatically start to load it with the first few words

you can't remember your blogger id or password

you can't even remember how to start a new post!

Today is day 1 of a new year. January 1, 2013.

Last night I held Ariam close and looked in her eyes telling her that she made 2012 the best year of our lives. She laughed. And maybe it was a bit dramatic. But it was true. Through the ups and downs, Ariam brings a light, a fire, a sparkle and a huge sense of happiness, peace and optimism to our home.

So that we won't forget, here are the biggies of 2012:

- Both of us changed jobs early in 2012. I left a job I had been working on for the past five years and began a new long-term consultancy. J settled into his life as a college professor and has never been happier.

Who we pretend to be...

Who we really are...

- At the end of March we traveled to Haiti for a week during J's spring break to meet our son, "Mr. Dimple." It was a very special time with a special baby.

- Travel. We did some. It wasn't up to our pre-parenting level of fun, relaxation or adventure. But it was memorable:

I took Ariam to California in May. (I was facilitator for a workshop at the Christian Alliance for Orphan Summit.)

Aya and Papa (my parents) joined us

We reunited with friends from Ethiopia!

Our small Ethiopia friends taught us to run naked on the beach (this was right before she stripped)!

We had a mommy/daughter beach day and made precious memories.

Ariam received and lost at least 4 pairs of sunglasses in the summer of 2012

J flew home in July to the small city he grew up in on the West Coast. It was an unplanned trip. He was back in his hometown for the funeral of his best friend, Alex. Alex's death was so sudden, so unexpected. It marks the heartbreaking mid-point of our 2012. We miss him every day.

Our best man.

J, Ariam and I went to Minnesota for a week in late summer to see old friends. It was supposed to be a girl's only trip but after Alex's death we decided not to miss opportunities to be together as a family and to see the people we love in person.

Met and fell in love here.

In late summer we celebrated baby brother's first birthday with cupcakes and a song. Ariam added to the growing stack of presents, cards and other artwork she is diligently creating for his arrival home.

Grandpa Jack made Ariam this awesome go cart. She spent late summer/early fall riding it as often as possible.

Gordon the preschool class mascot spent a weekend with us!

I went to London for work and spent a weekend with a dear friend in York. Prayed for miracles at Yorkminster Cathedral. We giggled our evenings away and walked/shopped with diligence during the day.

Was pampered, cocooned and completely loved and taken care of (and laughed until my stomach hurt and I couldn't walk) with this old friend and her hubby in Royal Tunbridge Wells.

Friendship that has taken us from  flip flops and stray dogs in rural Thailand to high heels and scones in England.

The fall was filled with pumpkins and trick or treating and sunshine.

I wish I could freeze them this way/this moment in time forever.

A light up princess crown from England (from Jackie and Ollie) was just the perfect accessory.

We drove to Santa Fe for a beautiful last warm fall weekend in early November.

Our solace. Our place of peace and escape. Closer to nature and closer to God.

Spent Thanksgiving in a small mountain town with wonderful friends and kids who plan to marry and make us beautiful babies. ;)

 - We ended 2012 the way we began it, with an epic 16 hour, 2 dogs, one restless preschooler, road trip to stay with family in Texas. This year it was much improved by the spacious used minivan we were rocking and the wonders of the ipad.

........................

And now I am watching the Rose Bowl parade. Specifically the part where a man coming home from overseas military duty surprises his wife and child on the parade route. My tears dripping on the keyboard.

I think it's safe to say that 2012 has made me hold what I have closer than ever while at the same time reminding me that our human earthly lives are so incredibly fragile and fleeting.

As a family, we have 2 goals for 2013.

1. Be even more diligent about making memories together and spending time with the people we love.

2. Bring home baby brother from Haiti. This girl of ours is so ready to be a big sister.

~ A

THREE is the new two!

July 18th is the day we celebrate Ariam's 3rd birthday.

Birthdates are not always recorded in Ethiopia and birthdays often go uncelebrated, particularly in the rural areas. So we have no way of knowing her actual date of birth. I wonder, sometimes, what she will think of this. This not really knowing. But I have come to a place of peace about it for myself. Millions of people around the world do not know their actual date of birth. While we would love to have known our girl from the minute she entered this world, we didn't. Those first six months is a story only her birthmother knows.

...............................................

The lead up to the celebration was substantial. Ariam's favorite conversation loop revolves around the topic of her birthday.

"When I have a birthday I am going to invite you. And I am going to invite my friends. (Insert a long list of friends' names.) And then I want lemonade at my party. Can we have lemonade? And soda? But is soda a red light food? Maybe we can still have some soda? And water. We need water. And then a cake. Can I have a cake? What color will the frosting be? (Insert rambling description of the colors of frosting she wants.) Will everyone come? How old will I be? I will be FOUR! No FIVE! I am FIVE!" (screaming laughter at her own craaazy joke.)

The birthday loop conversation was so cute at 2.5.

