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!