On Hope

I find that Hope is a very tricky element of the adoption journey.

Anyone who has ever heard the word patience in regard to their family building effort knows that Hope can be a very dangerous thing. It’s a simple equation: the more hopeful you are, the more painful the fall. And anyone who talks about optimism and how it’s supposed to attract good luck has clearly never been there.

So there are good reasons for trying to keep your Hope levels under control, however difficult that sometimes is.

On the other hand, the balance has to flip sides at one point. How do you prepare for the child that’s coming when you keep thinking it won’t happen? How do you even start preparing the people around you, your family, your friends, even your work team? How do you plan financially for diapers and ballet classes if you’re sure you’ll never have to worry about these?

So managing our levels of Hope seems like a very delicate, yet critical task to me. It’s something I struggled with in a lot of different ways, those past few months. And it’s still a struggle.

I am willing to believe that we’ll be parents one day and that we can start preparing. But anything more concrete seems too dangerous.

Our agency gave us a range of 8 to 24 months to referral.

I think buying baby clothes is fine. But moving our bedroom to free up the baby’s room? Telling my boss that I may very well go on parental leave in a few months? I’m not quite ready. And please don’t tell me to let myself be hopeful, I’m the one who’s risking the fall.

I can’t help but notice that today, we’ve waited for 1 month, that this leaves 23 months to the longest waiting time our agency has seen and that, if those numbers are right, 4.2% of our pregnancy has passed. That’s not even 2 weeks of a biological pregnancy. For now, this is about as far as I’ll go in hoping that our timeline isn’t too far off…