Final Conference Call Before a Referral

The wait is officially on.  Bethany requires a conference call with its "China team" before a family is eligible to be matched off the shared list, and ours was held today.  Since our home study had covered every possible aspect related to this adoption - what medical needs we are open to, age range of children we are open to, why we want to adopt, how much money we make, where we live, how much leave we plan to take, whether we can accommodate the medical appointments our future child may have and so on - I was actually quite nervous about what there was possibly left to ask and whether we would have to prove we're worthy of adopting. 

Instead we spent most of the nearly two-hour call rehashing what we had checked as a "yes" or as a "willing to discuss" on our openness form.  The conversation went deeper than just talking about the range of severity for each diagnosis.  The social worker cut to the chase and asked us questions like, Would you accept a heart condition that one surgery?  Multiple surgeries?  Limitations on your child's participation in everyday activities? With limb differences, will you accept a child with a missing arm, two missing arms, a missing leg, missing arms and one missing leg, both legs missing, but ability to be fit with a prosthetic?  Are you open to accepting a child with a heart condition, limb difference and cleft lip/palate?  How about just cleft lip/palate and a limb difference?  I wanted to say yes to everything, but then hemmed and hawed and felt guilty about our quickly-shrinking list of what we are truly open to. 

All that made the conversation bearable was that the social worker had  prefaced her questions with acknowledgment that families generally find these questions awkward and uncomfortable and that she and everyone else at the agency respects a family's honesty and its limits.  I felt she was very sincere and I recognized that she's asking tough questions now so she can make the best possible matches.  When the files are released each month, she and social workers from the 180 adoption agencies around the world have seconds to scan basic information - birth date, sex, orphanage name and medical diagnoses - and lock files for families.  She has 16 families eligible to match this coming month. 

The bright spot of our conversation is that the China team estimates that given our openness to a boy and certain conditions like cleft lip/palate, our wait for a referral could be three to four months.  It's hard to believe that by the summer, we could know who our child is.  The downside of hearing an estimate is that I hear "three to four months" and my heart thinks, "That means it could be this month, right?"