I wake up crying.  I’m on the tail-end of a dream about the little girl we met yesterday.  I watch as her caregivers hold her close and tell her that her mama and papa said “no”–they didn’t want her–and I’m so consumed with grief and sorrow for her sake that I cannot bear it.  The tears flow.  The sorrow has, literally, seeped into my muscles, and I’m so sore in my upper back and shoulders that I think I must have done something more strenuous than simply hold the child on my lap, touch her fingers and her cheek and clutch her hand as we walked outside with her.

Dan says that she wouldn’t have understood, that she was too young.  He says (almost wishfully) that the caregivers would have changed the subject and let the day progress like normal.  I’m not so sure, although I am desperate to believe it.

Again, we talk about the ethics of our decision.  How life will be for her.  How our friends Jamie and Jenny Collins would have taken her in, no matter what.  But we know our limits, and we have to be true to ourselves, in what we can handle.  But does that make us bad people

Since we don’t know when the next available appointment will be, we decide to take one day at a time.

We set out to find the National Museum of Art.  Paintings have always restored our souls, in whatever city we’ve been in.  The problem is finding the actual building.  The maps in our guide book don’t help.  In the book, the streets are written in English, whereas the actual street signs look like the sign above.  And there are no ready translations available.  We’ve met two people so far who speak passable English, and even then, it’s very difficult.  After turning down numerous wrong streets, we finally find it, and with a great sense of relief, spend the next hour browsing.  Indeed, the paintings are marvelous and remind us of The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, one of our favorite haunts.

We wend our way back onto the main street, and find a coffee shop, so we can again hash out what we’re feeling.  If it sounds like we’re really taking this whole thing too hard, it’s because we are.  This is a huge decision for us, one that we’ve not made lightly.  We’ve been married for a little over 17 years, and we’ve always thought that when the time came that we decided we would like to have a child, we would adopt.  There are plenty of children already “out there,” and we’d like to help.  And that last statement is not to make us appear better than we are, because if you’ve read the last few posts, there are limits to our goodness.

What makes this particular situation difficult is that we just learned yesterday that all our misery the first 24 hours of this trip was due to a Summit Adoption social worker’s mistake in our home study.  Back in November of 2007 when our updated home study was typed up and sent to us, I caught numerous mistakes.  I mean, the kind of mistakes that no one would make if they had actually been present at our home meeting.  I mean, the kind that are made if you have a standard form that you just drop the names into.  I mean, the kind that includes a whole section on infertility when Dan and I had been clear that that hasn’t been an issue with us.  Not that to have infertility issues is wrong; it simply isn’t the case with us.  On the last page of the home study (we have a copy of it here with us), it states boldly that we would like a child from 14 months to 3 years of either sex.  Everywhere else, it says “girl.”  I will accept half the blame.  It was a mistake I didn’t catch while proofing; there were so many others.

Also, we now believe that the director here was truly and genuinely shocked that first day, and all his aggressive gesturing was a normal Ukrainian “thing.”  Very few people smile here, and when they talk to each other, it sounds like they’re truly upset with each other.  That’s just the way the language comes out.  Everything seems catastrophic at first, but in the end, they somehow find a solution.  So, we are more confident that the director here will do everything in his power–legally–to find us a child.

We have eight business days to do so.  I guess once you “reject” a child, you are given eight days to get another referral and say “yes.”  After that, you have to return home and start over.

It’s about 5:30 pm as we head to the Ukrainian cafeteria-style restaurant we’ve found that makes food selection easy–point and nod.  We are waiting for the call, telling us that we have another appointment tomorrow.

It never comes.  So now we wait to receive the call on Sunday evening–for a Monday appointment.