When it Rains it Pours (and we sure need it)

Here in Colorado, we've been enduring a drought for years, with this winter's precipitation levels not expected to provide any relief in the foreseeable future. Our reservoirs are down to about 65% of where they should be currently. This is the time when we hope to see deep snow pack in the mountains, but unfortunately, on our trip to the slopes a week ago, we were skiing a natural slalom course through exposed rocks and patches of dry ground. The anxious anticipation of what's to come is pulsing through the farming, ranching, recreational sports and gardening communities. It's an impatient time with our hopeful eyes ever-searching for that moisture icon in the weather reports.

Likewise, some families in our adoption group ended the year on an emotionally dried up note. There hadn't been any news from the agency about new birth mothers for those of us hoping to add to our family through this course. Multiple couples expressed that they just needed to see that something positive could happen for the waiting couples rather than the disappointments of the last half of 2012. It appeared that the start of 2013 was going to feel as scorched and hope-deprived as the desolate situation we wrote about earlier this month.

A few months back, one of the women in our group shared her story of an emotional visualization session she had just experienced. She was meditating and focusing on nothing in particular when the vision of multiple babies came raining down in her mind. This hadn't happened to her before and she was sharing the hope it inspired in her to stay positive and welcome the coming months with optimism. It might sound peculiar to some of you, but she is the one who is now a new mom. The additional good news for the rest of us is that she envisioned multiple babies...so we wait with open hearts!



We learned that the agency we're working with placed a baby with another waiting couple from a previous group in recent weeks as well. Last week, three good friends shared the exciting news that they are now pregnant. It certainly feels like there is something happening out there in the drive to keep the species alive.

And, although it won't be enough to help the state's situation in the long term, it snowed through last night and we woke up to a moisture-laden slog of a yard.

We're still in a personal drought for now since we don't have any news to share about our family's unique wait. However, I'm clinging to the idea that they changed the term from Global Warming to Climate Change to imply that it's not just hot and dry conditions, but also abundant moisture that we can expect in these uncertain, changing times. Hopefully, the precipitation of babies will pick up again soon in the same fashion that El Niño increases the depth of a good snow storm in Colorado.

As if trying to contribute to the return of the hopeful sense of creating what we want to happen, our hens picked today to start laying again after their winter moult. Yay, eggs! Though it would be a stretch to use these unfertilized eggs to also represent the coming of new life, they will certainly be added to the hope that is back to happily sustaining our own.

There's Hope

It's not my news to share, so I'll be short on details, but we did learn that the first of the seven couples in our group was placed with a beautiful (we've seen the photographic evidence on this one) baby boy last week. We couldn't be more relieved that this seemingly unattainable dream really can come true. Sure we have heard of stories like theirs before, but the reality for those of us who are just a year into this journey was looking dismal as we dragged the group along through the muck of our emotional 2012. Luckily, 2013 has already turned out to be much more positive for the couples waiting to welcome home new additions to their families through adoption with our agency.

I've wondered how this news would make us feel when it finally came. The beauty of our group is that we really do feel each other's devastating losses and tremendous gains. Josh and I have been so lovingly supported through the last six months, but still I only hoped I could be happy for the couple who first shared this exciting news after what we have been through. I'm thrilled now to know that I am truly elated for them!

All at the same time, I feel so lucky to be able to share in the joy of our group members as their families expand to more than two and I feel a little pang of contempt towards fate that it doesn't go this smoothly for all of us. It's not envy I'm writing about. It's a knowledge that each of the couples in our group is deserving of the most peaceful, loving and genuinely real journey into parenthood that ever was. It's an understanding through gritted teeth that it doesn't always happen that way. And, it's a full heart of appreciation that now we see that it can.

The combination of the timely meeting of a new friend (see previous post) and a decent enough memory to remember the Tiffany I know and love in myself has resulted in some positive feelings today. It's been a while since I could describe my state of being as contentment, but today that is where I am. No promises that you won't read more frustration in the future as this roller coaster ride continues up, and then down sometimes, but today is a half full day! And that is what I'll be grateful for tonight as we lay down to sleep.

Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COE6YHIK-pU

The Sage

I don't know if any of you have ever been so lucky to be aware that you were meeting someone who was truly a sage in your life. They exude wisdom and calm, confident judgement. They seem to appear at just the right time for their experience to speak directly to your wavering convictions. If you're wondering about your next bold move or how to absorb the results of the last one, they seem to have the answers. They are not asked for guidance; they offer this sagely advice indirectly, but so on point. The weight of whatever is preoccupying your mind and soul is lifted and life just starts to make sense. There is a comfort in knowing that others have gone before you and that you are on your right path. It might feel like a happen chance meeting at the time, but as you look back at all of the circumstances that planted them in front of you, it becomes as clear as a distant train whistle through an otherwise silent predawn in winter. This is who you were meant to connect with and the messages are acutely relevant.

