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If you are waiting to adopt, you have probably asked, “When we will be matched?” about 300,000 times. I would have given anything to have a crystal ball tell me when the match would happen. I could have handled waiting another year if I could only know that a baby was definitely coming in twelve months. I have always dealt better with bad news than no news at all. The uncertainty can drive me crazy.
One really odd thing about newborn adoption is that your forever child could already be conceived and growing in another woman’s body while you are crying into your pillow about not being a mother. Your baby is on its way, as surely as if you were pregnant yourself, but you do not know this. In fact, I know several adoptive families whose forever babies were conceived in the same month that they suffered through a failed adoption.
Several people told me that waiting for the phone to ring was like waiting for a pot of water to boil. It will happen when you stop looking for it. That is exactly what happened to me.
After a year of waiting to be matched, I asked some friends to help me put together a different portfolio. Scrap booking is not my talent, so I asked some friends who enjoy scrap booking to help me out. The difference between the two portfolios was amazing, and I hoped that this would make a difference in speeding up a match.
I resubmitted my new portfolio in July, hoping that we would get a fast match. By the time November rolled around, I was pretty depressed. I was losing hope that we would ever be matched with an expecting mother. The very next week, after I had accepted that it was going to take as long as it was going to take, we got the call that an expecting mother had selected us.
In most cases, the call comes out of the blue when you least expect it. It really is kind of like waiting for water to boil. The more you can focus on other aspects of your life, the less energy you will put into stewing over when the match will happen.
I look back now and realize that while I was crying into my pillow, my son was growing in his birthmother’s body. My prayers were already answered: I just did not know it yet.
Related Topics:
How to Survive the Wait series
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
