You say goodbye and I say hello

J and  I just arrived home from spending a very extended period of time with AJ in Haiti.

When I arrived in Haiti in July I had every intention of staying until I crossed through the immigration line in the U.S. with him, proudly wearing our Colorado t-shirts, hopefully by end of this month.

But things don't always turn out the way we have planned. It became clear that AJ's passport and visa would not be ready in July or August.

J left Haiti first. So it was up to me on Tuesday afternoon to haul my 55 pound suitcase out to the van and wrap my arms around my distracted little boy with the frown on his face. I told him I would be back.

I didn't think I would cry. I honestly thought that I've cried every tear available to me since January and have not a single drop left.

But when he started crying I cried. I cried for him and for us. So many hellos and goodbyes. So much time passed since we first met. So many hurdles we've had to overcome and so many still to go. Confusing for a 2 year old.

I cried for the pure unfairness of life. And for what he will think when I am gone. And how he will view me when I show up again, randomly, in his life at a future date.

If I'm honest I am still crying. Something happened today that just set me off. It's interesting isn't it how when you are holding back one big set of tears, something can sneak in and trigger them from an unrelated angle?

I wonder sometimes how many times we can all pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and keep going forward. How many times can I wipe away the tears in the shower and keep a stoic face when friends ask how the adoption is going. How many times can we go to Haiti and not bring AJ home?

I wonder how long Ariam can deal with this - the tension, the anxiety, the not knowing and waiting. I wonder how many more midnight phone calls I can field from other adoptive families using our former organization who are terrified for their children. How long can I keep up the strength to listen and support and encourage?

I guess we just keep walking forward. Putting one foot in front of the other. I'm going to try to blog more. It helps. Most of the time it is easier to write about all of this than it is to talk about it. Thanks for being here with me.

~A


AJ the morning before I left. He's getting so big.

(I put him in the Colorado t-shirt that was meant for his homecoming.)

Adoption Truths Part V: Sometimes things fall apart and you have to ask for help

Update - we made our goal of $8,500. Anything given over that amount will be put towards the cost of mediation and our legal fes. Thank you!

When our friends at Project Hopeful asked last week if they could intervene and help us raise the funds we need to bring AJ home from Haiti, I was nervous.

I don't want anyone to think for a minute that I write this blog as a lead up to asking for money.

But truthfully we need your help.

We need to reproduce all of our adoption documents and our son's passport in Haiti.

"WHAT's that?" you ask. You've never heard of this situation?! Neither had we. How could a family be completely done with their adoption, legal parents of a child, adoption fully paid for and yet unable to bring him home?

If you are like me, you probably need the long story before you make a decision about donating your money. And that is completely legitimate. There are a lot of fundraisers out there and a lot of people in need asking you to fund their cause.

You can read more of the story HERE under our Fundraising Tab.

We hope that, after reading our story, you will support us for this simple reason: we will not sign a gag order to protect our former adoption "agency" and their facilitator in return for the easy release of our documents.

We feel that signing a gag order would NOT protect other children, Haitian first families or prospective adoptive parents in the future. 

We have decided that our discomfort asking for financial help, the work of reproducing AJ's adoption documents and the extended time it is taking to get him home is worth the freedom to tell the truth.

Our full story will be part of the Adoption Truth series which you can find here. Please keep coming back to check for updates. It is taking time to write and requiring significant prayer and mentorship from close friends and family.

Thank you for anything you can give. 

Our first meeting...March 2012.

Together again after a year, March 2013

~A

* "Agency" is in quotes because it turns out that the group we signed a contract with was unlicensed to operate as an adoption agency. We did not know this when we signed on. It was put in writing to us that the "agency" was licensed.

Adoption Truth Part IV: Pressed on every side

we were pressed on every side

full of fear and troubled thoughts

for good reason we carried heavy hearts... (Sara Groves)

For good reason we carried heavy hearts.
That is how I feel. Heavy.
But also free.
The juxtaposition of heavy and free don't sit well with me.
Shouldn't free feel light?

This post is my attempt to shed some of the weight.

...........

Adoption Truths Part IV: Pressed on every side

We are in a situation where it is impossible to please everyone.
I love to make people happy and to please others. But the older I get the more I have come to realize that being a people pleaser is at unfortunate odds with being a truth-teller.

Watershed moment... I can only tell our truth with as much wisdom and sincerity as possible. But I cannot be responsible for how it lands in other people's hearts and whether or not it is "pleasing."

This post is my attempt to put to words the ways I feel pressed, pressed to please. Hoping to find personal freedom from this pressure simply by recognizing it. "Hello pressure, I see you. And now I write this to release you."

When an adoptive parent finds herself telling hard truths about her adoption several things seem to happen. (Generalizing here from a very unscientific observation of the adoption blogging community over the last 4 years.)

