Holding My Breath

Over the course of the last two and a half years, I have learned not to hold my breath when it comes to anticipating milestones for eventually getting our child. From the moment we submitted application, we hit obstacle after obstacle.  I typically tend to see the glass half full so despite the seemingly endless series of setbacks, I constantly expected things to get better.  But while the adoption process hasn’t soured me and turned my optimism to pessimism, it has forced me to become a realist. 
 
In reality, I don’t think we will be traveling until March.  But in the back of my mind, the positive-thinking Jill still holds hope for a February travel date.  As indicated in my previous post, one of the most recent delays is due to our agency’s license expiring and a backlog of agencies waiting for the same thing.  Without a license, the Ministry of Women in Ethiopia will not issue letters of recommendation for adoptive families and without that letter, no court date will be issued.  And so, on January 25^th our letter was due in court, but did not materialize.  Our case was then issued a new deadline of February 8^th – this Friday for the letter to arrive.  There have been murmurings that the Ministry was to start issuing letters again this week.  Ours would be the first of our agency’s cases (as far as I know) for which the letter is due. 
 
Potentially, then, on Friday, if our letter is received, we could be issued a court date shortly thereafter.  The other caveat, however, is that supposedly Ethiopian courts are closed until February 22^nd.  Yet court dates are still being issued and I have heard that they aren’t exactly closed, but are catching up on a build up of cases.  Are we one of those cases?  I’m not sure.  Optimistically, the letter could be received Friday, a court date could be issued shortly thereafter, and we could be traveling in two weeks.  That is the best case, and highly unlikely scenario. 
 
Worst case scenario is that our letter is not received, we are issued a new deadline date two weeks down the road, we receive a court date soon after that, and travel mid-March.  Well, I suppose that is not worst case scenario, but I can’t emotionally afford to think of every potential thing that could go wrong!
 
Clearly, we have no answers.  And with no answers and vague indications of what actually is transpiring across the world where our son is waiting for us, we cling to hypotheses.  We find ourselves trying to calculate and make sense of something that is futile.  “Well, IF, our letter is received Friday, and they immediately issue a court date and we get a court date even during this supposed closure, we could spend Valentine’s Day in Ethiopia!”  Right.  Even optimistic Jill realizes the impossibility of that one.  Still, over a glass or two of wine at night, we fantasize about the day, hopefully sooner than later, when the voice on the other end of the phone will say, “book your tickets.  You’re going to see your son.”