Waiting for a message

Our family has been in the adoption process since about October.  We already have four beautiful biological children but we wanted to share our family and our love with a child that otherwise would be without a family.

We’ve been through the process of deciding domestic or international, country of origin, and agency.  We’ve completed an in depth application with lots of questions about our motivation and heart as parents and as people.  We’ve spent hours with a social worker, hours completing a workbook and hours taking online educational courses on adoption.  Lastly, we’ve completed our dossier.

Well…almost.

As part of the background checks, Ethiopia requires a background check from every country that we may have lived since we were eighteen.  I happened to have lived in the Republic of Panama between the ages of 17-20, twenty five years ago.

In case you are not current on your Panamanian history, the government in place twenty five years ago no longer exists.

Fortunately, the US Embassy in Panama was able to declare that my background is clear and they promised to send us a letter stating that fact, about a week ago.

Now we wait.  It’s only been a week, but in the age of email and instant communication, it feels as if they sent the letter via a bottle tossed into the ocean for the waves to carry it here.

I know there will be lots more waiting as we go through this process.  Once the dossier is ready, we’ll need to wait for our agency to approve it.  After the agency approval, we need to wait for Ethiopia to approve the paperwork and approve us a fit parents.  Then we wait for a child to be referred to us.  And finally, we wait again for the Ethiopian courts to process the adoption.

We obviously had plenty of waiting with all of our biological children as well.  However, I could place my hand on my wife’s stomach and feel our child.  Our new child is thousands of miles away.  The wait is longer when you can’t see what is happening.

It’s like standing on the beach, looking out into the vast ocean, waiting for an expected message in a bottle.