Confessions of THIS Adoptive Mom

This is your chance to go where no one else has gone before inside my mind (I can almost hear the screams of fear now). I only ask that if after reading this you feel the need to have the nice men in white coats come for me please give me a heads up. At the very least bring diet coke and chocolate.

Even though it is before 8 am and our adoption agency is not open, I check my email for the first of what will be LITERALLY a million times that day. If there is no adoptwaiting email I check facebook to check other fellow adoptwaiter’s status to see if anyone else has heard news. Depending on what I find there I may check an online forum that participate on or some blogs. I do all of these things for 3 reasons: 1) To see if anyone has heard news either about a) their own adoptwating situation or b) adoption in Ethiopia in general. Because 2) I am addicted to trying to find out information because 3) I want to be in control. As I have mused in other blog posts finding out information is a not so secret way to be in control. If I have information, I may be able to know what is happening and thus be in control. For the record to any other fellow control freaks in recovery; this does not work.

Doing all of this causes me to feel elated if others share news, because I love, love, to see people move forward in the process. I love sharing in others joy. However now and then, while I am still elated to see others good news, seeing others news causes me to feel anxious, why I am I not hearing anything? Or, and I HATE when this happens, I occasionally use another’s positive news to have a pity party. I apologize to anyone to whom I have invited to one of my pity parties.

Now in spite of all of this I may repeat this cycle numerous times through out the day. At a minimum I check my email, I am certain a million times a day EVEN if I am NOT expecting to hear anything. I have at times made myself so stressed by reading something that someone else has posted that I have said that I need to stop the madness. And I do for the rest of the day. But it stops there. I tell you just this past Friday I said I am going to stop. I did for the rest of the day. But today was business as usual.

Now evenings and weekends, it is less of a problem. Things are closed and there is no news that can happen. If I am in meetings all day or am away from a computer, I don’t go through withdrawal. I do have a smart phone so I can do a certain amount of checking, but not quite as much.

Prior to adoptwaiting, I did not jump at the phone ringing. Since we have started this process. If it is between 8 am and 5 p.m. and the phone rings, there is ALMOST ALWAYS a small part of me wondering if it is our social worker calling to tell us something. I feel this expectation even if we are NOT expecting to hear anything.

Anyone who has read any of my blogs knows that I have a love hate relationship with waiting. As we have completed each step in the adoptwaiting process I have thought “Whew, waiting for ______was the hardest thing”. I have discovered that is not quite true. On the one hand my patience muscle has gotten stronger, because I have had NO choice. I have HAD to exercise it, thus assisting me in future waiting.  But at the same time just when I thought the hardest part of waiting is over, it’s not.

Commiserating, supporting, encouraging and sharing the journey with other fellow adoptwaiters has helped me realize that SOME and the key word there is SOME of my above confessions are a normal part of the process. 

So here is one of, many I am sure, confessions of this adoptive mom.