We have been fortunate to get more and more plugged into the adoptive world. As we do so, the reoccurring analogy we hear from just about everyone discussing the process is comparing the process to a rollercoaster ride.
With all the twists and turns and ups and downs and highs and lows we have experienced in this process, we understand why it’s such a popular comparison.
Most people think that once you get the initial paperwork for home study, and dossier done, that you are over the hardest part. I naively thought this way myself, and although the more physically demanding piece lay behind, the wait is the emotionally challenging part. Which for me has proven harder.
Each country has it’s own quirks with how they process referrals (basically, giving out of kids), and China is no different. They have what is called a shared database, that mainly agencies have access to. This database contains all the children that are “adoptable” from China in it. While most agencies could just pull from this database to match families, what happens more often is matching through orphanage partnerships.
Agencies partner with an orphanage, and help fund their needs, and that agency gets all of that orphanage’s files to match with families.
So in China at least, sometimes bigger is better. Because the larger the agency, the more likely it is to have more orphanage partnerships, which often results in more files to give out.
Our agency is severely backlogged on families waiting for young girls, as several agencies are right now. If you are interested in doing a special needs adoption for a boy in China, you could quite feasibly complete the process in under a year!
Since we have become aware about increasing wait times with our agency (we are looking at probably another 6 months wait), we have decided to explore the other options to get matched with a child. The options include transferring to another agency after being matched with one of the children they have available (although you loose a significant amount of money in this process), finding a file that is about to be returned to the shared list by an agency, so they are willing to send the file to your agency (lots of risk/wait, stalking sites, competition, and usually more intimidating special needs), or watching for kids that are on the shared list database that China has and are available to be matched (usually older, more intense needs, and also means you will more than likely travel on your own and not with a group or place your agency has experience).
Obviously, the options aren’t great. And we have spent a fair amount of time on each option, and learned the downsides to each route the hard way.
We have had files we looked at, and got attached to, that ended up not working out for a variety of reasons. And that has been really hard. There have been many days when I wanted nothing more than to walk away from this process because my heart felt like it couldn’t take the ache anymore.
The international adoption process will push your faith and trust in God to whole new extremes.
So we are praying about how to proceed. Do we stalk the advocacy sites, and try to find a match outside of our agency (incredibly emotionally taxing and time consuming), or do we sit and wait on our agency? We have had some challenging circumstances with our agency of late, so that option doesn’t seem the most appealing either. And we are weary of the process. When we signed up for international adoption we were under the impression we would have our daughter home in about a year. It’s been about a year since we submitted our first dossier, and we are over the wait. We are over paperwork, and emails and money and stress. We want our girl HOME.
When we submitted dossier to China, I prayed that we would be matched with a child by the end of February. A year of waiting seemed like enough, and with the rate that China was moving, waiting 3 months after having DTC, seemed reasonable. I’m still holding on to that prayer, not sure of how it could come to fruition, but knowing all things are possible in Him.
We are on this crazy rollercoaster ride, with all it’s ups and downs; knowing as much as we want to get off, it’s right where we are supposed to be. So we continue to hang on, trusting in the one who is operating it all, and that He knows where we are headed and how we are going to get there.