So, today I am doing some work from home, making some calls to folks, when my phone rings. I assume it is someone returning my call and answer, "This is Molly…"
Apparently I threw my adoption agency rep off, because there was a pause, and she says she’s calling from the agency and she has a referral.
My pause. My brain is like… what’s a referral? I know this word but its totally meaningless to me right now.
<Snap back to reality, woman on the phone> "Is this a good time?"
Me: "Yes! yes."
And then I listen as she describes my daughter. She’s from a town south of Adis Ababa, both her parents died, of typhoid and malaria. She’s 30" tall. She’s 19 lbs. Her development is optimal. She’s on track for everything a 2 1/2 year-old-kid should be doing. HIV negative.
They are going to email me the information. Do I have any questions?
My hands are shaking. I am having a hard time processing this. I’ve been pretty detached so far with this whole process- I mean, excited, with a sort of pleasant anticipation thing going on, but nothing like this. In this moment it takes on a sort of hyper-reality that I am having trouble keeping up with.
"Do I have questions? My mind is blank. I’m pretty surprised right now." I am positive I do have questions but I can barely speak.
All I can think of is opening the email and looking at her picture. I tell the agency representative that I’ll call her with questions and hang up.
I call Charles, but I’m unable to determine if I will be able to speak when he answers the phone. I half-yell "we have a referral" into the phone and I hear his silence as his brain parses that word. I tell him to go to his email and we open the file together and see the photo of our daughter, together, for the first time.
I tell him to fax the medical records to our pediatrician and then come home so we can tell our son together. It seems like hours before he gets home, but I am sure it is just a few minutes. In the meantime, I obsessively start trying to find some answers to my questions. I never thought we’d get the referral this quickly. I had heard many warnings about how the wait time had been increasing, and while we had been told the wait was 0-6 months, I had anticipated it being on the longer end of that timeframe.
When will we travel? <check discussion boards> Looks like between 6-9 weeks, 9 weeks being more common. But crap, we only turned in our final paperwork on May 26th! This isn’t typical so far!
Obsessively start thinking about a thousand other details while printing out a picture to show Dillon of his little sister. <Door opens.>
We show D his first glimpse of his little sister. He giggles happily. "She’s brown!" We tell him the few little facts we know about her. He thinks she looks happy to be joining our family. I tell him that he doesn’t have to worry about us leaving too soon to pick her up, that it will be a couple of months before we leave and he goes to stay with grandma. But he’s not worried. He thinks it will be cool if she’s here for his birthday.
I tell him her favorite toy is a ball, that she likes to kick it, and we talk about how they can play soccer, he can be the goalie (his favorite role) and she can be the striker.
I want to tell everyone but I don’t know what to say. We decide on an email as we can tell everyone at once and then no one is our first call. Also, it buys us some time to digest the information.
We decide to go out for dinner for a last splurge as we’ll probably be squeezing our pennies pretty tight over the next couple months, and Dillon carries the picture of his sister to the car and declares that he wants to hold it all the way to the restaurant.