To adopt in Haiti one spouse must be 35 years of age, and if you one isn’t 35 years of age, you must have been married for 10 or more years. You must have no biological children, and you must be 19 years older than the child you are adopting.
Herein lies our problem.
- Even though we’ve been married for over ten years, I am 31, Amanda is 29 – strike 1.
- Even though the oldest child we are wanting to adopt is 5, so Amanda is 24 and I am almost 26 years older respectively, we have 3 biological children – strike 2.
Our attorney said that with both of these issues going against us, he would highly recommend us waiting until I reach 35 (4 more years) before we begin to adopt from Haiti, as the probability of our adoption taking an ‘indefinite amount of time’ is very high; and the possibility of being denied is very strong.
When looking at our adoption process, we have already spent months of dedicated time in preparing our family and our home and our paperwork for our adoption of our two Haitian children, and have invested unmentionable amounts of money just to get to the point of submitting our paperwork to the Haitian government.
We have invested time, emotion and love into our someday-to-be-children, felt the heartache of watching these two little children through the video screen of a computer, and wanting nothing more than to hold them in our arms, to give them the love and comforts that their biological parents could not give them. We’ve shed many, many tears thinking about how long it would be before they were safe at home with us, and how much hurt (especially our older girl) has gone through in loosing both her parents to death, and wanting to be there to comfort that pain and fill that emptiness.
We knew it was going to be tough, and yet, no one has actually quantified how tough it really was going to be for us to walk this road. The pain of possibility of year after year just waiting, and hoping; the possibility that even after all this we might be rejected. The fact that our little children will be sitting and waiting without parents to tuck them in at night during this whole time we fight for their future.
So now we’re supposed to walk away? I’m left numb, and disillusioned and saddened. Why would God send us here, just to find a dead-end road.
Surely we will take His hand and allow Him to lead us, and open doors in His time, in His time. He has brought us here, He will make a way!
As Antoine De Saint-Exupéry states: You risk much weeping if you allow yourself to be tamed. :~(
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