One minute, forty-one
seconds - that was the duration of the phone call from my husband one Saturday
afternoon. The phone call that sent us
into fast-forward mode, the phone call that brought news I've reflected back on
for the past month now.
Let me back up a
bit. This phone call was completely
unexpected on this particular Saturday afternoon. I was at a birthday party for my daughters'
friend who was turning five. Ben stayed
home to knock off elements on the honey-do list while I went to the party with
the girls.
Forty-five minutes or
so into the party, my phone rings. I look
at the screen - it's Ben. Hmmm, I think to myself - curious as to
why he'd be calling.
"You got a letter from Homeland Security,"
he says after I answer.
Instantly, my heart
began to beat deafeningly inside my head.
My mind began a frenzy of thoughts:
What! It's only been a mere week and a half
since we went down to USCIS for our biometric fingerprinting. Our agency told
us it would normally be two to four months wait for our background check to
come back. There must have been a
problem. What could have gone wrong?
I could not help but
mentally prepare for the worst. This must be the end. More than three years of preparation would
all come to a halt if we were not approved.
"Do you want me to open it?" I hear
Ben say from the other end. I am brought
back down from my frenzy.
Of course I wanted him
to open it. There was just no way I
could wait another hour and a half before I returned home to open it
myself. I needed to know what the news
was in that very moment. What was likely
mere seconds had already felt like a week in my worries.
I could hear the
rustling of the envelope as he broke the seal. The whisper of the paper sliding
out of the envelope as my mind kept playing various scenarios over in my
head. Tears were on the verge of
emerging. I was on the edge of losing it
at a five year old's birthday party.
"We're approved for up to 3 children,"
Ben declared remarkably calmly in comparison to the mental state I had worried
myself into.
I could feel a major
adrenaline dump as I began to wonder at how I had possibly doubted the
approval. God has shown his own
fingerprints in each and every step of this adoption adventure. Why would I have allowed myself to worry in
such a way that made that one minute, forty-one second phone call feel longer
than the forty-five minutes of the birthday party prior to my phone ringing?
One of the things I
have learned over and over again on this adoption adventure is that nothing -
and I do mean nothing - goes according to the "normal" timeline. After a grueling home study process which
resulted in twenty months of back and forth rather than the
"normal" four to six months, I guess I was taken aback by the speed and
ease in which the approval had come. This
time there were no hiccups, no clarifications, no missing pieces.
Ben's voice echoed in
my head as the waterworks sprung from my eyes.
However, this time they were tears of joy, tears of relief, tears of
thankfulness, tears of hope. The timing
of this approval was nothing short of a miracle.
Yep, I lost it at a
five year old's birthday party. I did
not care. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Having had the privilege to witness many of
our friends go through their own adoption journeys, this was finally forward
progress for my family's adoption adventure.
Those children we were approved
for would become our children.
We're approved
for up to 3 children. APPROVED. We're approved.
***This phone call occurred one month ago, yesterday. Tomorrow, we mail in all but two of our Dossier documents to our placing agency to be translated, apostilled and sent to the Dominican Republic.
