Last week, I received a promotion at work. It’s slightly surreal because I still think of it as “my new job,” even though I’ve been full-time for 16 months and contracted two years before that. At my previous full-time job, I worked there for about six years without a promotion and only a single small, token bonus. I internalized this notion that I’m a dime-a-dozen technical writer who is lucky to have a job. By promoting me, my company is saying “We’re lucky to have you.” And that recognition is worth more than the new job title or salary increase (though the salary increase is pretty sweet, too).
This blog has suffered lately under the brunt of my professional pursuits. And personal pursuits, as well. In six days, Mr. P and I will be going to Ethiopia to meet a 2-year old boy and testify in court that we want to be his parents. We will them come home without the boy, wait restlessly for an appointment at the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, and then return to Ethiopia to bring home our son (hopefully) in late April–early May timeframe. And we could not be more excited.
I’ve read countless blogs and forum messages from parents who adopt toddlers, and they all say the first few months are incredibly hard but ultimately worth it. It’s the adjustment period, when he doesn’t speak English and doesn’t fully understand what is going on and who we are and what his new life is going to be like. When he misses his caregivers in Ethiopia and he goes from the communal life in an orphanage to the solitary life of a revered only child. When the food tastes strange, the toilets are scary, and everything smells different. When we take him to doctors and dentists and give him foul-tasting medicine to clear up the parasites that all Ethiopian adoptees return home with. When he is discovering us, and we are discovering him.
So the work promotion is bittersweet, coming right before I have to take time off from work and at a time when my job will no longer be a focal point of my life. Because I’m also being promoted from “wife” to “wife and mother.” Actually, it’s “wife and working mother,” and I am thankful for and will do my fucking best to live up to all my promotions.
