A Hard Week

I've been MIA recently with very good reason. First, I was really struggling with The Wait as illustrated by my last post.  I really didn't want to subject the blogsphere to my whining, but I also really had nothing else to say, nor did I feel much like writing anyway.

Emotionally, this has been an extremely hard week. The Wait had me in a bad place and then the USCIS struck *again*. Monday we received a letter requesting yet MORE info and an addendum to the freakin' addendum because our social work left out ONE word that was implied by everything else!! Seriously, I think they have it in for us! Our poor social worker is about ready to hurt them, but I *think* that will be taken care of soon.

Then it came. The Call. "A possible match. A child for your family. Are you interested? " "YES, YES, 100x YES!!!"
But as I watched the photos load on my email, I knew this child had a condition not listed in the file, one far more severe. So begin the emotional race to confirm with our doctor my suspicion and to try to research what this new diagnosis would mean for this child and our family. The answer: no way to know for sure until the child is here the true severity. Certainly years and years of therapy (some of them daily), possible surgeries, and no certainty of outcome. I have no doubt that this child will make a wonderful addition to some family. However with much soul searching we do not feel that we are the best family for this little one due to already have two young children in our home. We do not think it would be fair to this little one or to Miriam and Evan. So this AM, I made the difficult call to our agency.

All that said, this was a very hard decision and I write about it in part so that others who walk this road will know they are not alone. I doubted myself. We had always believed whatever referral God sent we would accept, certainly that is what we would do if we gave birth to this child. I looked at the pictures and did not see my child. But was that just my selfishness? Was that just me not wanting a child who would require SO much time and energy and change to our family life? Was God trying to tell me to stretch in a different direction than I had planned? Certainly, I felt for this child. I want this child to have a family. To have medical care and therapy. To be able to reach their full potential. It was so hard.

Finally, Brian said that if I was really convicted that this was what God wanted he was game, but otherwise he didn't think we were the best family. Then I realized that I felt different about this child than I did when I saw Miriam and Evan's referrals. With Miriam, I knew she was mine for the moment the phone rang. Never a doubt, never a question. With Evan, we were not even looking for his adoption... he was our miracle, fall-in-your-lap, never-happens-that-way adoption. I didn't *know* when I saw Evan's pictures and info that he WAS my son. But he pulled at my heart in a way this little one did not. And perhaps more importantly, I was ready for anything with Evan. We were told that he had been evaluated as mildly cognitively delayed, severely speech delayed, and severely physically delayed. But I KNEW without a doubt that he was fine and even if he wasn't, I KNEW we would be ok. I did not feel that with this little one.

But WHY would God send us this file? That question continued to bug me. This morning I received two possible answers.

1. I am perhaps the only waiting parent with our agency who could have looked at that photo and IMMEDIATELY knew the correct diagnosis.  I'm not sure our wonderful doctor would have known right away if I hadn't pointed her in the right direction (this is a very rare condition, one she has never even seen). How *I* came to be able to recognize it is completely a God thing. So perhaps we got this referral so that the correct diagnosis could be identified and our agency can find a family who is ready for that diagnosis. Perhaps we saved another family from the REAL pain of falling in love with this child and THEN learning the truth and having to say no. Or even worse, disrupting the adoption in China when they saw the truth.
2. Perhaps this is yet again God's way of buying time so our little one can make her way to our agency. I don't know. All I know is we are still looking for our little XinXin. Hang on baby, Momma is looking for you!