Comments on: Anger

By: jennyj

jennyj — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:09:45 +0000

Also in countries where you can only work through the goverment agency, it can takes a very long time to get your dossier to china in the first place. Here in the Uk, from the inital phone call to DTC it took us 18 months. This is pretty normal and some people wait longer! I sometimes read your comments about getting your documents to china in 6 months and think wow wouldn’t that be nice, it would mean that we would have a DTC of Aug 06 instead of Aug 07… what a nice wish….

By: Mom2Isabel

Mom2Isabel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:37:29 +0000

Waitingforyears_
I, for one, am guilty of forgetting at times the multinational group that we are here. Thank you for reminding us Americans that, as frustrating as it is for us, many of you from other countries, deal with far more frustrating aspects of this adoption roller coaster.
Forgive us our ethnocentricity.

Laureen
http://www.babysites.com/sites/laureenmary

By: Mom2Isabel

Mom2Isabel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:32:52 +0000

deegee said: ” Someone mentioned earlier that our country will not let the adoption proceed if they get pregnant. WHY IN THE WORLD NOT?”

They are from a country other than the U.S.

By: frannysmom

frannysmom — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:28:23 +0000

Since adopting my 2nd, I’ve been dealing with similarly intense emotions, but different ones. My dd was nearly two and had been with a foster family since she was about 3 months old. It was really clear to us that the family would have kept her if there were any way they could have. Their grief was heartbreaking and seeing it ranks right up there with my father’s death in terms of intense experiences of my life. Although they say now that they have seen how well she is doing with us that they are happy about where she is, I struggle with very intense feelings of guilt. Guilt that we get to hold her close and watch her get bigger and stronger everyday. The more powerfully we bond with her and she too us, the more I feel that guilt. This is a strange and unfamiliar experience to me and I wish there were more discussion here of this issue, but maybe my feelings are unusual.

By the way, our dd did suffer delays (though probably not serious) even though she was obviously entirely well cared for. Sometimes delays happen even with the best of care.

I can imagine that I also would feel angry if my dd had suffered from neglect. I might wonder though how much I don’t know about the reasons why, the situation that is so far removed from my own.

By: RayRDT

RayRDT — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:39:31 +0000

We feel very blessed and grateful to have our first daughter. She’s the sunshine in our lives :-) She was very well taken care of in China. And we can’t wait to be blessed a 2nd time (LID Dec. 2006) ! I do feel very sad about the wait (especially my daughter who can’t wait to meet her little sister Emily).

I really hope it won’t go farther than end of 2009 …

By: deegee

deegee — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:26:17 +0000

I can’t even feel anger anymore….I’m too exhausted from everything I read, hear and see about China’s one child policy. I have to say this has been the emotional rollercoaster of a lifetime.

2qts4me — I agree with you. We are all “trapped” by our agencies.

The standard response from our agency is typically “we can’t speculate on anything” — but what they CAN do, and have been quite successful at is to continue to TAKE people’s emotions, applications and money for a long, long ride. We often look up these international/chinese adoption websites to see if any of them are saying what’s going on with the wait — and we’ve yet to come across any of them being completely honest. I often ask my DH why these agencies don’t stop taking applications for China adoptions? Our best guess is that then their money train would end. We are “older” parents waiting in the never ending que as well — have no children of our own yet — and have felt very mislead by the entire system. Someone mentioned earlier that our country will not let the adoption proceed if they get pregnant. WHY IN THE WORLD NOT? If this is true, and my apologies for not knowing as it doesn’t apply to our specific situation…then our country doesn’t really sound any better than China? Whenever we ask our agency any questions — we are abruptly brushed off. We have looked into other adoption programs and no one will allow for concurrent adoptions. In fact, we have friends in the middle of a domestic adoption and they are also in the situation where there are more prospective parents than babies (Anglo babies, I believe). Hhhhmmmm….something just seems wrong with this process. And this process won’t change unless we insist that it does.

My DH and I wouldn’t be surprised if the China program completely shut down in a few years — which will have meant that we’ve waited and paid financially for nothing. The upside hopefully will be that the “wealthier” Chinese families become, the more they might be able to give these sweet Chinese babies homes where they can grow up and bond with their own culture. I’m all fine with this…but I am not fine with MY life being on hold for some “unknown” reason. Note to Agencies/US Gov: be respectful of us who are playing by the rules and help us get through this process a little easier.

The most confusing issue for us is that we have been told that China will never stop adopting their children out because it’s too big of a money maker for them. But apparently not big enough to deal with the dossier backlog.

And yes, we were mesmerized by the China’s Stolen Children documentary that aired on HBO a couple of nights ago…to think that sonograms have helped China abort an estimated 40,000,000+ little girls since they started using that technology. THIS type of information continues to keep us mentally exhausted and frustrated.

