Musician and apparent adoption expert, Tom Petty, said it best in his song “The Waiting,”

The waiting is the hardest part, Everyday you see one more card, You take it on faith, You take it to heart, The waiting is the hardest part

The waiting of adoption or anything in life is brutal, especially for planners like myself.  I don’t like to make mistakes.  I don’t like to redo my work.  I want to do things once and be done with them.  Can you say perfectionist?  Ok, fine.  I’m a perfectionist.  Would you accept the term “recovering perfectionist”?  There is nothing that brings me into full blown perfectionism than waiting.

There is so much waiting in adoption and in the waiting I turn into a researcher.  I want to have questions answered before anyone has asked them.  I want to know what to expect.  I do not think there is anything wrong with being prepared, but my goodness I take it to another level.

We have a pretty documented account of our adoption journey.  We had an email list that grew to over 200 people before our adoptions were finalized.   I can go back and read what we shared and in those emails I am able to see the amazing ways God took care of the details, the things my preparation had left unattended.  I can also see where I tried so hard to make the time table what I wanted instead of what God had for us.

Every adoption is different and in the grand scheme of things our adoptions were fairly quick, but the journey to get to our children felt like an eternity.  We submitted adoption paperwork to Jamaica in 2011.  We were put on a waiting list in 2012.  Our first son was born in 2014 and he was not born in Jamaica.

When we were put on a waiting list I began calling every week to get and update on the status of our application.  (I was a lovable little dumb dumb.)  Every week I was told that nothing had changed and we were still waiting.  I asked questions.  I changed our age of children we were willing to take.  I told them we would take siblings.  I did anything I thought would help keep moving the process forward.

I personally did not know anyone who had adopted from Jamaica.  When we finally had decided to adopt from Jamaica I went into research mode to find out what we were getting ourselves into.  Adoption and immigration laws had changed dramatically since 2006 when I first looked into adoption.  I searched the internet and found a handful of people that were trying to adopt from Jamaica and less people who had actually done it.  I did find an amazing couple who had adopted a child from the children’s home I had visited in 2006.  They were so gracious to answer my questions.  They opened my eyes to what could be expected and what hurdles we may have to overcome.

A year after being on the waiting list our hearts were weary and I dove back into research mode to see if there was any help I could find in the Jamaican adoption process.  I met a woman that showed me a different side of Jamaican adoption.  She had been through the process two times herself and she was currently trying to help a young mother get her two-month-old baby girl adopted.

We were beyond excited and after a lot of prayer and information gathering we boarded a plane to meet our baby girl.  It was a whirlwind of a trip.  We saw parts of Jamaica that we had never seen before.  We lived like locals for 5 days and got to spend every minute with our baby girl.  We had no idea what we were doing.  It’s hard enough to take care of a baby but to do it outside of your normal culture was extremely difficult.

We came home and began a new waiting process.  I don’t know if it was harder than before, but now we had a tiny person with a name and face that we were fighting bring home.  We started our home study and bought a crib.  We started filling out an adoption application for our baby.  We waited and waited and waited for an answer.  Months and thousands of dollars later the answer was, “No.”  Our baby girl would not be coming home.  We were devastated.  I think of her often and pray she was adopted by a loving family.

The waiting was so hard, but something happened in the waiting.  God changed the size and shape of our hearts to be ready for what was to come next.  Before our daughter we would not have considered domestic adoption.  We believed our calling was for Jamaica.  But in the waiting our scope and understanding of adoption became bigger.  Our family and friends presented us with opportunities and needs in our own community.  At one point there was the possibility of us being instant parents to 7-year-old twin girls from a really difficult situation.  I am thankful we weren’t chosen because we were not trauma informed parents at the time (I’m still learning) and I fear we would not have been the best fit for their emotional needs.

I don’t remember all of the opportunities we were presented with, but there were several children we were made aware of through different sources.  I was in the process of finishing grad school and fielding calls about potential children to adopt in Michigan.  It was hard to know what to feel.  A lot of these opportunities came to us before the door for our daughter had closed, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention because we had a child we were still trying to get home.

Two days after our Jamaican adoption fell through I was at home and got a message from a young man with some concerns about us adopting his child.  I was very confused.  I had never had a conversation with this man, but I had apparently talked his girlfriend.  I hardly remember the conversation, but she was convinced we were adopting her baby.  The problem was we had not committed to adopting anyone’s baby.

Part of me wanted to tell everyone, “no.”  We were going to adopt from Jamaica and felt if we adopted from the U.S. we were giving up on what God told us to do.  But the other part of me felt like our experience with Jamaica had prepared us for what was in front of us.  It was emotional.  We met that couple two weeks after that seemingly random message.  Our hearts connected instantly.  The conversation was easy even though my heart felt like it was going to explode out of my chest.  There is no course in school that quite prepares you for how to talk to bio parents, but Kevin and I muddled our way through.

After that meeting we were put right back on the waiting rollercoaster.  It was so hard and even after the baby was born we entered another waiting period.  We were able to take the baby home from the hospital with a power of attorney, but he was not ours.  You are in an emotional tug-of-war.  You are desperately trying to bond with this baby who has been separated from his biological mother, but also trying to hold him loosely because he is not legally yours.  Kevin was working out of state after our son was born.  During this time the bio parents are able to make arrangements to see the baby.  I would walk into a Panera across town with our tiny little man, scared to death that they were going to walk out with him.  My head knew that if that they had changed their mind it would a good decision for the baby, but my heart wanted nothing to do with what my head was thinking.  Once I was there, I loved watching him with them.  I was able to see how much he was loved.  I was able to see that their decision to have their baby adopted was one of love and not from selfish motives.  I marveled at their bravery.  They deeply cared and do care for our son.  If we didn’t have to wait, we would have missed the gift of witnessing their love for him.

Waiting is so hard, but it also has given me the best gifts of my life.  I learn the most in times of waiting.  My heart is changed in times of waiting.  My prayer life is never more real than in times of waiting.  I am able to reflect on the goodness of God in times of waiting.  The rough edges of my heart are softened in times of waiting.

Adoption has a lot of different periods of waiting, but the waiting is a gift in and of itself.  Our waiting prepared us to be the parents our boys needed us to be.  It made our hearts open at the right time for our boys to come in.  Waiting helped us see that God is bigger than we could ever imagined and we could not have written a better story if we tried.