Wait till Next Year

That, in essence, is what our agency told us.

Our expected referral did not arrive in the package our agency received last week. In fact 2 of the 4 they “expected” did not arrive last week. We’ve been in touch with them to figure out why, and chart out our next steps.

What happened can only be described as a colossal foul-up with our paper work.

Adopting families, with their agencies, assemble a dossier of information for the adopting family--personal and financial data, an evaluation of your ability to raise a child (the home study), a photo album, government background checks, and agency approvals--which is all notarized, translated, “sealed” by the Chinese embassy, and sent to the Chinese government. For reasons I will not go into here--but do not appear to be the fault of the Chinese Center of Adoption Affairs--our dossier, while “approved,” was not processed with the others that it was received with. The story as we understand it, and it does seem to change from time to time, is that this happened two years ago.

As it turns out, our agency does not know what batch of dossiers ours is “traveling” with, and when we’ll receive a referral. They expect that we’ll see a referral in no sooner than three and probably no longer than seven months from now.

We are very, very disappointed.

We had expected to see (and share) a photo of our daughter this week. We were making plans to travel, take time off of work, and begin our new life.

Because of the specific and repeated assurances we have had, we never expected what happened.

We are trying to be optimistic, but remain concerned that this kind of highly unusual delay is caused by factors that will lead to more even delays, and limit the ability of our agency to help us.

So, we’re doing our best to hang in there. We’re slowly convincing ourselves that Jenny will be here, but is running a little late. As the soon-to-be outnumbered male, I guess I’ll need to get used to that.

“Wait till next year” is a bit too familiar to Chicago sports fans. It’s kind of a seasonal ritual: it happens every summer and every fall. I never expected to hear that about our adoption.