So the big weekend arrived. Family came from out of town. Friends came from far away places like Redstone. My mom and I frosted a lot of cupcakes in multiple frosting colors and styles (as directed by the birthday girl.)

 The  yard was decorated.

Water games and balloons were prepared.

Temporary tattoo station at the ready.

We exterminated for bees (and found at least 15 wasp nests in our eaves.)

And then, despite my screams of of "man your station" to J, my parents and his father, what was supposed to be a multi-station water themed birthday party exploded into a total free for all.

Turns out that 20 preschoolers hopped up on sugar and handed water balloons and water guns are much more powerful than their parental contingent.

Despite the reign of utter chaos, it was just perfect.

While we didn't hire a band, or a clown, or a pony. And we didn't have a giant bouncy house or even a balloon animal "artist." This kind of party still has a financial cost.

I don't imagine it is something most families do every year for their child. Especially larger families.

My mom reminded me a few times that they did not throw big birthday parties for me or for my sister back in the dark ages.

If I thought that it was spoiling Ariam, I wouldn't do it. But if I'm honest with myself, the party is not for her. She'd be just as happy with one friend, a bottle of "red light" soda (red light foods, according to her "Eat Healthy Feel Great" book are those that you should NOT eat or drink, which of course has given them huge amounts of fantasy and mysterious intrigue in her mind), and a can of pink cupcake frosting.

The party is not for her. It is for me. For us. It is a celebration of all that we waited for. All that we waited to be. Every bit of longing I stuff into those party preparations. With every frosted cupcake I am erasing a childless day of my past. Every time we sing happy birthday it is one more year with Ariam, one less year without.

~A

Random bits of early summer

Thank you so much for all of your kind comments about Mr. Dimple. I so don't deserve comments and blog friends after being such a bad blogger for so many months! Please know that I read each of your comments and I am trying to get caught up on your lives too.

That fact is, while I am sad for Mr. Dimple, and it is never easy to get bad news, I also have a lot of hope for him.  Given that there is not much I can do for him until he is ours, we just continue to pray that his heart is resilient.

And life goes on...

The beauty of this time right now is that it is just us three. And we are such a close little family. Ariam is at a fun age. (Fun and frustrating and bossy and hilarious and mischevious and and and..)
Here are some of my favorite recent quotes:

"I love you with BOTH of my hearts!"

"You are my very best friend." (Said to everyone from J and I to the dogs to the drummers at a recent festival.)

"When my baby brother comes home I am going to teach him how to check his emails."

"Are you sad you aren't from Ethiopia?" (Said to us in a moment of pride in her new Ethiopian outfit.)

"We NEED to celebrate Hannukah and Kwanzaa!!" (Inspired by a new Elmo video)

She keeps us on our toes and makes us see the world differently.

We're taking advantage of having just one child who is at an increasingly flexible age. Since celebrating our family anniversary on June 1st (2 years together!) we have eaten tons of injera, danced samba, been hiking in the mountains, participated in Juneteenth celebration, danced even more, and come to Texas to visit Aya and Papa!

~A

PS. Are you all watching Downton Abbey? How did I just discover it? Staying up way too late at night catching up!!

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

Zen Did Not Last Long - Mr. Dimple Introduction

My peace and calm lasted for a few weeks leading up to our trip to Haiti last month.
Where we met Baby Brother, aka "Mr. Dimple."

Zen quickly replaced by urgency and rising panic as the social welfare agency in charge of adoption in Haiti decided to stop accepting adoption dossiers for a period of time. The period of time is not extremely long, but I think any of us who have been through an adoption are well aware of the meaning of delays, temporary "holds", and increasing restrictions.

Not knowing exactly what is going to happen in Haiti, we have spent the last couple of weeks attempting to finish the dossier that we began in February. (For those not in the know, a homestudy and dossier normally take about 3-4 months to complete because many pieces of it are not under our control.)

Every. single. problem that one could encounter with an adoption homestudy and dossier...we have encountered. It has been an agonizing process.

Some of the problems we've experienced: FBI backlog for our fingerprint clearance required to finish our homestudy, lost application for J's birth certificate from California (actually still waiting for this to be resolved 5+ weeks later), two notaries who misspelled their own names which caused those documents to be rejected for authentication, rejected Washington DC child abuse clearance - technical glitch (fortunately resolved that by using the clearance from our last adoption), employment letter for Jeremy had to be rewritten FOUR times by his HR department and then they forgot to notarize the final copy (and then they notarized it incorrectly and it had to be done AGAIN!!), French translator fell through and we had to pay $200 more than going rate to get expedited translations, my doctor stopped doing TB skin tests so I had to go downtown to the health department to get one implanted and then back again to get it read and then hand deliver results to my doctor, entire dossier missent by the post office when it was supposed to be going to CO Secretary of State (creating a statewide "manhunt" for the express mail envelope it was in) = four day delay for something that should have been one day turn around. Oh, there is more, but those are the immediate issues that come to mind. There have been moments when all we could do was laugh. But truthfully the amount of money we've had to spend fixing errors that were not our fault and overnighting documents is horrifying and hasn't even been totaled yet.

