Saturday, October 11, 2014

The Journey to Our Daughter



We brought our son home from Hong Kong a little over a year ago.  Not long after he came home we started talking about when to start the adoption process again.  At the beginning of his adoption we knew we would adopt twice, because we wanted our adopted child to have that connection with someone else in the family.  We played the name game, throwing out names for our next child.  For the sake of privacy I'll say we settled on the name Sarah for a girl.  Not long after that the adoption agency posted the profiles of 14 children in China with Down syndrome needing families. One little girl was Sarah.  We told our kids about the children and we all prayed together to ask God to bring families for these kids.  Our second son asked if we could be one of those families.  We wondered the same thing so we started looking into adopting Sarah.  At first it looked like it might work out, but soon realized that the door was closed to us for the time being. (In this past year every one of these kids have been taken off the waiting child list as families have started the adoption process to bring them home).  At that point we decided to give our family six months to transition with a new child at home and then revisit the idea to decide of starting the adoption paperwork again.  Mid-January came and I felt like I was to pray for Sarah because someone from our agency would call to ask us to adopt her.  I thought this was just me being a little crazy.  Stuff like that doesn't happen often and it certainly doesn't happen to us, right?  But, I continued to feel like I should pray for Sarah so for the next two weeks I prayed for her, for her family and that God would prepare us if we were to adopt her.  The end of January we talked about adopting again and decided that since international adoption would take a year or more we would go ahead and start the paperwork.  The next day our social worker from the adoption agency contacted us about a baby due in the States with DS and the family was considering adoption.  Our social worker wanted to know if we would be willing to be considered as a placement for the baby if needed.  After finding out we could easily switch from a domestic home study back to an int'l one if they decided to parent, we went ahead to complete the domestic home study.  That situation did not work out for us and come summer time we didn't feel quite ready for all the paperwork that would be coming for the int'l adoption process so we registered with the National Down Syndrome Adoption Network with the plan that we would go back to int'l adoption in the fall or winter.  The NDSAN called several times about different children, but other families were chosen to adopt.  It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster and I was figuring out that we needed to try to stay emotionally detached from these potential placements in the beginning.

Every year I take pictures of our kids at the end of summer. After taking our daughter's pictures we looked back at her photos from past years.  She kept asking about where her clothes were that she wore in them.  When I told her she had grown too big for them and they were in a box she said "Mommy, we need a new sister so she can wear my clothes."  I told her she could pray about it without thinking much of it.  A week later our social worker called.  They had a baby girl in the NICU with DS that needed a family, would we like our profile shown.  I said yes and when my husband got home that Tuesday evening I asked if he wanted to hear the latest situation that probably wouldn't work out.  We talked a little about how we would travel and arrange things at home, but didn't expect much.  Wednesday morning I was on a field trip with our kids when the social worker called back.  We had been chosen as her family!  It felt surreal as we arranged travel plans and child care.  I flew out on Sunday to be with her.  She ended up being in the NICU for just under a month and I was with her for 3 weeks.  She was released with an NG tube for feeding, but otherwise seems healthy.  Had you asked us last year if we would adopt an infant domestically we would have thought it unlikely, but God had other plans and we now have our beautiful daughter home with us.

On this side of the adoption, it's fun to see how God has been preparing us to bring her home.  1. At the beginning of our son's adoption we had to fill out a form about what medical conditions we were comfortable with.  It's not a fun process, because we knew that every time we said NO, we weren't saying no to a condition, but to a child that needed a family.  One of the things I said no to was feeding tubes.  NG tubes, G tubes, I didn't care.  It all sounded a little too scary to me.  Fast forward to the beginning of this summer and we heard about a baby girl that had some medical conditions requiring G tube feeding.  I asked some other moms that had adopted kids from Hong Kong with feeding tubes and their responses were very similar.  Once you get used to the feedings, it's really no big deal.  Another family was chosen for that little girl, but I was now much more comfortable with the idea of a feeding tube.  2. Since we were registered with the NDSAN we saved the money they recommended for an adoption, but we neglected to save for traveling expenses.  Last spring we decided we'd like to get a little used car as a second car, so we saved up for that.  The end of August we decided that a second car was a luxury and not a necessity, so we planned to send the money to pay down student loans.  I had written the check and was getting ready to send it when we found out about Sarah.  I decided to wait a day to see if we were chosen or not.  Once we were chosen I kept the check and we used the money to pay for her adoption.  The additional fees and traveling expenses totaled up to just a couple hundred dollars more than what we had saved for the car.  3. Another situation came up where we would have had to leave about 3 days later to get the baby.  We made a tentative plan, called my parents to find out if they could help out on such short notice and then found out that once again another family had been chosen.  When our social worker called about showing our profile for our baby girl saying that one of the requirements the agency had was that one parent be able to travel quickly to stay with her in the NICU, we already had a plan in place to make that happen.  Had my mom not been able to stay with the other kids on short notice, making it possible for me to travel quickly and stay for three weeks, the social workers would have looked for another family.  These are just a few of the things we've seen over the summer that God has used in getting us ready for her.  In the midst of disappointments He was preparing us for our daughter.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

I've been remembering the summer I spent volunteering at the orphanage a lot during this past Thanksgiving/Christmas season.  It was an intense summer.  Some planned experiences and other completely unexpected.

Entering the orphanage for the first time I didn't know what to expect.  Was there a routine to follow?  How were we expected to interact with the kids?  I followed the women I was with to a hot stuffy room with blankets spread out on the floor.  The workers brought the children in and laid them down.  Some of the kids could crawl/drag themselves over to us, but most were not mobile.  The first day we picked up one child, played with her for awhile and then went on to play with the next child.



