how are you holding up? and other questions

Many of you have asked questions about my last blog post, so...

How are you holding up?

Um, I'm not really sure how to honestly answer that question. I'm listening to a lot of Gungor and Laura Story's Blessings and similar songs in a playlist I made a titled "encouragement" long ago for such a time as this. I'm diving into the Psalms. I'm flipping through albums of memories from Zoe's adoption exactly three years ago and viewing each one as a stone of remembrance of what God has already done in and through our family and her first family. 

Oh, and I'm eating all the things. I like to eat my feelings, and none of them have been healthy this week. 

So if you're homestudy ready now, does this mean...?

No. Let's just stop right there.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the lingo, homestudy ready is an adjective used to describe an adoptive family who has been approved to adopt by a licensed social worker and who has the report - the homestudy - to prove it. That homestudy is used to evaluate a family's ability to be a safe, loving, and suitable adoptive match for a child in need. When prospective adoption situations arise, agencies and lawyers seek out homestudy ready families first, because having a homestudy is like putting your money where your mouth is - it means you aren't just talking the talk of adoption, but you're willing to walk the walk of being scrutinized and background checked and physically examined and having your children medically cleared and getting personal references and providing every imaginable financial detail and discussing any hard parts of your part and... well, let's just say it's a lot. 

(Note: I'm not complaining about that. It's a lot because it should be a lot. When a child loses his or her first family - by choice or abuse or death or disease or poverty* or some other measure of brokenness - the next family to receive the child should be screened well so that the child doesn't have to experience any additional trauma. I'm all for homestudying the heck out of prospective adoptive parents. I'm just saying it can be a lot to open yourself up to, even with the best social worker.)

*Side note: poverty alone shouldn't be a reason for adoption because financial and social supports can and should be extended to try to allow the first family to parent the child. If that is truly attempted and doesn't work, then that means another reason is present in addition to poverty. But when poverty is the only problem, then the solution should be something else other than adoption.

When friends ask what's next for us if this adoption doesn't happen and we have a homestudy ready and we're already pre-approved for international adoption by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, they're asking if we're going to adopt a different child. The answer? No. Not unless God moves us in a way we're not expecting right now.

Adoptions fall through. We know that. But our family has never experienced an adoption failure before, and words can't describe this hurt. It's like having a miscarriage but the baby is fine, thank God, but you'll never get to hold and love and raise him like you expected so the loss and grief and sadness is still deep and profound. Loving someone else is always risky, and right now we're feeling too raw to even consider that sort of risk again.

We've said no before and had God turn it into a yes, so we'll see what happens this time. We weren't planning to adopt yet when my friend Georgeanna contacted us about Zoe and we weren't planning to adopt three at once or from Uganda at all until another friend shared a waiting sibling group with us, so we've learned to hold our "no" loosely. After all, we want to be faithful in all circumstances, not just the ones we choose. But for now, our hearts are with "Sam" and not ready to open up to any other children than him and the six God has already placed in our home.

How's Lee? How're the kids?

Lee is grieving hard too. From comments made to us in passing, we've realized some people assume I'm the driving force in our adoptions. That couldn't be more wrong. Lee and I are a team. I guess you could say he's the leader and I'm the mouthpiece. His heart is as 100% in this adoption as mine is.

We haven't told all of the kids yet. Some are too young to fully understand. The big girls do know, though. They say they won't be sad until they know for sure that he's going to be adopted by the other family. Patience says she's sure the other family is going to say no to the referral and then we're going to get to be Sam's family. I'd love for her to be right.

Do you think you might be able to adopt Sam after all?

I really don't know. I want to say yes. I want this to work out in the way we imagined. I want God's plan for this to match with ours. I want to be hopeful.

But hoping hurts right now.

So I'm not hoping. I am trusting:

that God is still God.

that God has a plan for us and for Sam and for their birth mother and for the family considering the referral and for you.

that God's plan is far superior than anything I could ever imagine.

that he loves me more than I will ever understand.

that beauty can still come out of brokenness.

None of this is in our hands right now, so we'll wait and trust as our homestudy and dossier sit ready in a drawer, just in case.

dingle, party of 8.

I'm not sure how to begin this post. I've only shared about this on friends-only FB statuses so far, so forgive me for the surprise for the rest of you. I didn't want to go public until I felt like the situation was more firm.

I don't think we'll be able to adopt the boy we've named Sam in our hearts.

Yes, he's Zoe's brother biologically. Yes, we were contacted to adopt him. Yes, we prayed over the opportunity and said yes. Yes, we've planned and sacrificed and been fingerprinted and background checked and scrutinized and spent some money toward that end. Yes, we have two or three boxes labeled "Sam" full of baby & toddler stuff in the attic. Yes, we love him and always will, no matter what.

But when I blogged about the possible adoption, I titled it "dingle, party of 9?" with the question mark on purpose. When we announced our news then, we shared:

Right now, we’re in the early stages, so there’s a possibility something could change. That said, we’re far enough in that we feel safe sharing with confidence that this process will end in Zoe and her brother growing up as siblings in our family. (In other words, if this were a pregnancy, we’d be entering the second trimester - not completely out of the woods for complications but far enough along that the odds of everything else going smoothly are pretty good.)