By: foxislandwa

foxislandwa — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:10:57 +0000

We started our China journey in September of 2006.
I am LID of Feb 24th/07. We had our dossier done much before this but Christmas came and went and got in the way of much of our paperwork (not to mention endless gov’t setbacks). When I first joined this group I felt almost embarrassed to post anything for fear of being too “new” in the line. As time rolls on I feel more and more confident that I have something to contribute also. I feel very badly for the countries that cannot do concurrent adoptions, we chose to adopt from Ethiopia also and now have a beautiful 9 month old boy. This adoption did not come without and hardships either including one lost referral for a 3 year old boy that will always be burned into my heart and mind. Our baby boy came with twelve fingers, it is called polydacltyle and it is very common actually I would hardly call that a “special need”. Everyone here deserves their child and every child deserves parents that love them and want them. I still hope and pray every day that our China adoption is not just a dream never to be realized. If I were to be angry at anyone I wouldn’t even know who that should be. Instead, I just hope and pray the seemingly endless wait will end and we will meet our baby.

By: Ruby Hill

Ruby Hill — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:04:19 +0000

I have been reading these posts and thinking about this subject before responding. We are still waiting for our four year old NSN son-we got a referral in June but he lives in Beijing so we still have to wait to go and get him. I don’t know what we will find, but I feel no anger even after waiting three years for him. I feel sad for a number of people, most of all our son, but not angry. How can I when I watch American children and the way that they are treated by our system?

An American child can be abused or neglected for five years until they get to school and their kindergarten teacher observes something not quite right. Then they report it, and there is an investigation. The first one probably isn’t conclusive. So it goes on. A year or two later, if the child’s family hasn’t moved, another report is filed, and another investigation that finds evidence of a problem. So social services are offered. A year or two later, if the family hasn’t moved, they fail to achieve results. So the child is removed from the home. They go to an emergency foster home for a couple of days, then to a longer term one before possibly an even longer term situation. In the meantime, their parents are in court to get them back or in counseling to learn parenting skills. A year or two later the child is returned to them. A year or two later evidence shows the same problems as before. The child is removed, goes to an emergency placement, etc. So here we have a child whose life has been filled with abuse and/or neglect and has lived with it for several years and is now so old and problematic that no one wants to adopt him/her. They live with such uncertainty that they suffer from depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, etc., and as a result they live with medications and counseling and continued uncertainty. If they have siblings, they may not be with them.

Now we can adopt them, but our legal system is weighted so heavily on the side of blood relatives that you can adopt this child and love this child and still lose this child to a belated challenge by a blood relative, and even if that doesn’t happen, you might be required to take them to visit relatives who, while important to the child, also failed to protect this child.

Preference will also be given to adoptive parents who can stay at home-important, since the child will have so many needs, but not necessarily possible for the average family.

So we have two very different systems and neither of them is best for the child, but I know which one makes me more angry.

By: hawaiigirl24

hawaiigirl24 — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:36:20 +0000

dear cab21404 I too am very frustrated with the whole china adoption our lid is 10-11-06 and we too were told that it would take no longer than a year to get our referral. Well here we are almost two years into it with absolutely NO IDEA when to expect our referral. We have heard from our agency numerous times that things will speed up…… well it hasn’t happened yet…. in fact things are slowing down more and more and with the olympics on the way who knows what is to come. We have tried to be patient but it has become unbearable, it sounds like it is your first child, it is our first child too. We are looking into other options out there… we just completed our training to foster-to-adopt in our state and hope that we can have a child in our arms soon. It is just sad that they keep taking people’s money and not telling the truth on what is really going on with the China Adoption program. We should be getting our referrals at the same time, or around the same time we wish you both the best and as frustrating as this has been just hang in there.

By: catherinethegreat

catherinethegreat — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:17:01 +0000

I know this will not be a popular sentiment, but I am not angry at the CCAA. I can understand why RQ is angry and others that have posted why they are angry. I totally get it. I am sad that my five year old had to be in an SWI for the first year of her life. However, at the same time, I am entirely grateful to the CCAA for uniting me with my two youngest children. I know this is easy for me to say as my DDs were both clearly well taken care of and developmentally on target at adoption. But, it still bothers me that they both had to wait so long to be united with their family. It seems so unfair for any child to wait as long as twinkletoes did….this of course bothers me the most. However, I just cannot lay this completely on the doorstep of the CCAA. For me, there are many issues in other countries that do not support IA that are to blame for this as well. Consider people like waitingforyears who live in countries where the CCAA does not allow WC and where the country she lives in does not change its own laws to facilitate WC adoption (I did not know this either) or those countries who will not allow concurrent adoptions. How on earth is that a child friendly policy? So to me the problem is not just with the CCAA or with the chinese government, the problems with IA are also within the governments in the countries that we live in that do not support a structure that faciliates IA. Homestudies that can take more than 6 months to complete, renewal of paperwork that is expensive and stressful with short durations of re-approval, rigidity regarding concurrent adoptions (the CCAA appears more flexible about this than many countries) all make me really upset and I think also contribute to children languishing in orphanages. And yes, I agree spending an inordinate amount of money on the Olympics at a time when a child goes hungry makes me really unhappy too!! And like AW, I feel so sad for the families still waiting. Its so hard.

Respectfully CTG