Many of the kids responded positively to the interaction and would often cry when we set them down.  One little girl cried when I picked her up.  I tried interacting with her the same as the other children, but she only became more upset, calming down only when she was set back on the blanket.  During the rest of our time that day I watched as she reacted the same way with the other volunteers.  Several visits later the orphanage workers quit brining her in altogether, so I went searching for her.  She was laying in a sopping diaper and wet sheets behind the cold metal bars of her crib.



As I walked over to the crib the mere presence of someone standing there clearly made her agitated.  I asked her name.  Nigar.  Nigar wanted only to be left alone.  What made her so fearful I can only imagine, but I decided to spend time with her every day I visited.  Standing over her made her nervous and even a gentle touch drew her into herself even more, so I pulled up a chair and sang.  Eventually she wouldn't wince when I would come in to sing.  I then started to stroke her arm lightly for short periods to see if she would tolerate it and slowly she relaxed with that as well.  It was my hope that eventually she would allow herself to be held without recoiling.  But the summer was over too quickly.  It was time to leave.  I talked with one of the other women volunteering and explained where to find her and what I was doing hoping Nigar would continue to get loved on.  It was hard to leave.  How I wished I could have brought her home.

The family I was traveling with had planned to stop in Turkey for a week and I was very excited about our time there.  It had been my dream for as long as I could remember to return to Turkey and it was finally happening.  Our plane landed and we arrived at the hotel about midnight.  Sometime around 3am I woke up shaking.  Wait, it was the bed that was shaking.  In a 3am fog I finally realized it was an earthquake.  The woman I was sharing the room with was already in the doorway and as I quickly joined her we watched as other hotel guests rushed into the parking lot in their whitey-tighties.  It seemed to last forever, but finally the shaking stopped and we went back to bed.  Smart?  I don't know.  What is a tourist supposed to do once an earthquake is over?  I laid there for awhile wondering if it would start again.  The next morning the news report said it had been a 9.8 earthquake centered about 30 miles from where we were in Istanbul.  The casualty rate quickly climbed from the hundreds to the thousands and kept going up.  Later they would downgrade it to a 9.3 or 9.4 and estimated that over 18,000 people had died.  The area we were in saw little damage, but as I watched the news of all that was happening just 30 miles away I couldn't just sit there.  A group of people from the hotel arranged to go out to help find survivors and I quickly signed up to go.  To be honest I was quite scared of what I might see.  This was not the way I envisioned a trip to Turkey turning out.  As it was, most of the rescue work that could be done by individual people had been done in the first day or two after the earthquake.  By the time we arrived they were brining in heavy machinery to move the concrete slabs that had once been apartments.  Rescue dogs searched the rubble for survivors.  The dogs eventually came and found no one alive at the apartment complex we spent much of our time working.  A couple days later I was able to join a group that was delivering relief supplies to people living in tents cities set up by the Red Crescent (the Muslim version of the Red Cross).   It started to rain not long after the earthquake and the ground of the tent cities was squishy with mud.




I had left for my summer full of anticipation and on a spiritual high. The months leading up to the trip were a break from the normal college routine and I had had much time to sit and be with God, to study the bible and spend time worshiping.  I returned overwhelmed, angry and full of questions.  I was no longer riding a spiritual high, but muddling my way through a spiritual crisis.  There were so many things to wrestle through.

The college I attended had people briefly discuss their summer trips during chapel time.  What would I say?  I wasn't sure, but decided to talk a little about Nigar.  I was able to talk with a few people afterwards about the trip and mostly they were positive conversations, but one man did not like the idea of people visiting orphanages.  His objection was along the lines of the fact that these kids were not puppies that people could play with for a short time and leave behind.   In his opinion it was a cruel thing to do. Over the next month I wrestled with questions that people have struggled with for ages and  I came out with a stronger faith in the goodness and love of God and a stronger commitment to my relationship to Him as His child.  One question, though, I've had in the back of my mind since then.  It's maybe not as significant as some of the other questions, but I have still wondered about what the man said regarding the visit to orphanage.  Had my good intentions done more harm than good?

This past November I attended a retreat for foster and adoptive mothers.  One of the speakers was a woman named Stephanie Fast.  She was abandoned in South Korea around the age of 4 and spent the next 5 or 6 years as a street child.  She shared with us a small fraction of what she and many other street children endured everyday.  Eventually she was brought to an orphanage and adopted at the age of 9 by an American couple who had come intending to adopt an infant.  Her story was about redemption which is hard work.  She shared about a time prior to entering the orphanage when she was caught by the villagers she had been stealing food from and was tied to a moving water wheel.  About the time she was sure she would die a man, whom she could not see because of the effects of being drug through the water, took her off the water wheel and placed her on the ground.  He washed off her face, touched her gently and told her "You must live."  He did not give her food to satisfy her hunger or bring her home to give her a family, but he showed her kindness and spoke life into her.  She did not see his acts as cruel, but recognized the kindness and held onto his life giving words in the years to come.  Stephanie told the audience that our kindness and life giving words are not wasted.  They are not wasted.  I have wondered if I should have ever gone to the orphanage.  It made a difference in my life.  It opened my eyes to needs of orphans and people with disabilities, but what about the children I left behind?  Stephanie was in a place where she experienced cruelty just as the children that lived behind the cold walls of the orphanage.  She was shown kindness by a stranger and she held onto the kindness for many years to come.  God uses even our feeble attempts to show His love to His children and I pray that our kindness made a positive impact on the children and helped to show the value of life to the orphanage workers.