Well, something changed. It seems another family will get to hold and love and raise "Sam."

In Taiwan, large families aren't the norm, HIV is even more stigmatized than it is here, and people with special needs sometimes face discrimination. Don't get me wrong - I love Taiwan. I can't wait until the day we return, whether to visit or for this adoption if the tide turns back to us. But just as I love America while still acknowledging both flaws and cultural issues present here, I'm doing the same here for the island country branded on my heart.

The orphanage where "Sam" lives decided, based on our family size and special needs present in our home, to present Zoe's birth mother with a smaller family to consider and suggested that he would be better served by those prospective adoptive parents. She signed off on that. We have to respect that decision, even as it breaks our heart. It would be arrogantly hypocritical for us to advocate for foreign countries and first parents to have autonomy in adoption decisions and then rail against those principles when it doesn't work out for us like we'd like.

The referral for the child we hoped to adopt has been presented to a different family.

If they say no because of certain risk factors in his file, the referral might return to us. At this point, though, I have to assume they will say yes. Why? Well, I know we would say yes in a second and immediately pay the fees necessary for the adoption services. That money is waiting in an account at our bank, ready for that purpose. Given that we would say yes in a heartbeat, I can't imagine why they wouldn't do the same. We've shared our information with their agency and with the orphanage, in hopes that the siblings will have contact in the future even if they can't grow up as siblings.

Do I know what God is teaching us through this right now? No, to be honest, I really don't. But I know that he is good and perfect and that he loves us and Zoe and her brother and this other family more than I could ever feel or imagine, so we're trusting him to write the next page in each of our stories.

After all, God has gone above and beyond anything we could ever have hoped for our family so far, including the scenes below (captured by our friends at The Archibald Project) from three years ago when we met Zoe for the first time in Taiwan. So for now, we're settling in and striving for contentment as Dingle, party of 8.

an open letter to Pat Robertson, from the adoptive mother of a child with brain damage

Dear Mr. Robertson,

I want you to look at this face.

Isn't she darling?

I want you to look at her because that's the face that came to mind when I heard your words yesterday.

On The 700 Club, you answered a question from a single mother of three children, each adopted from a different country. This mother wrote in for help understanding why the men she dated always left as soon as they found out that her daughters were adopted.

Your response? "A man doesn't want to take on the United Nations." And "you don't know what problems" there will be when you adopt. You continued with the cautionary tale of a family you know who adopted a "child [who] had brain damage, you know, grew up weird." As you disagreed with your co-host, you excused your comments by saying, "you just never know what's been done to a child before you get that child: what kind of sexual abuse there has been, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation."

I want you to know this: We didn't adopt a problem. We adopted a child. She was knit together in her mother's womb, fearfully and wonderfully made. She is an image bearer of the one true God. She laughs at me, loves her brother and sister, and cries when she's hurting or hungry.

She was also born with brain damage. 

And we love her.

Perhaps I'm naive to be writing this letter to you. After all, a year ago you said that a man could divorce his wife with Alzheimer's because she was "not there" anymore, less of a person than she had been when she married him. Two years ago, you said adoption "can be a blessing if you get the right child." Perhaps I'm naive in thinking that Zoe's sweet face would change how you think and speak about orphans like her, but it's worth a try because God used her face (and is now using her life) to change us.

You said that we can help and love orphans but that doesn't mean we have to take them - and, in your words, their "problems" - into our homes. When my husband heard your words, he said "No, we don't have to do it. We get the privilege of doing it."

That's a real man. I'm thankful to be married to him and thankful to parent these three darlings with him.

You said your friend's child "grew up weird," and that's certainly a possibility for our kids too. If "weird" involves caring for orphans and widows in the name of Christ and laying down our lives for others as Christ did and believing God's Word to be true, then I pray you'll have plenty of reasons to call each of our children weird.

It surely wouldn't be the first time someone used that word to describe us.

Sincerely,
A mom who is blessed by all three of my children


PS - If you'd like to see a video of The 700 Club segment that prompted this post, here's the only version I can find right now.

would you pray for another baby girl who needs a family?

Our adoption coordinator just asked if I could get the word out about another baby girl in Taiwan who needs a family. She's in the same home as Zoe Amanda. She is seven months old. Her mother is 16 and gave birth alone in a hotel room; she was later found wandering the streets. This baby girl also has special needs; the primary diagnosis appears to be schizencephaly, which is a rare developmental disorder of the brain. She is able to track items with her eyes and enjoys being held and loved by the caregivers in the children's home where she and Zoe Amanda are living now. Some short videos and medical records are available for families who are seriously interested.

image source via pinterest

Please pray that God would provide a family for this little girl and, in the words of Psalm 68:6, "set the lonely into families."


If you're interested in adopting her or know someone who might be, please contact me at shannon@dinglefest.com. Because of changes to Taiwanese adoption law, the process of getting everything together and submitted to the courts in Taiwan would need to be accelerated. A home study should already be done, or a family must be willing to have that process expedited. (Ours was done in less than a week, so it's possible to rush it.) The total adoption cost will be $20,000-25,000.




P.S. - Tomorrow I'll have a post with loads of pictures, more in line with the posts I usually have around Dinglefestopia, so if you've been missing those, don't worry... they're coming!