Blog friends, we haven't been completely honest with you. Thus the radio silence for the last few weeks. It has been for good reason, but we promised to share the good and bad of our adoption adventure and we both feel that its time for this part of our story to be shared.
When we posted
this, it wasn't 100% true. We
were matched off of the shared list that came out in September, but we were matched with a child that was much older than what we had been approved for. We have been approved for a child up to 18 months and we have prayed and talked about this age quite a bit over the last 10 months and really felt like that was our comfort zone for many reasons. It was apparent that this child was not meant to be ours. Our coordinator apologized for the mix up and said she would make sure that the person doing the matching reviewed our choices before the next list came out. We were sad, but ok with it because it was just so obvious that this kiddo wasn't ours.
And then 11 PM the next night the phone rang. It was our coordinator, telling us that she had another match for us. Another family with our agency had been matched off of the shared list and they had declined the match. Our agency had then thought of us and wanted us to review the file. There was a catch though. The other family had used all but 8 hours of the 72 hour hold on the file. Our agency thought they could just transfer his file to us, but we had to make our decision in that 8 hours. As you might imagine, it was a shock and we were wide awake at that point (which is saying a lot for me, once I'm asleep it usually takes a lot to wake me up!). We spent the rest of that crazy night reading the medical file, looking at the pictures of an adorable little boy and asking ourselves "is this our baby?". Long story short, we said yes and with that "yes" we had a match and a son. We had waited almost a year for this moment and it had finally come.
Four happy days went by. We were
dying to tell everyone, but our best efforts to get those we wanted to tell first together were unsuccessful for
various reasons and as it turns out we were glad we weren't able to tell them.
That fourth night we received a phone call from our coordinator. We knew it was bad news just from the tone of her voice. As it turns out, there was a clerical error when this boy's file was being transferred from the first family to us. Somehow when his file was unlocked, it was never officially "re-locked" for us and his file was already gone and locked by another agency for another family.
Bottom line:
He wasn't ours and there was nothing that could be done.
As you can imagine, we went through many emotions. At one point I wondered if this was a sign that we weren't supposed to do this, weren't supposed to be parents. It even brings back tears to my eyes to type that sentence. It was too difficult, confusing and painful to talk about with anyone. So, we ran away.
We took an amazing trip to New Orleans and Alabama. This trip had already been planned, but as it turned out it couldn't have come at a better time. We needed to take a breath and we just couldn't do that in Colorado (it's actually hard to do that in New Orleans too, hello humidity!).
So that brings us to today. Today we are ok. We have weathered storms together before and we always come out stronger for it. We are moving forward and trying to have closure and peace in the fact that this was not our child and it is a
great thing that there are more adoptive families than available children right now.
Thanks for reading this beast of a post. We are trying to look forward to the next shared list, which will most likely be released in the next few weeks. As you can imagine, we might be a little hesitant to share the news right away when we actually do get matched, but we promise we will share as soon as we feel like it is really happening. We started this blog to share the ups and downs and after this experience we know we are due for an up and can't wait to write about it!
