Banging my head today over the frustrations of this paperwork! We STILL have not gotten Jay's GBI prints cleared. He failed the electronic prints yet again, and on December 9th we sent manually inked prints to our homestudy agency so the GBI could run a background name search. I've been trying to check on the status of those prints all week, including phone calls and emails, and today I finally got through to someone. I was told that they don't talk to families, only to the agencies, because "You are not our client, the agency is." When I pried for enough information to at least know if they have the prints, the woman I spoke to essentially said the electronic prints failed and we needed to send in manually inked cards. Well...that's what I was calling about and it answered my question in that I now know they don't have the manually inked cards in the system, otherwise she would have seen that.
So I had our social worker call the agency as ask "the lady at the front desk" (remember how much I like her?) exactly what day she sent those cards in to the GBI. Turns out she does have a record of sending the cards in, but it wasn't until 11 days after I sent them to her. So she sent them on December 20th, which means they got there right before Christmas. And we all know the prints didn't get checked during Christmas. So where are the prints? No one knows, and she cannot call the GBI to check until tomorrow, because she didn't get back from lunch until after 2 pm, and the GBI doesn't take phone calls after 2 pm. Nice.
So I am really trying not to be a butt head about all this. I am trying not to pass blame or get angry, but it's hard. Here's the crux of it: I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW God is in control. I trust him and I trust his timing. But it's still so hard when frustrating things like this happen ~things that should be so straightforward get so messed up! I feel like banging my head on the wall and stomping my feet. A grown-up temper tantrum, if you will.
But when I feel like this over the adoption paperwork, it always brings me back to the fact that adoption, in and of itself, is a painful, awful, frustrating part of life in this fallen world. As much as I want to have a tantrum over my frustration of not knowing the status of Jay's clearances, I can only imagine the frustration of our own children who will go through the rest of their lives never knowing their own biological status. As much as I am irritated by not being able to have control over our own paperwork, how irritated might my children be about how it seems everyone but themselves had control over their futures? They didn't get to choose their adoptive parents, their adoptive cultures, or even the foreign country of which they were to become citizens. They had the least control over their adoptions out of everyone involved. And when I feel like I could just scream because everything is taking so long... I remember that for myself, this paperwork will eventually come to an end. For my children, it will not end. In their lifetimes that ache of not knowing will never, ever go away. They will always wonder at the unanswered questions. They will search other Chinese faces looking for a hint of familiarity. They will question themselves and secretly long for even the tiniest shred of information. And it will never come.
So as I try to reason my way through being ticked off at "the lady at the front desk" for not mailing in the cards in a timely manner; at the GBI for not giving me more information regarding our clearances; at the Hague process for making our paperwork that much more complicated; and at anyone else who pretty much doesn't do his or her job exactly the way it should be done, I have to remember that there is no such thing as a "smooth" or "easy" adoption. Even if every part of our paperwork moved along perfectly and without a snag, our children's adoptions would still be shrouded in pain. The pain of a mother and father abandoning their infant in hopes of providing him or her with a better life; the pain of a child crying out for a parent whose comforting embrace will never be felt again; the pain of hunger, not only for food but also for affection, in a place where both are scarce; and the pain of the scars that will forever be tender to the touch--scars on the heart and mind. My paperwork woes are the least of the pain. It goes so much deeper, to the very heart of why we adopt. Babies and children are in orphanages. They have no one who calls them "mine". And even when they are adopted, they will still carry that pain of not knowing the circumstances of their births. Thus is life in our fallen world.
I thank God that He is in control, that He promises to place the fatherless in families, and that He is the Father to the fatherless. And I thank Him that he continues to remind me of that when I start to whine about my own circumstances. I've got to keep my eyes on the goal.
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