We had the last homestudy for our Russia update completed on September 14 and now I get to bounce in my seat for awhile until I receive the final notarized copy in the mail. I have to be very patient with this part. The last time I went through this with my social work agency, I was really under the gun and trying to submit my updated homestudy before May of 2006 (!) to meet the new China deadlines which placed more restrictions on who can and can't adopt from their country. People of a certain age, income or those with more than one marriage were in this newly despicable group and I would have had to get right in line with them with my second marriage on record.
I went around and around with my agency trying to get them to speed it up. Eventually, I cc'd the director on an email to Ruth, the AA in charge of my file. I got it toute suite after that, but of course in the process, made an eternal nemesis of dear, pokey Ruth. At the time, thinking I'd never need her services again, I thought good riddance and carried on with the rest of my day. Doesn' t the universe work in mysterious ways to jam a good lesson back in your face when you haven't learned it? So of course, three months later, I'm back in touch with Ruth trying to get her to help me transfer my information to Russia. Needless to say, Ruth isn't very warm, fuzzy or fast in anything she does with me now and I'll just bite my knuckles until it gets to the ridiculous point. I am paying her and she is providing a service for me so eventually she has to pony up. But I should have stayed on her good side.
That's the dark worry for adopting parents with this whole process. You have so many questions and concerns and you are paying dearly for every step of this adoption and it never seems to be as 1-2-3 easy as they first lay out to you when you are shopping agencies. So there are times when you want to explode and raise hell and ask why no one has gotten back to you with an answer about immigration forms or you ask two people in the agency the same question and they each give you a different answer. This is where I start to get a little crazy and the customer service part of me begs to be...serviced. But I dare not get short, snippy or curt with this group because in the back of my mind, I know that they hold the key to the door that's going to get me to Baby the Great. They could lose my file, never receive my email, or worst of all...the dark worry - assign me a colicky, two-headed monster that is not going to come anywhere near to my vision of Baby the Great. I can just see them holding the phone two feet away from their ear while I am hollering at the other end about why it's taking so long to get an answer. "Oh yes, Ms. Burdash we have the perfect baby for you...Hah aha haahah." I've voiced it, we all think it. I want a darling baby, a cute baby, a healthy baby. And if I have to suck up my temper and treat people whose service I think is lousy like they are the bees knees, then suck up I must.
Again, it's all part of the bigger lesson I am learning here as I shorten the distance between me and B the G. You would think, reading this, that I have some sort of Medusa like demeanor, but honestly I don't. It's a stressful process, made worse by the possibility of the rug being pulled out from under you at any time. And honestly some people I've encountered are truly slack about doing their jobs, and unfortunately for me they are tied in with my progress in adopting a child. Which is not to say there aren't also some truly heroic people in this business who have provided the best service I could have asked for. I guess it's like all aspects of daily life I guess, you deal with winners and losers, slackers and professionals. heroes and hangers on. I just want it all smooth and easy for MY adoption. And by god I should know by now it never will work that way.
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