We are now 15 months into a journey that started much like our last one: with choosing an agency, receiving packets, making appointments, and beginning that famous paperwork trail. That trail continues right up to the end. It started, this time, with a conversation with Pam, one of the directors of our agency, who described the Xingfu Program - the Happiness Program - which would soon connect us with our new daughter.
Being the second time in I thought I'd have it down. I was a pro, right? Wrong. It was just as endless: the notarizing, the authentication, the multiple overnight envelopes to State Departments for final authentication, the fingerprints for the state, the fingerprints for CIS, the long wait for both those appointments, the hours of online courses that had to be logged in despite the fact that we'd taken all of them before, the social worker who went MIA with our home study draft, the trips downtown to the Department of Health for authentication and the mad-dash crisscross across downtown to the NY State Department with those same docs, overnight deliveries back-and-forth to the Chinese embassy in San Francisco, and finally the trip to 42nd St. to the Chinese embassy in NYC for final authentication which occurred last spring at the height of Olympics-travel visa requests resulting in hours upon hours spent in that hallway until I finally cut the line and got into a battle of assertiveness wills with the man behind the counter who finally relented when I pointed to my two youngest children who had been sitting for three hours in what looked like was going to be another five hour wait. I was number 248, they were on number 15.
Our emotional urgency picked up in January when Nancy, our agency's other director, phoned one evening and said she had a file for a little girl in her hand. Within minutes we rec'd that file via email. Our Lila.
Along the way acts of kindness sneak in reminding me to take pause, reminding me it's not about the process. Pam and Nancy, for example, our agency's directors, grounding me each time we spoke. Their dedication to children in need is humbling. Other smaller acts of kindness eased the frustration: the CIS worker who after a couple of hours of playing with CIS phone number extensions I managed to get live on the phone. He offered up his email address which I proceeded to use on a weekly and then daily basis checking on our approval. He tried, I believe, though did not succeed in speeding up what turned out to be a six-month wait for our own government's approval. Then there's the woman in the SF Dept of Health who took my overnight envelope and our personal check, put our marriage certificate in it, and on her lunch hour walked it over to the local FedEx to send it overnight to the Secretary of State saving us about two weeks of wait time by sending it straight from there. Or the woman who on her lunch hour in a snow storm met me at our doctor's office to notarize our doctor signing medical forms.
And then it ends. The last document comes in. You're finished. The precious 171-H arrives from CIS and you add that to the pile. You're done. It's ready to go. You look at it sitting on your desk. For my adoption friends you know this feeling.
Off to China it goes.
That was mid-May. It is one day shy of December.