Finally, after overnighting the completed dossier to the consulate in Chicago last week for legalization, the consulate took some days off and didn't legalize the dossier at all. (Supposed to be one day turn around.) We are still waiting for the package to arrive back to us. Today is our cutoff. Last day it can possibly arrive and still make it to Haiti in time.

If the dossier arrives today then we have a few hours to put it together with translations, make three photo copies of every page (with translations, medical lab reports, 3 years of tax returns, authentications and legalizations that's probably going to be 100 pages in the original copy.) Then it will fly Fed Ex next day air to arrive at the home of a family traveling on Saturday morning. Allowing ONE day (Monday) to sneak this thing in under the  May 1st cutoff.

I don't know. I have been praying a lot. J has helped each time I've come to the end of my rope.

We want to share more. We want to show you a photo of Mr. Dimple and tell you all about him. All about how we chose to adopt from Haiti and our trip there last month. But I need this dossier to safely make it into the adoption system first.

So please pray with me that it will happen. We would really like to call ourselves a family of four.

~A

Can You Feel My Zen?

In March of 2009 I was convinced that we were going to adopt. Specifically a child with special needs or a waiting child. What that looked like, exactly, I wasn't sure of yet, but God was doing this...work... in me. Everything looked different after that January trip to Ethiopia and my visit to AHOPE. The world was spinning at a new angle.

Never one to believe that feeling "called" means turning off my God-given brain or making wild assumptions that the easiest or most obvious path must be *the* path, I went into research mode. That month I spent all of my free time researching, reading, emailing, and looking at DVDs of children. I so clearly remember the day I filled in an online order for "more information" from one of those agencies.

I remember March of 2009 distinctly. I secretly purchased a few, very small, things. For a future child. Very small. Nothing of note. No clothes. But a few visual reminders tucked into the back of my office closet. A stuffed animal. I remember opening the closet and looking at him when I needed a reminder that someday, I would be a parent.

This little blog hadn't even been born yet. But I was reading a friend's adoption blog, and her friend's blogs, and her friend's blogs. On our nightly walks around the lake with the dogs, I would feed J tiny bits of information. Tiny tiny bits. He wasn't quite ready yet.

The rest is history. You and I all know the rest. And for posterity it is all recorded on our original blog: http://www.at-the-watershed.blogspot.com/2009/07/watershed.html (my first post, July 2009, on the old blog.)

Now, here we are, together. You, me, this often neglected blog.
J, Ariam and I.
My utterly fantastic circle of Ethiopian adoption friends who have come to mean the world to me both in person and online.

And that brings me to July of 2011. In July, a week after Ariam's 2nd birthday party, we sat at the playground watching her bravely slide down the biggest twirly slide all by herself. And in a less than 10 minute conversation agreed that we would do it again in a heartbeat. All the pain of searching for Ariam's first mother (a post for another time), all of the heartache of infertility and figuring out what to do about it (nothing), all of the questions about ethics in adoption, all of the time and money. We still wanted to do it again. Because we are selfish like that. Ariam has made us both insanely happy. And we want more. More happiness. More laughter. And we want her to have somebody to grow up with.

I immersed myself back into learning. Learning more about domestic adoption. Continuing the fight to find Ariam's truth/first family in Ethiopia. Asking myself and others hard questions about adoption systems, both in the U.S. and in other countries we were considering.

A couple of months ago we decided that we were ready to move forward. This month, every Wednesday, we have our homestudy visits. We've been fingerprinted. We've started collecting all of those endless pieces of paper that, when put together, tell the story of our lives: medicals, bank statements, taxes, loans, marriage certificate, birth certificates, employment letters, references, psych evaluations, and on and on.

No tears. No hoarding of secret baby clothes or toys. No overreading of blogs. Just a peace that comes with knowing that we did this once and we can do it again. The peace of knowing that we've done our homework, we are prepared, Ariam is ready, and at some point, hopefully in 2012 or 2013, we will be the parents of 2.

But with my relatively new zen attitude has come a new realization that, while I loved to share our journey to Ariam here on this blog, I'm not so sure I can share to the same extent this time around.

It worries me. That he or she will someday read here and believe he/she was less wanted just because mama's learned to reign it in a bit...

Hopefully not though. Hopefully he/she will know that all the same excitement, yearning, and love applies the second time around. It's just a very different process moving from 10 years of aching to be a parent to adopting again while parenting an almost 3 year old!

At some point I will be ready to share about where we are adopting from. And I'm absolutely positive I'll be quoting some good Sara Groves lyrics (because obviously she writes her music to coorespond exactly to my adoption emotions!)  In the meantime, thanks for reading.

~A