Drama

Well, just when I thought that I was moving on and not grieving about Dung anymore, I find this posted on the "Vietnam family forums" at our adoption agency's website:

USERNAME DELETED Location: DELETED Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 12:32 pm Post subject: We have a son!

I have been lurking for a while with a few posts, but I just need to share... Thursday we were matched with a beautiful little boy from Veitnam. He is on the Southeast Asia waiting child page and his "number" is XXXX [this was the random number assigned to Dung]. It is so great to see "I have a Family" written over his picture. We are just getting ready to send in our paperwork to start the home study. So we have a ways to go. They say it could be a year before we get him home. Hope it goes faster, but we are thrilled just to have been matched to him and know he will come home to us.


Obviously, the red and the italics are mine. They gave the little boy to a family who is even further behind us as far as paperwork goes. We have all our paperwork in, and had all of it in when the interviewed us.

I was so terribly upset, I sent an email to A., the social worker who runs the waiting child program.

This is what it said,


A.,

This feels like a childish reaction, is probably an inappropriate question, but, I am so upset I don't know how to not ask it.

This was posted at the "Vietnam" forum yesterday:

(I copied and pasted the other family's post).

I guess I had the impression that we were passed over for a family that was closer to having their homestudy done, but, that doesn't appear to be the case.

I feel like this is such a tremendous slap in the face, and honestly I am really confused.

If there was something about my husband and I that led the committee to feel that we are not committed to adopting an older child, or not ready, or some other correctable issue, I would really like to know what those issues are so that we can work on them.

I'm not sure what else to say, and I do not mean to sound childish or petty, I am just genuinely shocked and confused.

So, yesterday evening, A. called me. She said that she didn't want to reply to my email with another email, and wanted to address the fact that we "rightly feel betrayed and misled."

She said she didn't mean to mislead me, and that if she had implied that that was the reason for choosing another family, she was sorry, that she had placed three other children with families that day, and that in all the other cases timing was the number one factor. She apologized several times. Then she said, "I'm limited by confidentiality, in what I'm allowed to tell you about the other family and why they were chosen for this child instead of you. You are a qualified family and you should in no way feel that this was an indication that you weren't 'good enough' for this child. I went back over this other family's file, and they have had one particular life experience that you have not had, that I would not wish for you to have had, that I would not wish on anyone. But, the fact that they had experienced what they had experienced, it made it very hard for the committee to place this child with any other family."

I am not sure I responded to that. And she said, "I'm sorry, I think I've confused you more." And I said, "we'll it sounds to me like they lost a child of this age." And she didn't answer. She just said, "you have an excellent family, and I am quite certain that you will get a positive home study, and then you won't have to go through this horrible process again. I sense that you really came to love that little boy, and you are grieving right now, and that's understandable, and expected, and you need to give yourself time to grieve. You aren't the first family to be truly emotionally attached - and those other families, who experienced this same loss, have gone on to say that they found the right child for them."

So, I said, "so, it's not that you didn't like us or thought we were bad parents?" And she said, "Absolutely not." (I am ashamed of myself for having stooped to such a pathetically low self-esteem moment right then.)

And I said that I knew that our child was out there, waiting for us to find him (I meant "him or her" - we really are open to either gender, but, I said, "him"), and I want to find him."

And she said, "we will find him."

And then I thanked her for calling instead of emailing, and she said she didn't really think it was a conversation that could have been adequately resolved over the email.

So, I guess I feel better.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding. I am sorry if that other family lost a child, but, it doesn't really do anything to assuage the fact that I still feel kicked in the teeth.

Law Mommy