1. Close friends and family rally. They pray and cheer and hold you close. But you worry about their longevity. They see you changing. They may suggest that you are putting yourself in danger for a "cause." Can they hold on and stick with you long term? Nobody really wants to be left hanging without resolution forever. Family and friends don't really know what to do or say. You find yourself tucking in, hiding out. Because it is hard. You are not fun. Truth telling sucks a lot of the fun and life out of you.

2. Adoptive families who have been through hard times and lived their own hard stories quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) share your blog, press like, and leave long comments sharing their pain, frustration, and fear. They want you to to press forward. Say it all. Call people out. They hope to God that you can accomplish something that they couldn't. Maybe you will finally be the family that doesn't sign the gag order offered by the agency. You feel responsible as this group's newest vocal representative.

3. Families in process or families who have not experienced difficult stories feel awkward. Sometimes they feel attacked. Sometimes they feel like you are saying they should not have adopted or should not be adopting. Sometimes they extrapolate that your warnings and concerns are actually sweeping anti-adoption statements. Not all, but some, pull away. Some scramble to reduce your credibility. (In our case we've had people say that we are "not real Christians", "frauds", and that we are "crazy.")

"Families that speak out against agencies and tell stories of fraud in their processes and want to warn other families looking to adopt or who are in process are consistently shut down. They are shunned. They are told they are mood killers. They lose real life friends and Facebook friends. They are kicked off of support groups. They are asked to stop talking because they could ruin adoption for everyone else.
But I want it to be clear: families who beg for someone, anyone to listen to their story are not ruining anyone's adoption. It may feel like they are threatening something dear to the heart. Something prayed about, stressed about and let's not talk about the savings and check writing. But really, they are not threatening adoption. The agencies they are trying to chuck a stone at, like David against Goliath, who participate in child trafficking, or forge documents, or don't investigate "abandoned" children's history, or turn a blind eye to poor practices, they are the ones that are ruining adoption." (Staci from Scooping it Up)

4. Adult adoptees. Some, not all, begin to read your blog. Maybe they have read along from the beginning but many are new to you. They are reading because a post went viral. They cheer that someone is standing in their camp. That an adoptive family is advocating for truth, reform, first families and giving voice to adopted children who will grow into adults.

You begin to feel that you owe it to them, almost as projections of your current children's future adult selves, to stay the course. You don't want to let them down. You become scared that they will be disappointed in you. You wonder if they will still be cheering if you end up completing your adoption.

5. The folks who just think adoption is a load of crap. They are out there and they have some valid reasons. They often also have extremely hard stories. They may love one post of yours but hate another. They are often anonymous and while their comments have truths they bite so hard that you have no idea how to engage with them.

6. The faith community. I am part of this community and maybe you are as well. Many in this community do not like public strife and do not want to see anyone question a Christian adoption agency. Some feel that any problems between professed "Christians" should be worked out behind closed doors. Some do not want to recognize that there are people who masquerade under religious "Christian" language but have bad intentions and/or poor practices. You need this community more than ever but it no longer feels safe.

Recently on a Haitian adoption forum filled with Christian adoptive parents someone demanded that I provide "proof/evidence" of my concerns. And then I was kicked off.


"Here is the biggest problem with proof and details: adoption lies and fraud and corruption don't just involve adoptive parents. At the heart is a child or children. And having major or heck, even minor ethical issues in an adoption story is a little like having your child be abused. If you come out against the perpetrator (who may be popular, powerful and big or even really nice) your child's story, the details of their pain is now fodder for the Internets to criticize, dismiss. To seek justice, to warn others, to appease people and convince them "it's true" you essentially must throw your family under the bus and expose yourself and your child to ugliness.

That is the reason most families stay silent. That is the reason many people don't report abuse: it is hard to prove, it can feel like shame, it can harm our kids more than they've already been harmed.... How do you prove to people that fraud happens and that agencies are either complicit or know about it/suspect it but have personal philosophies that justify the fraud? How do you convince people without specifics that throw a kid's privacy in the garbage?" (Staci from Scooping it up) 


What to do? Pressed on every side. There is no way to win and absolutely no way to please everyone.

"There's redemption in confession and there's freedom in the light. I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid...."

I'm going to keep saying that until I feel it. And I am going to keep writing until there is nothing left to hide. I am going to do my best. Thank you to those who choose to stay with me in this Adoption Truths series. I know it isn't light reading. But thank you.

go on and ask me anything
what do you need to know
I'm not holding on to anything
I'm not willing to let go of
to be free, to be free

it's a sweet, sweet thing
standing here with you and nothing to hide
light shining down to our very insides
sharing our secrets, bearing our souls,
helping each other come clean

secrets and cyphers
there's no good way to hide
there's redemption in confession
and freedom in the light
I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid
(Sara Groves)

~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