This blog post originally appeared on http://www.alcoates.co.uk/2015/06/what-if-time-is-now.html in last June. Mr. C aka the flesh and brain behind Misadventures of An Adoptive Father has asked me for a guest post on his widely successful site, which I considered a great honour.
Now, almost a year later, hubby and I are approved adopters and if all goes well we will have a Matching Panel in a couple of weeks. I feel the time is right to dip my proverbial pen into the ink and start my own blog.
Mr C found out we have been approved a few weeks ago as adopters and asked me to jot down my feelings. Hope you can make sense of these ramblings now...
Friends were cheering for us, some prayed, others crossed fingers and they worked! We were recommended by Panel and 2 weeks later the single most important letter arrived confirming that we are indeed approved and Family Finding can start. Yay! Exciting times ahead! We were ecstatic...relieved... and scared.
Then this emotional turmoil turned into a loop. Excited-happy-afraid, what a combo!
Yesterday our SW came to formally sign the Family Finding papers and encouraged us to look at websites dedicated to ‘Children shopping’. Suddenly a whole new world opened up in front of our very eyes. It took about 10 minutes of browsing to become overwhelmed. It reminded us of compiling our weekly Tesco shopping; inviting photos of the ‘products’ with a description and a way to enquire further.
Thank God we both knew exactly the kind of children we were hoping to receive into our family so it didn't take long to draw up a short list. In fact, we finished sooner than with our Tesco list, but boy, was it million times harder!!!
Naturally the Saviour complex kicked in and we wanted to rescue ALL the short-listed siblings in the system. Then we started to read their profiles. Hubby is smarter as he purposefully didn't look at the photos first. I couldn't ignore the pictures and with pretty much all the children I noticed something familiar: a smile; that mischievous look; those adventurous feet; the longing to be loved and cherished.
Not fully understanding the system just yet we clicked on ‘enquire further’ a few times. Then we went to bed still feeling enveloped by the excited-happy-scared loop.
Today at work my phone dinged. The message read ‘a link was made’.
A LINK WAS MADE!
We were told family finding can take a long time. All the way from day one everybody in the know told us to prepare for a long wait and we were. Deep down I was happy with it as I still think I am not ready to become a mummy. I have come to terms with the fact that I will never feel ready so I could overcome this nagging feeling of ‘not being there yet’. I even drew up a long list of reasons why it is good not to have the children just yet, although hubs doesn't share my views; he chose to drop the ‘scared’ bit from his loop and wishes the children were placed yesterday. All our friends encourage us with ‘it will happen in God’s time.’ Right... But! What if this time is NOW?
As I type this 2 SW are exchanging our PAR and the children’s CPR and I feel a level of panic creeping up in my heart. OMG! This is really happening!!
Realistically this might not lead to anywhere. This was just the very first step. So many unknowns, so many variables, so many potential outcomes... One of those might just change my life forever! Not like getting married; it will be much-much bigger! That I am sure of! What I am unsure of is how will I react if this progresses in the right direction???
So, for now, a link is made. And I am choosing to drop the ‘scared’ bit of the loop and just embrace this truly exciting moment in time and not worry about the next steps!
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