Getting Ready

The whole screening process for our adoption went much quicker than we anticipated. Everyone advises you to be prepared for a long wait, and in our mind it would take 4-6 months to go through our screening before we would be approved to adopt. And so when we were done after one month we couldn’t quite believe it. Suddenly we were in the “waiting for our baby” phase, and we were caught off guard; we were about to become parents! This was a more sobering and scary thought than I expected it to be. And so we asked for two months to ‘get ready’ before we would be able to accept a baby.

Our reasoning was that we were going on a holiday in three weeks, my husband had a conference he was attending in a month, and we felt we needed time to get prepared. I didn’t want a new baby while my husband was away, and we wanted to get our baby room ready and settle into the ‘pregnant’ stage of our adoption. Of course, we didn’t know whether we would be matched with a child after two weeks, two months or two years. Who knows? But we still felt we needed some time.

But what does prepare mean? We were lent a cot which we set up in the baby room. We were given a pram and car seat, which we are still trying to figure out (why is it so difficult to put together and take apart? I can’t imagine doing it with a baby in tow!). We went shopping for a few baby things for the room; blankets, facecloths, towels, one or two outfits. We spoke to friends about how children have changed their lives. We went on an “expecting course” with pregnant couples to get advice on how to navigate a new addition to the family and still keep our marriage strong. We have slept in, eaten out, watched movies, watched series, dozed in bed, lay in the bath, read a good book, read any book, done nothing, and tried to do everything.

Let’s be honest, though. You are never ‘ready’, are you? We are trying to get everything ready for this baby, and we don’t even know it yet. We don’t know its likes and dislikes; we don’t know age, gender, race, or personality. We are preparing for the idea of a child, what we think it is going to be like to become a parent.

I don’t think you can ever know what it is like to be a parent until you are one. We can guess, think, assume, ask others; but we will never know fully until we receive our new addition to our family.

And so I sit in the ‘getting ready’ phase of our adoption, knowing that I will never really be ready for what is to come. Our lives are going to change in ways I cannot imagine. And yet, it is the most anticipated season of my life so far. The one thing I am more than ready for, is to love.