And suddenly it was real
Thursday, September first was an amazing day, but it didn’t start out auspiciously. I woke up early with a headache that got worse as I started to get ready for work. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d probably slept four hours the night before. Stephanie was in Ashland visiting her best friend Kerry, and since I couldn’t sleep I’d stayed up late assembling furniture from IKEA (Effektiv for Stephanie’s part of the office in our home) and reading the DTCFebruary2005 Yahoo group, where the rumors were converging on Thursday as “referral day”.
Referral day. We’ve been waiting for this day for literally years now (but that’s a story for another time). Now it was nearly here, and I’d spent most of my waking, non-working hours reading the messages on the group list and anticipating. Of course, there were no guarantees that we’d get our referral on the first day, but we were pretty confident we’d get ours in this batch as rumors were consistent that referrals would come out for at least those with LIDs of 2/26 and earlier, and ours was 2/5. I checked the Yahoo group–the first referral had just come in on the East Coast!
By 8am, I knew I couldn’t go to work. I took some ibuprofen, sent e-mail to my colleagues, and sat down in front of the computer to watch the list. Our agency has a local office but is based in St. Louis, so that’s where DHL would be delivering the package of referrals from China. That meant they’d arrive a couple hours before the West Coast agencies would get theirs. I called Linda at CHI to tell her that Stephanie would be on the road, so if there was any news, she should call me. She told me she’d heard the night before that referrals would be here “soon”. I didn’t ask her to define that, but knowing Linda she would only have told me that if she was sure it was true, so my hope grew that we’d get our referral before the long weekend.
I grew more excited with each new announcement of referral on the list. These people that I’d come to know a little bit in the few days that I’d hung out on the list were now my comrades in waiting, and I felt a surprising amount of joy for each one as they announced “Just got the call!” and shared the vital details: birthdate, Chinese name, orphanage, province, and agency. I kept a lookout for the referrals from CHI, but so far there weren’t any. I called Stephanie and told her that Linda would be calling me, which she agreed was a good idea. I found a document listing all the vital information, with blanks to be filled in during “The Call”. I printed it out and set it and a pen by the phone.
Then I read a message from a woman whose agency had called, but it wasn’t “The Call.” Her referral wasn’t in the batch from China, and they didn’t know why. I remembered at that moment that as consistent as it usually is, adoption from China isn’t a sure thing. There are all kinds of things that could go wrong. Things that could have gone wrong for us, too. My cell phone rang, and I looked at the display: “Linda Annable”. This was it. Or not. I answered and mumbled something into the phone. “She’s so beautiful!” were the first words I heard, and I knew it was happening for us. It was real.
I didn’t even try to pretend I wasn’t crying as Linda gave me those simple but amazing bits of information: March 1st, 2005 (”It’s her 6 month birthday today,” Linda pointed out), Tong Min Juan, Tonggu in Jiangxi province. She was healthy and if the data is right big for such a young child in an orphanage. I wrote everything down, but I had the hardest time just finding the right places on the page. I thanked Linda, and she excused herself so she could make more happy calls to other families.
As soon as I hung up with Linda, I called Stephanie. She said, “Hello”, and I said “We got our referral.” It sounded stiff in my own ears, but I heard her intake of breath and knew that she was instantly crying too. “You’d better pull off the road,” I said. She told me there was no place and she’d have to call me back. It turns out she was going over a pass and even the shoulder was being used by slow trucks. Ten minutes later, she called back and I shared all the details I’d heard from Linda. It still wouldn’t be until the next day that we’d see her picture (together–Stephanie didn’t open the package until I got home from work), but we were already in love–with her name, her province, her birthday, her length, her orphanage. We didn’t choose any of those details, but each one is precious to us. It was CCAA who matched us to her, who matches all the children adopted from China to their parents. And in doing so, they work an amazing kind of magic–they turn dreams into reality, people into parents, me into a father. I hope they know how much we appreciate the work they do; I don’t know how I could ever put it into words.
Oh, and my headache was gone, too.