Have you ever experienced that sort of serendipity when meeting a new friend?

Lately, I have.

Stranger Danger (way up here from the top of my soap box)

Despite having nothing to report regarding progress towards expanding our family, our minds are still focused on what our life will look like when our youngest members finally join us. After all, we are in many ways pregnant. I don't know any expectant parents who don't spend some time each day trying to learn about how they'll shepherd a young mind through this crazy world. With the type of news that bombards us each day, it's terrifying to consider what we're up against. I received this reminder of one of the many threats from one of my dads the other day and thought I'd pass it along.

~

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger... he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

 

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

 

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home - not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our long time visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol but the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly, and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

 

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked...And NEVER asked to leave.

 

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first.

 

Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures. We just call him "TV." 

~

Most of you know that our exposure to "popular" culture is pretty limited, by our own doing. We enjoy what we enjoy and it rarely involves a trend. Sure, in some circles our addiction to Downton Abbey is well-understood, but not to most of you. And, the only news we watch is the News Hour on PBS since they don't scream at us, or at each other. Occasionally, we'll check in with the weather in the morning before work just to give us a fighting chance to don the right coat in these subzero temperatures.

It's not that we begrudge the choices of others to watch what they want, but it does seem like people forget what they generally stand for when it comes time to turn on the TV. We feel that it's important for our actions to back up our values, so our TV and movie selections are pretty tame. It brings a bit of relief to think that our kids will skip some exposure to the TV drama and just soak in the drama of real life, which is generally entertaining enough to captivate us.

Of course, when they're older and buying their own movie tickets, we might have to concede. After all, I wasted a lot of money on gruesome tales at the box office before I realized that real life was scarier. We'll do our best to give them a foundation of understanding what is really important and then let them make their own decisions. I think this is what most parents really intend to do, but we have to make sure not to include the box in the corner, or hanging on the wall these days, as a co-parent speaking on our behalf when we're not in the room.

Imagination Breakthrough

When Josh started a new job in San Francisco after we moved back from Peace Corps, they warned him that newbies (uh hem, and their spouses) had to stand up and sing a song at the annual holiday party. It was months away, but they were already talking about it. Any song. In front of everyone. Individually. A Capella. Surely they were joking in some sort of threatening tradition to haze new employees. As the party approached, Josh would come home with reminders that had been issued about the singing requirement for both of us. It seemed they weren't joking after all.

It turned out that the other newbies came up with the genius plan to pick a song everyone knew and after the first note the entire group would join them, building camaraderie and making the subject fool feel immediately at ease. Their humiliation lasted for maybe one verse and was a group effort. But I didn't think of that plan.

No, taking the threat literally, as is my norm, I figured I had to do this alone. I felt I had nailed this one by picking a song that I knew well, but didn't need to sound good. A song no one would know so they couldn't criticize if I was off a little. A Yosemite camper song from my childhood. Idiot. I stood, took a deep breath and out came a confident sounding...

I'm a hayseed

Full of seaweed

And my ears are made of leather

And they flop in windy weather

Gosh oh hemlock

I'm tough as a pine knot

I'm a camper, can't you see-ee-ee?!

 

I'm sure that when I learned this as a kid, and then sang it repeatedly for years, that there were accompanying moves to go with each line. I'm also quite sure the moves were not a simple march in place, which is what I did (at age 30) when put on the spot with all of Josh's new coworkers staring at me in disbelief that I had missed the opportunity to draw them in with the likes of some ubiquitous replay of a hit from the '80s. At least they were nice to me afterwards. The kind of nice that probably made Josh feel like he'd married the girl who got into Peace Corps by somehow hiding that she was just a touch off her rocker.

 

Luckily, after years of talented performances in front of people with a high school garage band (yes, there are videos), Josh had no problem standing up and belting one out. I made a special request and he hit it note for note. He definitely managed to silence the crowd, but the difference was that he was serious and could actually sing. They loved it!

 

http://youtu.be/EhprEdIDVnI?t=1m24s

 

Last night, I found myself humming Josh's corporate office singing debut. When I traced the thought back, I was pleased to find that I was imagining a baby coming home to us. This might sound like something obvious to you. I mean I write about our wait and we've shared our ups and downs along this journey. You would expect that it's all I daydream about.

 

Unfortunately, lately that hasn't been the case. A lot of less hopeful thoughts have crept into my daydreams and time has been spent reliving some emotional challenges from recent years. A sort of resignation that this will never happen has clouded most of our thoughts. But, when that was cleared away for whatever reason last night, I was left with the sweet image of things going right and focused on imagining that it will happen. I experienced a light, airy, comfortable feeling around our journey for the first time in a while. So, this post is dedicated to those of you who have been waiting for a glimmer of hope to creep back in. It's beginning to push through again and imagining the future can sure be fun.

