Happy Birthday Baby Girl!

 I woke up this morning and imagined little A sitting in front of a birthday cake attempting to blow out 3 birthday candles while everyone clapped and cheered.  I stopped myself when the positive Happy Birthday vision began to fade into an empty feeling that usually follows my visualizations and memories of my sweet baby girl.   I am determined today to be positive and to send positive thoughts out in to the universe especially to Patna for Anjali.  I opened the photo album of our visit to see her in December and  I sang Happy Birthday to her as I thumbed through pictures of her and felt joy watching her smile and play. Happy Birthday my sweet girl...I send a big hug and kiss to you.

The whites, pinks, and yellows have started to bloom here in Raleigh, next will come the greens.  It is the first week of Spring, a time for renewal and hope.  I am determined to pull myself out of a place of frustration and sadness and focus on the happy life we will have with Anjali once she gets here and enjoy the now.  It has been a hard couple of months.  I think I have been grieving the fact that we aren't going to bring her home in April which is the date I had been so fixated upon for so long.   I can't stay in this place.  First of all, I have too many blessings in my life.  I have an amazing husband and family, a beautiful house and job I enjoy.  I have a beautiful daughter waiting for us who is having fun with her brothers and sisters at the orphanage in the meantime.

There  is this row of ten trees on a road in my neighborhood that blooms bright white flowers at the beginning of every Spring.  When you come around the bend where they are situated, their beauty takes your breath away.  We ARE coming around the bend in this adoption process...the end is not yet in sight, but I've got to keep my spirits up and keep things in perspective.

Paperwork Madness

This week was a frustrating week in Adoptionland.  The amount of paperwork that needs to be submitted in the adoption process is mind-numbing.  The first and probably most  time-consuming set of documents that are needed is the Home Study.  This set of documents that seem to ask for every imaginable nuance of who you are and includes 4 visits from a social worker took us a couple of months to complete.  It is your first test to prove you are fit to be parents and more importantly muster the adoption process.  Anyways, we got word over the weekend that our Home Study was set to expire in June and that our social worker was retiring so we would be assigned a new one and would need to renew our Home Study.  This includes additional fees, new paperwork , new sets of fingerprints, criminal background checks, employment verification....blah, blah, blah...

If this wasn't enough instead of  getting news that NOC was approved this week, we got notification from CARA that a couple of questions on our physical exam weren't answered by our doctor.  These questions were missed by our doctor, our caseworker, us, and the gazillion other layers of bureaucratic checks that came before including their own.  I was simply in shock when I heard this...really, REALLY?  This paperwork has been with them for close to a year.  We were told we needed to get the doctor to complete the form again and resubmit, notarized and apostilled...immediately.  We made a scrambled attempt to get everything done and were able to do so in a little over 1 day ...they have emailed copies of the new forms and will get the originals early next week.

I just want to know where the accountability is in this whole process.  The only people who get penalized for this process taking so long are the parents and the child.  The emotional and financial stress is relentless.   It doesn't matter if a child needs medical attention or is spending her formative years in an orphanage. You would think it would...why doesn't it?  Why is there no incentive, moral or otherwise to get things done in a reasonable amount of time?

Monday is my daughter's 3rd birthday.  My caseworker allowed me to send her a gift with the new paperwork being sent by Fed Ex to India.  I found a cute wind-up sheep doll and a book about lambs...and I found the perfect birthday card.  It has a pig with a set of birthday balloons in it's mouth that is swimming through a body of water.  The message on the inside reads:

"Ain't no river wide enough to keep me away from you, babe.  

Happy Birthday!"

On a side note, I found out this week that once we receive NOC, we can take over guardianship of Anjali.  We can't take her home until after the case has been through court which could be quite a while, but I could go to India and live with her there.   Come June...there are some serious decisions to be made about how much longer I wait for this adoption process to take it's natural course.

Why India?

People who don't understand the international adoption process will often ask if you had to choose a specific country and when I say yes, I often get asked why I chose India.  My mother is from India and I was born there, but I don't really look Indian, I much more resemble my father who is American despite my dark hair and dark eyes.  In all honesty, most people think I am Latina or Middle Eastern.  Culturally I would say I am far more American than Indian though ironically I have more relatives in India than I do in the U.S.  Adam and I considered domestic adoption first, but connected with a domestic adoption lawyer who we didn't care for, so we decided to go the international route.  Adam and I were married in India in December of 2009 and although he wasn't as concerned as I was as to which country we chose, I would definitely say India holds a special place in our hearts.  My mother and father were actually living in the U.S. when they became pregnant with me.  They realized it would be just as cheap to fly to India to have me as pay for medical care in the U.S. and my mother wanted to be near her family for my birth.  When my mother was 7 months pregnant she got on a plane with my brother who was 15 months old at the time to be reunited with her family who she hadn't seen since she first came to the U.S. a few years earlier.   My father came to India right around the delivery date.  He ran 6 miles through Pune to get to me the morning I was born.  Unfortunately, he got amoebic dysentery and was really sick...we had to leave India in a hurry.  I was only 10 days old.

In India as a young girl

We visited India several times while I was growing up.  On one such visit when I was around seven years old, the reality and contrast of poverty in India really hit home for me.  We were at the train station and I distinctly remember wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and bright yellow pants as we waited for our train.  A little beggar girl came up to us holding out her hand for money.  She was about the same age as me.  She began to sing in a sweet yet powerful voice and play spoons.  She would glance back at a woman who I am assuming was her mother.  Her mother sat stoically in a corner.  She had no legs or arms.  I realized the girl was essentially working to support herself and her mom.  I remember looking down at my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt thinking how unfair it was that she had so little and I had so much.  It was the first time I recognized my privileged life and it left a big impression on me and has stayed with me all these years. It means a lot to me to be able to bring a young girl who might  have otherwise been very limited by her poverty and special needs to be with our family in the U.S. where she will receive the care of two loving parents as well as an amazing extended family and be able to receive the best medical care.  I do hope she maintains a connection to India.  I envision her some day going back to Missionaries of Charity  to volunteer and help out  another set of orphans or homeless children. I do feel in my heart that  Anjali was somehow meant to be ours and I can't wait to get back to India to bring her home.

Just me and my sweet Anjali!