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Saturday, February 9, 2013

A Race to the Finish


Finally a moment to catch you up on our family.  See after our Homestudy took a little longer to complete, we kind of rushed through the rest.  Within about a 45 day period, we were matched.  But let me start at the beginning of this part of our story.

 

     The profile (or as I call it the “pick us”) book.  Imagine someone telling you to describe your life, your immediate and extended family, your values, our hopes, your house, neighborhood, city, joyful times, your job, your interests and oh, you have to accomplish this with about 60 pictures within a 20 page photo book.  But 4 of those pages are just words that need to be good enough to capture someone’s attention, entertaining enough to keep their attention and brief enough so that you don’t lose their attention.  In adoption world, this is called your profile book.  It is shown to perspective birthparents along with other family profiles whose preferences match.  Imagine picking one Christmas photograph to represent 10 years of Christmases.  Until I actually sat down to do it, it seemed like a piece of cake.  Thought I would just sit down, pick a few pictures, write some nice things about our family, and be done with it.  After about an hour of creating ours, anxiety had crept in.  I began analyzing every picture; me in my husband’s boxers is not flattering as bedtime attire, this one is great of our family but my right eye is shut halfway as it is prone to do, does this picture make us look too silly, does our Christmas picture with family gifts make us look pretentious, our backyard is a big pitiful sandpit.  I finally had to take a step back and remind myself that whoever picks us, will pick us, for being us.  Our family is not perfect, we are not Better Homes and Gardens, heck we are lightyears away from Leave it to Beaver.  Our family is messy, ornery, fun, affectionate, tough, crazy, stressful, but we have love.  When we are hurting, we have family.  When we are stressed out to the max and raise our voices, we have family.  If God can see us in all our glorious mess and still love us, then we can be OK with not being perfect.  We are real and real is exactly what I put in our profile book.  Yes, I included the picture of me in boxers because in that picture I was reading to my kids.  I also put one in there of me sticking my tongue out because once in a while, I can be funny (my husband is responsible for most of the fun in our house) and I put in a picture of my husband sitting amidst a pile of dirty laundry because in that picture he is painting our daughter’s toenails.  See those are the important things, it ended up being an affirming moment for me.  Life isn’t about what you’re wearing, where you are or what you have, it’s about those little moments in day to day life. 

      Whew, that’s enough deepness for me in what was supposed to be a lighthearted post.  So about our final profile book……..that’s right, I never actually had a chance to finish it.  See I was sitting at home one day, our daughter was sick at home, when my phone rang and our adoption worker’s name popped up.  See after the home study is complete, there really are only 2 reasons they call you.  Either it’s a good thing or something is wrong.  I had fantasized for months about how I would react if/when she called with good news.  Would I burst into tears as the happiness poured into me, would I faint with excitement (hey it could happen), or would I play it calm and collected and just say “that’s cool”.  Ends up I had total brain lockup and really didn’t say anything for a few (very long) seconds.  Apparently it takes me a while to totally process things.  So I was in the middle of something when she called and thought to myself, I’ll call her right back.  Then I thought why is she calling and instantly a thousand thoughts filled my mind, the first of which was “no way” (it’s funny how fast your brain can think, I answered on the third ring).  So with my heart absolutely pounding I answered the phone.  She was wondering how our profile book was coming along (normal question, heart slows down), how far along in the book were we (heart calming, brain not overanalyzing too much), because the other worker was meeting with some birthparents the next day and wanted to show our profile (WHAT? Heart back to racing, self doubt sneaks in).  I let her know I had all the important stuff I wanted in there, but it hadn’t been prettied up yet.  She said to send her what we had and assured me whatever we had was fine.  Now to someone whose greatest fear is that no one will ever pick them, showing a half done profile book that surely had misspellings and hadn’t been “edited” was a daunting thing.  But we knew everything was in God’s hands.  I sent up a quick prayer that whoever was going to view it would just be blessed by it.  I prayed they would be confident in their decision and I prayed for peace for ourselves whatever their decision may be.  Then I clicked “send” and it was off.  Surprisingly, I really didn’t think much more about it through that night or the next morning until we had a message in our adoption portal that went something like this “book looks good.  Oh and by the way the expectant couple wants to meet you.”  There goes my heartbeat again.  Reread it and make sure you are reading it correctly.  Should I email and ask her if she’s sure?  Could she have misunderstood?  Why on earth after seeing the unfinished profile would they want to meet us?  So with my shaky hands (from a huge adrenaline dump) I called my husband.  As an aside can you imagine the physiological impact this continuous emotional up and down kind of thing can have on your body?  Sorry that’s the nerd in me.  So we agreed to meet the birthmother and birthfather of an unborn child.  Their circumstances and details are part of our child’s own adoption story to share themselves so I won’t be putting any of that out there in cyberland.  Think that’s enough for one post.  Believe me, meeting a birthparent is a blog post in itself…

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