Part 3/8: Unexpected Setbacks
1999 started out as a tough year. Rodney, a university professor of speech/theatre, was up for tenure and spent countless hours compiling a portfolio documenting his achievements. He also directed a show in February, leaving me as a de facto single mom for about two months. We knew a final tenure decision wouldn't come until spring, and though we were optimistic, he wasn't 100% confident. Meanwhile, some chronic oral problems, caused in part by a surgery almost a year earlier, had mushroomed into a highly stressful and painful situation -- especially for a person who makes a living by lecturing.
Worried about my spouse -- and not seeing much improvement after visits to doctors and dentists -- I gingerly broached the idea of postponing or halting the adoption. Did he really need more tension in his life? Despite his difficulties, Rod rejected my suggestion, assuring me that things would have to get a lot worse before he would consider such a drastic step.
Things got better instead. The tenure came through, causing an immediate improvement in the family mood. Alice, now a vigorous and delightful child, celebrated her third birthday in June, amid frequent questions about WHEN her baby sister was going to arrive. A combination of therapies was found that eased Rod's physical difficulties. I mailed out the first database directory, and persuaded Martha Osborne (of the RainbowKids cyber-magazine) to set up a new Internet listserv dedicated to Thai adoption.
WACAP's "healthy child" Thai referrals had inexplicably slowed, and we were stuck at #2 in line for an eternity. Watching many acquaintances, most of them in process for a much shorter time than us, return with children from China was disheartening. I had kept a handle on my anxiety and longings for months, but I was starting to get impatient -- and tired. Still, the little "Made in Thailand" coincidences continued just often enough to keep me believing that Someone was pushing us toward Bangkok. The family in front of us finally got their good tidings in July. I felt sure the next happy news would be ours.
But when the phone rang in mid-August, close to our one-year dossier anniversary, I heard something completely unexpected. The Thai Red Cross Home -- a small orphanage with a capacity of 45 to 50 children -- had changed its parent age rules, our WACAP social worker explained. At almost 42, I was now considered too old to adopt a child the age we had requested, and for which we'd been approved a year earlier. (For some reason, the fact that Rod was five years older than me didn't faze the Thais -- it was the mom's age they were concerned about.)
Mothers between 40 and 45 would now be allowed to take a child no younger than 2. As a compromise, the Red Cross offered to give us an 18-month-old -- which would have been perfectly fine with us -- but then explained that there were no adoption-ready girls that age, except for a few with quite significant special needs. Right now, they had only girls under 12 months or well over 3 years. They had no idea when a child the "right" age would materialize.
Our social worker told us that this was not a national Thai rule but rather a rule created by the Red Cross, which has a great degree of authority over its own placements. WACAP immediately began a series of letters and phone calls, urging the Red Cross officials to grandfather us in and give us the oldest young child available. They diplomatically protested the unfairness of keeping our dossier for a year, and then imposing the new rules when we came due for a referral.
Privately, WACAP officials gave us a 50:50 chance of success. Meanwhile, they presented another option: switch to their China program. All fees paid thus far could be applied. We'd need a new dossier and an amended home study, but WACAP advised us to get to work. It was difficult to predict if there would be a swift resolution, or no word at all for months.
We were stunned. Coming from the world of China adoption, characterized by huge orphanages with hundreds of waiting children, I found it difficult to wrap my mind around the idea that there were no eligible girls between 12 and 36 months old at the orphanage. Rodney resisted my suggestion that we switch our request to a boy; he still wanted a girl. Neither of us really wanted to adopt a child older than Alice -- who by now was locked into the "eldest child" mode and who had her heart set on a little sister.
My brain churned with unanswered questions. So many of the Thai database families had come forward for older kids and kids with serious special needs. Would our relative inflexibility about gender, age, and health -- which I knew I wasn't going to be able to alter -- doom our process? Had we wasted a year waiting and praying and hoping for something that would never happen? Were those Thailand "messages" I'd received truly just coincidences? Would we have to tell Alice that she'd wait yet another year, or more, for the beloved "mei mei" we'd been talking about for so long?
And would I find someone to take over the database: now involving more than 160 families who were beginning to network with each other? Without a Thai child, my oversight of the directory and newsletters would be problematic, at best.
Sick at heart, we began going through the motions: paying FRC to amend our homestudy for a China adoption, collecting a new set of documents. Alas, it was now clear that we'd have to redo our INS paperwork as well; the current approval would expire in early January, and regardless of what happened, there was no way we'd finish an adoption by then. We went back for more fingerprints, this time stuck with a fee of $455. I frantically e-mailed my adoption buddies, several of them found through the database. I battled depression. I prayed a lot.
Our WACAP SW called periodically, merely to say that nothing was happening. She had planned a trip to Thailand, and we hoped that she'd soon be able to plead our case in person, but the journey was postponed until late October. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait that long. In mid-September, before we finished the China paperwork, we were informed that a Thai referral was apparently coming -- that a child about 16 months old would be assigned to us sometime in October. We had no clue how this girl had come to be ours, other than the cryptic statement that she had been set for referral to another family but the assignment had never been made. Now her papers had to be redone, leaving us hanging without a name, birth date, history, or medical information.
Cautiously happy but low on patience, we waited another six weeks. We carefully assembled a small package for our SW to take to our still-unknown child: a soft blanket that we'd slept with, a fuzzy elephant toy, a photo album, and a kiddie tape recorder with a cassette of us talking and singing to her. We weren't sure how much access she'd have to these things, but we had to try.
Finally, while our SW was in Bangkok, a stateside WACAP staff member called to tell us that the Red Cross had unexpectedly sent our referral packet. Courtesy of our home fax machine, we found out at 6 p.m. on a Thursday that we had a daughter named Nuthamon, born in August 1998. She had arrived at the orphanage within days of our dossier. Three blurry faxed photos, taken in May, showed a chubby-cheeked angel with sparkling eyes. Bracing herself on her elbows and staring unflinchingly at the camera, she seemed to say, "Here I am, come and get me."
At 14 months, she was younger than we'd been led to expect. And when I started doing the math, I had to laugh. If her gestation period had been normal, as her records implied, our child might easily have been conceived on that day when I'd encountered the "Made in Thailand" boxes in the grocery store -- and made up my mind to go find her.