I'll Take Those Odds

One month.

Considering all the many, many, many months I have spent waiting for my children, 1 month shouldn't even register on my list of most trying.  And yet, this month, the last 30 days, will go down as some of the most memorable in all three adoptions.

In the past we waited for a travel call.  A given outcome that was the end result of a lot of paper pushing. And while the papers might be pushed a slower than I wanted, the outcome was predictably a travel call, which was then predictably followed by flying to Korea and bringing my child home as soon as I could.

Not so, this time.  This time there is little predictability in the process.  The court date we are waiting on is uncharted territory in waters we had expected to be old pros in.  Families with our same time frames are in Korea now or packing their bags while we are still RSVPing "Maybe, but I hope not" to anything in the next month.

But the most perplexing part of the last 30 days has been the fact that it has little to do with paper pushing.  This time, a judge is reviewing our home study...unquestionably the most invasive, raw documents ever written about us and something I wouldn't even be comfortable sharing with our family.  But some judge in Korea is reading it over, mulling over our merits as potential parents.  And although I am fairly confident what we present won't keep us from the honor of raising Little Moon, the predictability is compounded by the fact that the judge can issue our court date whenever and for whenever he or she wants to.

That means that if the judge has a vacation planned or is feeling under the weather or had a bad breakfast and is in a bad mood, those things could swing our notifications and dates by weeks or months at a time.

It's maddening to have something so important and time sensitive be completely at the whim of someone else with absolutely nothing we can do about it.

So every morning until lunch time I hold my breath and stalk my phone and check my e-mail every 2 minutes (I am not exaggerating) even though I know the phone call will come first (I think).  I'm crippled from giving full attention to anyone or anything that isn't on Facebook's adoption groups. And for 30 days, nothing has come except for one emotionally confusing day when half our group did get their court dates.

But there is an unexpected and welcome silver lining.  Appa and I are both invested and waiting together this time.  Appa's logic and trust helped him breeze through the other two waits, but this new unpredictable timeline seems to have thrown him for a loop.  So instead of only leaning on friends for sympathy and support, I have my best friend to live it with.  He even suggested we have a "pity party" last Friday night.  Pity is SO my emotion, so to have him suggest it was really pretty funny and ending up making our pity party a night of silly board games and drinks.  We've been sad together and happy together and I'll always think fondly of this period in that respect.

And each morning when Appa asks me with hope in his voice "Think today is our day?" he follows it up with "The odds are better today then they were yesterday."  And we get a little giddy and the anticipation of what they day could bring.  It's a fun feeling.

So these 30 days have been memorable for me, but not in a bad way.  Sure, it hasn't been fun and I want our court date TOMORROW PLEASE but I'll remember this time as a really uncomfortable and hard time frame that we managed to weather with positive attitudes fitting for our grinning guy.

We will not let this take the joy from our journey to our son.