Long Story Short

(If you’re not coming here from the link on Facebook and want the really short version of the news here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/abasham  Mine is funnier though )

There’s a story about me on a car ride to church one evening that I only vaguely remember but I believe my mom has written down in the Bible she used at the time. On this ride I asked my dad, who was a pastor and would be preaching that evening, if his sermon was going to be long or short that evening (something special was going on the next day). He told me that it was going to be, “about average I guess, why?” and I apparently replied, “Oh, well, I was wondering if you knew how to make a long story short.”  Those of you who know me may know I can sometimes struggle doing that myself…hey, stop laughing! It’s true, I love a good story, and it’s hard to squeeze all the funny out of one if you make it too short. I’m going to do my best here, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

The reality is, I’ve lost count the number of times over the past two years that I’ve sat down and started to write a blog post about what’s going on in our adoption. Each event, be it good news or bad, seemed like a good time to do it but for some reason I could never quite find the right words. This was particularly true when the news was bad, it’s hard to make those stories funny and I would usually give up and delete what I had. Who would want to read me ranting about bureaucracy? You know…again. So, the more time that went by the more there was to say and as events unfolded, quite frankly, the less I wanted to say them.

We started the adoption process back in December of 2015, so as of right now we’re a quarter of the way into year number three. A year and a half after we started an adoption agency (not ours) here in the United States was investigated by the FBI for some financial shenanigans. One of the adoptions they were facilitating at the time was in Poland and this caused their newly elected government in Poland to pause all adoptions and re-vamp their processes for international adoption. Several months later the process started back up and we were matched with two little boys. We started readying the house, tried to learn some Polish (and failed), and…waited. Every now and again we would get word that another step in the new process was done and it was moving on to the next one. We eventually got to the point where we were waiting on approval from that last person in their government, and there we sat…waiting. As weeks passed, we started to get a feeling that the bottom was going to drop out, and sadly, it did. Last July I got a phone call from our adoption agency that our adoption was denied, and our attempt to get a second hearing on the matter was also denied, with a rather snarky letter from the Polish ministry that handles such things. After two and a half years of paperwork and waiting we were pretty devastated. Not a lot of funny to squeeze out of it, even now (though the thought of some bureaucrat writing an official document that, when translated, sounded a lot like a note a high schooler would write is kinda funny to me now). Regardless, it was painful, and I still have the picture of those two little boys on my phone.

So, after a week of licking our wounds we took a serious look at what we would do. Do we give up and just plan on feeding each other pudding in a nursing home in our old age or do we try again? (Lets be honest here, the odds of me making it to nursing home age is pretty slim, even if I avoid certain power tools the rest of my life #nochainsaws). Obviously, we chose the latter. So what now? Poland is basically closed to adoption at this point unless you’re Angelina Jolie so we looked through the other countries with similar requirements (the big one being how long you have to be there) and chose Hungary. From the start of this whole process we wanted to adopt siblings and, in an irony that gets funnier every time I think about it, we were warned that it’s not as common when adopting from Hungary.

It’s here we pause to take a moment and say aloud, “Long story short.” Yeah, I laughed too. Onward!

After the initial paperwork push, the first attempt at adoption was a process that kind of felt like it was strapped to a tranquilized turtle. It moved if you watched it closely enough. Hungary on the other hand has been more akin to that scene in Toy Story where they duck tape themselves to a rocket and light the fuse (I was going to use Wile E Coyote but that never ended well). We started the process of moving our adoption to Hungary at the end of August last year. Our home study was reopened, more paperwork had to be done, and some U.S. Government paperwork had to be re-done because it had been so long it was expiring. The goal was to resubmit all of it just after Thanksgiving, and we did it, with one little ironic hiccup.

We got a call from our adoption agency just before the end of this past November with a question about our paperwork. Everything was in order but there was one number they needed to ask about, and that was the number of potential immigration requests. You see, at the moment we were only requesting two…and they wondered if we’d consider three. There was a silence on both ends of the phone at that point, and that’s when they laid it on us. They had, in fact, already matched us with a sibling group a week prior. They’d thought about it, prayed about it, even contacted our social worker to see if she thought we’d be up to the task and everything came back green. So, what about us? Would we consider three kids instead of two? “Uh…” is about all I could get out of my mouth. We’ve never been parents before, zero to two was “crazy” but doable. Man to man coverage, only two birthdays to keep track of, it’s jumping into the deep end, sure, but in a controlled dive. This? This is being thrown off the high dive by your hands and feet into a piranha tank. “…we’d like to sleep on it,” we said.

It’s a funny thing, curiosity. If you don’t give it an inch you just might be able to let something go, but once you even think the word, “well….” It’ll gnaw on you until you give in. We slept on it all right, and woke up the next day thinking it might not be that crazy, right? I contacted them and asked for info. No pictures, no video, just data. Soon after we got a handful of paragraphs on each of the three. Two girls and a little brother. Imagine summing up your life in just a few paragraphs (say it with me again, “long story short”. Ha! (sigh)…gets me every time). After reading about each child we had to go over it again. No red flags. Not, “not as many as we’d thought there would be,” but none. The oldest is out of the age range we’d picked but not by that much, and the other two are well under it. Three is nuts, but, maybe? The real moment of truth, honestly, is just before you request pictures and video. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine someone saying no after getting pictures of the kids they’ve been matched with, and after a few days of mulling the pictures and video over the answer was yes, as a matter of fact we are that crazy.

This kicked off a flurry of realizations over the weekend that followed. Our house is gonna be too small, Amy’s going to need a new car (thanks for texting me that at 1am, babe), oh…and everything we’ve done up to this point was getting ready for two little boys. From the toys to the furniture to the paint on the walls, the room they would inhabit was not likely to look all that inviting to two girls. We had a lot of work to do. Thankfully, a lot of family and friends have stepped in a helped us get things re-done for three (we really, really appreciate it) and now only a few minor things remain. And that, uh…”short”… story leads us to where we are now.

We’re 26 days away from getting on a plane and starting the journey to bring our kids home and 30 days from meeting them for the first time. Our lives are about to become very different. We promise we’re not going into this blind. We know that this isn’t a Disney movie. The next six months are 99% likely to be the most difficult in our lives, and even then it may only get better because the crazy will be the new normal. There will be sleepless nights, tantrums, crying and we haven’t even gotten to the kids yet. The reality for them is that their lives are about to be turned upside down and it may be some time before they will be able to look at what we’re about to do as an act of love. For them it’s going to be exciting and new but painful, and there’s going to be a lot of loss for them before they can realize any gain. In between now and then Amy and I are going to have to do a lot of intentional things to catch up with their lives and become their mom and dad. However, we’re certain the day will come when they look at us and call us that, mom and dad. It will all be well worth it, especially on that day.

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