We accepted our referral for Little Boy almost exactly one year ago. Almost a week prior to that, on a weekday at about 10am, I had gotten out of a meeting at work when I came back to my desk and saw a Skype message from Mr. P. saying that the case manager at our agency had called me and left a voicemail; he wrote in big letters: WE HAVE A REFERRAL. Surprise! My heart raced as I typed back to him, joyous, incredulous… and confused. We had only been officially waiting 10 months when we were expecting to wait 12-14 months. We hadn’t even had our “referral preparation” phone call with our case manager, which was scheduled some weeks away. Within minutes, we were on a conference call with the case manager, who admitted it was a surprise to be talking to us so soon before telling us everything the agency knew about Little Boy: his name, his age (30 months), the region he was from, some basic health information. She emailed us two photos of him. He looked sad, scared… and confused.
Only 3 months before that, we had changed the age range of our adoption request from 0-12 months to 0-36 months. Now, with the dramatic slowdown in Ethiopian adoptions, a lot of families are doing the same thing, but our reasons had less to do with expediency and more to do with an awareness of what we were prepared to handle. When we first began the adoption process, our social worker cautioned us that children who came from Ethiopia were often much older than their paperwork claimed, and that a 3 year old child could actually be 5. Factor in the time it would take to travel to Ethiopia twice, and “You could be bringing home a Kindergartner,” she said, which was a bit unsettling. But, after reading the stories of families who adopted older children from Ethiopia, we realized we could handle it. And we knew that the older children were the ones really in need of families — there’s hundreds if not thousands of people waiting to adopt babies, which has lead to the very corruption that, I predict, will ultimately end international adoption in Ethiopia within a few years. So we changed our age range to 0-36 months and joked nervously about the teenager we’d soon be bringing home.
(It strikes me that, if we had not changed our age range from 0-12 months, we would still be waiting for a referral. I frequent the circuit of Ethiopian adoption blogs from families using our agency, including one written by a woman who has been waiting nearly 26 months for a referral for a child 0-18 months of either gender. She wrote the other day about how she couldn’t believe her and her husband were facing another Christmas without even a picture of a child to hold and cherish, and my heart broke for her, because adoption is the only option for her, and because we, too, could have still been waiting.)
The same day we received our referral, I emailed his photo and his health records to an international adoption doctor who does referral screenings. This is standard procedure for most adoptions, having become critical when adoption in Russia was big and children could be screened for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome from their facial dimensions. With Ethiopia, there’s not a whole lot the doctor can tell you, and in fact most of the things she did caution us about turned out to be non-issues (she told us “not to believe” that he was really toilet-trained; she told us his belly was distended because of parasites). She gave us some positives too, noting his large head circumference indicated that his brain was growing. The one thing we really drilled her about was his age. “His eyes look… old, don’t they?” I asked. “Do you think he could be 5 instead of 2 and a half?” She admitted there was a possibility he was older, not 5 but maybe 3, yet there was no way she could tell for sure from a photo. And so, with great excitement and a little fear of the unknown, we accepted the referral.
One year ago, we first saw his picture, and he was scared, sad, and confused. So much can change in a year! Last night, I cuddled with Little Boy in bed as he stretched out his little body and wrapped his little arms around me. “I tired!” he yawned before giggling and snuggling his head against my chest. I wanted to freeze time, to forever be able to hold and behold this youth, this joy, this little bird broken out of his egg.
