A Strange Kind of Grieving

Four years, two months and 6 days ago my dossier was logged into the CCAA and I was filled with a giddy sense of hope, excitement, and joy that in 9-11 months I would see my daughter's face for the first time. I celebrated officially being "paper pregnant" and began to prepare for this greatly anticipated transition into motherhood. It wasn't long before that excitement turned to angst, and eventually depression, as the world of Chinese International Adoption changed in ways none of us waiting PAPs could have imagined, and that 9-11 month wait turned into a marathon with no clear finish line.


While I am a very independent person, having a sense of community is something that has always been very important to me. One of the things that thrilled me about the way the China program was structured, was that folks generally travelled in a group, and that each group's children generally came from the same SWI. For me, I knew the experience of traveling across the world as a single woman and coming home the mother to a little girl who lost everything familiar to her, would be something so powerful that it would be hard to put into words. Going through this transformation with others, both in the support and the bearing witness of it all, ranked way up there for me in the fantasy I created about how this would all play out. Also, the idea of our children all coming from the same SWI, which is typical for groups traveling from one agency, excited me, as I would have at least a crumb of something from my daughters past to give her through future contacts. I looked at these children as cousins of sorts. As my dossier left for China back in April of 2006, my agency sent a list of the names and e-mail addresses of the people in my travel group. There were 4 families in all.

In addition to my agency group, I got busy early on joining Yahoo groups for people waiting. Several of those groups were geared towards those waiting with the same expected timeline. Again, in the beginning there was a lot of excitement, gift swapping, and idea sharing. There was a giddiness that was just so much fun. I made some good friends and we talked a lot about the hope of meeting up in China and introducing each other to our children. So much shared fantasy during those first months of waiting.

Well, we all know that things changed dramatically and the fantasy changed into cold hard reality. Many of us eventually changed course and moved to the Special Needs program, other countries, or became parents by other means. Some people dropped out as they needed to take themselves out of limbo. Many peoples life situations changed, some no longer qualified to adopt, and some put wonderful opportunities on hold in order to stay in line. Many of those who decided to wait it out eventually needed to put distance between all things adoption in order to mentally survive the unknown. Relationships formed, but many grew distant, awkward, or to had falling outs. For all in this process there has been pain. Some more than others, but all of us have had to do some amount of soul searching. Most of us thought deciding to adopt was the end of the journey of having to dig deep, not the beginning.

I am grateful every day that I was able to change to the Special Needs program and found my amazing daughter. Being her mother is an incredible honor and I would not change a thing knowing how this story played out. So, why is it that I am finding myself a little blue as my original agency group received their referrals today? Of course I am over the mood excited for them, it's not an either / or kind of thing. But, what has also come up for me is another layer of sadness about how all of this has played out. How the process brought so much pain, both in myself and for those I care about. This process just played out so differently than I thought it would. It was so different than the stories of PAP's of years past. Today I am grieving and letting go of the expectations I had 4 + years ago.

While I stopped waiting when I accepted A's referral in late February of 2008, I realize that I have not fully let go. I have been reading RQ daily and tracking referral dates closely, still counting down days until my 5/9/06 group referrals finally came. I will admit, there is a pat of me that secretly hoped that a mistake had been made and I would somehow still be on that list. Yes, this is a greedy thought, and not one that would even be feasible to work out even if it happened, but it's the truth. In addition to this, I have had a bit of survivors guilt going. I have cherished my own experience, but have felt funny knowing so many of my friends still waited. For me, I allowed this to taint my experience a little and have often found myself being careful or worried my sharing was insensitive. Even the sharing of my referral news, back then, was tempered with the worry about how it would be received by my pals in the adoption community. Now that 5/9/06 finally received their calls I am also feeling like an outsider looking into a party that I would normally be attending. I look at my groups Province and very young girl referrals and wonder if one of them would have been mine, or what she would have been like. Again, I am not feeling regret, but curious and confused by it all. What I do know, though, is that I feel like I can finally let go. I can stop tracking and start fully living in what I have in a way that I just couldn't until now.

While I am so happy with my reality, it is strange to be grieving a process that played out so differently than I expected. If community wasn't as important to me, maybe I would not have held on the way I have. Or maybe its just that little problem of overanylizing I seem to have, LOL.

Congratulations to all those receiving their referrals this week and those whose turns are finally coming down the pike.