Due Date Blues

My pregnancies were easy… no morning sickness, no elevated sugar, no bed rest… Other than the discomfort each time of having a humongo belly filled with a dancing night owl, pregnancy was good to me. And the best part about it was that there was a guaranteed time line… a due date that most doctors won’t let you go very far past. My babies were all early birds by 12-16 days, sweet things!

Oh but adoption is so different… you start off in control of almost everything. You decide when you will “get pregnant”. You decide the sex of your child, its health status, its age, even what color eyes it has if you want to go that far…

Soon you realize one thing is completely out of your control: the time line… there is no due date. An adoption can go on and on and on and on… mountains of paperwork and appointments…then waiting to take a trip over, maybe two trips, sometimes three or four trips to a foreign land where you are desperately trying to figure out what it will take to get the judge to sign those papers…

In the beginning you believe you have some control over the timing. You scheme and plan and add up the weeks for this or that and you create a false due date in your mind. Mine was set for late July.

But then a notary makes a tiny mistake, a town official refuses to cooperate, a set of papers is apostilled together rather than individually, your translator gets sick, your facilitator’s workload gets backed up…

Before you know it, it is August 1 and nobody is offering you a c-section.

Patience, I tell myself… after all, as Sylvia Plath put it, “(I’ve) boarded the train there’s no getting off.” And I know that eventually it will pull into the station where my little darlings are waiting for me.

(To all my friends on this same train, take heart… before you know it we will be celebrating together at TGIF’s)