Disaster Averted

What's meant to be, will be. That's what "they" say, and that is what all of you have told us. We've even reiterated it to ourselves. As we have acknowledged, we accept that what will happen, will happen. We don't argue that. It's been a relief to learn that no amount of positive thinking and burned-to-the-base candles of hope could make a criminal in California place her baby with us, nor a birth mother in Colorado decide to do the same. The relief comes in knowing that an inadequate amount of those same positive feelings would not prevent the dream from coming true. It would be terrible to believe that we just didn't hope hard enough. Nope, it just wasn't meant to be.

However, it was easy to find meaning in each promising lead to the growth of our family. The story of our conception was particularly significant for us, relating to Winter Solstice, a full moon and a complete lunar eclipse. Our first match with a birth mother would've placed a baby with us at a perfect time for work and holidays and a "gestational period" of 9 months after we started with the agency. The second match came to us on our anniversary and would've placed a baby in our arms in time for the winter holidays, which are always so focused on family. It turns out, there is always meaning to be found when the eager are looking to find it.

Speaking of seemingly meaningful trends, my Colorado parents volunteer with the Red Cross and respond to national disasters by delivering food and supplies to those in need. In the summer of 2012, they were working the Colorado wildfires disaster relief program when we found out about match one. It was during their next disaster relief effort in New York after hurricane Sandy when we learned about match two. When they got called again to serve around Christmas, I suggested that the third time might be the charm. My aunt wisely pointed out that my parents learning about these matches while working a disaster relief effort seemed only to lead to disasters for us as well. She had a point. They arrived home today without our having been matched, so we know that the spell is broken. If there even was a spell cast.

It seems obvious that perfect timing, special occasions and clear signs from the universe don't seem to make a match turn into a placement for us. I'm hoping that the next time we're called, one of us is on the toilet, or I'm fighting with garden netting, or Josh is up to his elbows in scooter grease. I want as few symbols of perfection involved as possible. It will be considered perfect when a baby is in our nursery, and not just in our hearts and dreams.

One Year Closer

One year ago today, we met with our agency for the first time. We drove up to Ft. Collins, sweaty-palmed, anxious, curious, excited and with a conviction that we had spent our last holiday season analyzing various options to grow our family. We had made a decision! We left that meeting ready to sign our application and begin the long process of becoming legally eligible to adopt children. If you've been following along, you know most of what happened next and each day since.

Like every other prospective adoptive couple we've known, one of our first questions that day was "How long should we expect to wait before we're parents?" On January 2, 2012, the answer was that we should plan on two years, but that it could be sooner.

With absolutely no control on affecting the outcome, we set out to do everything we could to end up on the "sooner" side of that timeline. Two years seemed like a long ways off. If any of that two years was due to the length of time it takes to complete the required paperwork, we'd stay up late, writing our life stories over and over in different formats to get it done as soon as possible. If any of that time was eaten up by the lengthy process to create our profile book, we'd spend endless hours into the night putting the final touches on our descriptions of our families, friends and our lives together so that it was ready, again, ASAP. Nothing on our end would cause the delay. "Ticking biological clock" analogies aside, we were just tired of our journey and we were impatient. We wanted to be sure that everything that was in our control was ready so that we knew we had done all that we could to make this new decision take hold. Then, we waited.

When we consider the course this path can take for some, we admit that we didn't wait long to get called the first time. When we got the call only two months after becoming eligible, I cried tears of joy. When that fell apart, we didn't wait long to get the second call either. That time, I cried tears of fear. However, we've spent the year waiting, with no result except extreme disappointment and some stomach-wrenching emotions. So we're still waiting, only with the added feeling of being put in our place for being so ambitious. We feel like the painfully stubbed toes along the path we've taken this year have mellowed our enthusiasm a bit. We're still hanging in there, just with a little less anticipation, and a lot more emotional caution.

Depending on the distinct feeling occurring at the exact split second when we're asked about how we're doing, we're either in a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty kind of mood. Regardless of how we're feeling, half of what was in the glass is gone, and that is worth noting. A year has passed and that means that we're one year closer than we were last year to growing our family through adoption. And to answer you perpetual optimists, now that it's past, no it doesn't seem like the time flew by. We must not have been having fun.

We look towards the next half and hope that the end (and consequential beginning of something great) draws nearer to us than next January. One year behind us tells us nothing about the time that's left, but waiting couples will cling to stated average wait times with the same breathless, eyes-clinched-shut kind of hope as an Olympian awaiting the judges' scores after a performance they feel good about. The confidence in the achievement is tempered only by the fact that others are in control of the outcome. And, it's a stifling anticipation sometimes.

Here's looking ahead to "lucky" '13!