Adoption Status: Stalled

According to my little tickers at the bottom of the page, it's been one year since deciding to begin our adoption and 3 months, 2 weeks, and 2 days since our dossier went to Vietnam.

As I've told you before, I'm sometimes asked why I don't ever mention our adoption progress on our adoption blog. Where are the updates? My answer is always the same: There is no progress. I have nothing to report, so I talk about the idiotic details of my boring house frau life instead. It's depressing to keep trying to talk about an adoption that I'm beginning to fear will never happen.

Yes, we are still trying to adopt. Yes, we still want to add one more child to our family. In fact, I'm currently having the mid-life-crisis-baby-cravings so bad I can hardly stand it sometimes. Which is exactly why I don't like to talk about it. My "baby" is turning 7 in a week. I've never, in 18 years of motherhood, had a kid that old before without a baby or toddler coming along behind him. That's a lot of years caring for little ones. Bottles, diapers, Sesame Street... That's what "normal" is to me. Babies is what I do! lol. So this feels pretty foreign. I don't like it.

For family and friends that don't know, the situation between the US and Vietnam continues to look bleak. As I said last time I recapped this, no one knows for sure yet what will happen after September 1st when the agreement between our countries expires, but each new statement issued and every new bit of news sounds like another nail in the coffin. It's not looking good. I'm feeling increasingly hopeless, although I'm trying not to. For those interested, details on the latest scoop can be found here at Bring Our Children Home, and Christina has written about the most recent turn of events over at VVAI.

On a personal level, our agency has still NEVER received a single referral, EVER, from Vietnam. So even if the Vietnam situation turned around overnight, and all is suddenly resolved, we are with an agency that is having trouble establishing a good working relationship in Vietnam. It's very frustrating. We never hear from them. They, I'm sure, are just like me and have nothing to report, so I can't fault them for that. We have handed over thousands of dollars to them, which I'm sure would be difficult to get back, and we still have no idea what we will do in the event that Vietnam closes. It's scary.

In my last conversation with our coordinator, we discussed our other options. She said they are strongly encouraging their VN families to "dual enroll" in another program. If we chose to do that, it doesn't mean we would end up with two concurrent adoptions. We'd enroll in two and go with whichever one gives a referral first, then the dossier would be withdrawn from the other country. "We" (read that as Darrell) aren't sure "we" want to do that, because "we" want to wait to see what happens. Apparently "we" are very patient people who like waiting.

I believe we qualify for: Ethiopia, Kaz, (possibly) Russia, (possibly) China special needs, and domestic African American.

Our hearts were so set on Vietnam that we are having trouble even trying to seriously consider and talk about what we'll do. With all of these, there are so many factors to consider and drawbacks to each one. To make it all extra fun trying to decide, I've recently heard rumors of trouble brewing in Kaz and Ethiopia, too- although I don't have any reliable information on either one.

I would do the domestic AA program in a heartbeat, because I do love the idea of getting to have a baby baby again; a tiny newborn would be wonderful! But we have to be completely honest and consider what's best for the child, not what's best for the mommy. We live in a ridiculously small town that is far from diverse, racially speaking. We know people (quite well) who could make the life of our AA or Ethiopian child "difficult." I'm trying to be delicate here, but you get what I'm saying, right? There are idiots out there. Some of the same people who fawn and fuss over how cute my Chinese daughter is may not feel so warm and fuzzy about my AA baby, which brings up the interesting topic of the degrees of racism so many of us carry around every day, but that's a whole other post. Anyway, am I prepared to handle those idiots on a daily basis? Is it fair to bring a child home knowing they will have to deal with those idiots every single day? I just don't know how I feel about all that yet.

I like the idea of bringing home a special needs child who may have otherwise not found a family. Darrell and I both were sure, going into this, that we wanted an Asian child, mainly so that Bri could have that common link with her sibling- so that would be a point in the China SN column. However, how serious of a special need we feel able to handle is another matter. And we're not even completely sure we would qualify for that program.

Our main drawbacks with the Kaz program are: 1. Blind referrals, and 2. 6 weeks in country. I don't even know who would care for our kids for 3 weeks in Vietnam. Who on earth wants to be responsible for 6 kids for 6 weeks?

The biggest thing that's keeping us from acting on any of the other choices is what I said above; the fact that Darrell really wants to wait it out and see what happens with Vietnam. He feels that we believed at the time God was leading us in our decision, so we should believe it now, regardless of what the circumstances tell us. We need to be faithful and see what happens. OK. I guess that's what we'll do then. I do believe God led us into this adoption. I do believe He has another child in store for us. I just don't feel as confident that it was God who chose Vietnam. Maybe that was just us. But, Darrell is right. We need to be faithful and patient. Oh, yea! A chance to show off my strong points... :0

So there you go. There's your adoption update! In all honesty, I've been having serious thoughts about stopping this blog for a while now. I'm not a blogger. I never intended to start a blog to talk about nothing in particular, and since the only adoption news I can give is basically a rehash of a previous update, I'm struggling to find a reason to keep doing it. There are plenty of adoptee blogs, parenting blogs, motherhood blogs, etc., all doing it better. So I don't know. We'll see what happens on that, too, I guess.