The Paperwork Part

Hello lovely people,

A quick update before I take us all the way back to September to fill you in on the valley of the shadow of death of adoption paperwork. Last week I mentioned in my social media stories that it had been a wild week with our adoption process and it had been. We have been active, meaning we could be shown an expectant mother profile to say yes to so we could be considered as adoptive parents to her baby, since late January. Since going active in January we had not received any profiles and our adoption agency is lovely and had filled us on why this is but needless to say the silence has been heavy at times and expectant the entirety of the time.

Well, last week out of the blue, our social worker sent us our first expectant mother profile to view and within less than 24 hours we said yes to be shown to this mother as an adoptive parent option and the mother chose another family. It was an emotional rollercoaster to say the least and I have never had butterflies that intense in my entire life. After it was over we were able to decompress and talk but it was quite the day. Our agency prepared us that typically this happens a handful of times before you actually match with a mom (meaning we say yes to her and then she chooses us for her baby) but living it was quite the reality check for my heart. About 24 hours later to top it off we found we had not received a grant we had applied to a few months ago that I personally was really banking on getting. It was a disappointing week in a lot of ways. Yet, we’re still here, our baby is still out there, and we are incredibly crazily hopeful still that we will get to meet them soon.

And now, let’s go back to September.

Us the night we officially started the process (it felt similar to when you find out your pregnant by peeing on a stick and seeing those two pink lines. It all becomes very real and exciting but you have no idea what you are getting yourself into.).

I wanted to transport ya’ll back just a little further into our September through January part of this process. It was the dreaded paperwork, yes, but there are other things that go into that time as well. We had to have physicals for every person in our family. We had to have background checks done on us and any person who would be regularly watching our baby without us home. We went and got fingerprinted. James and I each wrote a 10 page autobiography (no joke, due to James and I being the perfectionists we are we took about 3 weeks on this alone.) After this part was done we had the home study process. During that time there are a few weeks of waiting without paperwork but instead of being home free I put all my time into making our adoption book (the book that expectant mothers see when choosing a family for their baby) and making sure that within those 20 or so pages that mom could see as clear a picture of our family as possible. Then after all of that, we went active and we had the opportunity to make our webpage on the adoption site for possible adoptive mothers to view which topped us off with another few weeks of writing and crafting our lives into paragraphs. All in all this took us about 5 months (which is about middle of the road for adoptive families but apparently pretty good when you already have kids, which of course made me weirdly proud.)

So how do you do this with 2 kids, 2 jobs and the hopes of not strangling your spouse every day you sit down to write? You don’t! Not without some sacrifices. We had just moved to a new city and started looking at new churches and truly felt like if we were going to get through this adoption process we wouldn’t be plugging into a small group at our church for the first time in our 10 years of marriage. We said no to nights out, we asked our parents for date nights where we spent all our time doing adoption paperwork instead. For my birthday, our parents took our kids for the day so we could celebrate and I begged James to go to a coffee shop and work on adoption paperwork all day. My husband, complied and I don’t think I’ve ever loved any birthday gift more than the gift he gave me that day as our butts fell asleep and our coffees grew diluted at Redefined Coffee as we typed away for hours.

We had some break-downs a few times during this process. Our therapist, who has done both individual and couples counseling with us over the past few years, called it pretty perfectly when we started this process.

He told me, “Molly, you charge ahead and like to walk in front when it comes to life. James is an ambler, content to walk at his own pace. You can either spend the next few months taking off, leaving him in the dust and trying to drag him along behind you or you can try to meet him in the middle of this.”

His advice was to slow down a bit, breathe, not rush to the finish line like you are literally on fire. Did I heed his wisdom? Yeah, I did, it just took me til about mid November after we were both so burned out we weren’t really functioning well anymore. Around that time my dearest husband asked if instead of doing adoption work every night we had off if we could like maybe actually watch a show for once: “Can we do anything other than adoption stuff tonight?”, may have been his exact words. Thankfully, by God’s grace, I said yes and we started taking some breathers in between adoption homework nights which were desperately needed.

All that to say, we got there baby. After 5 months or so of consistent paperwork, writing, signing forms, making appointments we got there! Then came what I thought would be the hardest part: the waiting. And to my surprise it hasn’t been…but that’s a story for next week.

I wanted to dedicate each of my blogs to a few people who have helped us on the way. So this one is dedicated to our therapist (who will probably never see this), you have saved our butts time and time again during this process and just helped us grow into more of the people we were created to be. I’m forever grateful for the impact you’ve made in our lives. Our parents, who took our kids for hours and overnights so we could actually get this paperwork done and gave our kids the time of their lives while mom and dad were working on this. To my co-workers, who when I came into work last Wednesday and I told them I may be acting a bit weird because we were waiting to find out if we were having a baby were the most supportive, loving and kind human beings and have been that throughout the entirety of this process. I’m so thankful for ya’ll.

Thanks for following along friends,

Molly