10 Months and 4 Weeks

Today William is 10 months old and we have been out of PGN for 4 weeks. My life has been nothing but waiting and I am getting really tired of it all. We wait to hear about our case. We wait to get pictures. We wait for someone to do something that might bring William even a day closer to coming home. We are still waiting.

I emailed our case worker yesterday in hopes to find out something. We know nothing at this point. We don't know if William's birthmom has signed off for the last time. We don't know if the attorney even knows where she is considering it has been since the DNA test in May that they have needed to contact her. We don't know if anyone has even started the process of getting William's new birth certificate. We don't know if they already have the birth certificate but are getting the passport. We don't know if they have started translating the file for submittal to the US Embassy. We don't know when William will be coming home.

We wait. We wait for our lives to change dramatically. We wait to tell our employers that we are going to be on leave. We wait to pack our bags. We wait to tell our families and friends that the day has come and William will be coming home at last. We wait for just one little piece of information that might come from our agency telling us that we won't have to wait much longer.

It is getting harder and harder for me to concentrate at work because I know that soon I will be on leave. There were a few days about a week ago when my employer thought that I didn't have any available leave for when William came home. I ignored our HR department and contacted our central office. I can take 6 continuous months off without pay. There is an out of town meeting coming up in November and I had to explain to my boss that even if I am not on leave already, I can't go. It is like being nine months pregnant. I could go at any time. Or I could keep waiting.

I am getting tired of having people approach me and tell me that they have read an article or saw something on the news or heard on the radio that adoptions in Guatemala are [insert something that is completely bogus]. I am tired of setting people straight. I am tired of hearing myself how the media is portraying that babies are stolen from their birthmoms and that it is easy to adopt from Guatemala. If babies were being stolen then there would be no match with the DNA test and the birthmom wouldn't be signing off four times over the course of several months to relinquish her rights. If it was easy than William would have been home months ago, along with Sophia and Karla and Lola and Mario and Caleb and Johanna and thousands of other children. Instead, we all wait.


Update: Never say complaining never gets you anything. About two hours after I wrote this I did hear from our agency. William's birthmom signed off for the fourth and final time which means that William is irrevocably ours! (At least that is what it says in our agency handbook even though there are still steps from this point on that could go wrong.) The attorney expects to get William's new birth certificate by the end of next week. He better! It usually takes around 2-3 weeks after getting out of PGN to get the birth certificate and by the end of next week that will be 5 weeks. I am still thinking that this will be a wild Thanksgiving though.