Last blog post was about physical pain. The more I thought about it, the more I
wanted to blog about emotional pain.
So, here we are…
This is kind of a long story… taking place over the last
8 years. I’ll try and keep it relatively
concise, but I also kinda need the outlet.
My wife and I always wanted a child, that was part of the
plan when we got together. We bought our
house, with the extra room, in hopes that there’d be a child in that extra
space.
Over time, we realized the way to make that happen, was
to adopt. In January 2010, we attended
what they call an adoption intake meeting and met Children’s Aid Society personnel
and started going through the steps outlined by CAS. Each step costs money, because of everyone
signing off on us and the paperwork involved… the bank, the doctors, the police
checks… everything costs money.
Fine. No problem. If that’s part of the process, cool, we’ll
do it.
Then, my wife and I lost our jobs. The same time, the same day. As wacky as that sounds, it’s the truth.
I contacted our rep and Children’s Aid and explained that
we needed to put this adoption process on hold.
We can’t really bring a child into our house with both of us out of
work. So, our file was put on hold until
we were able to get our employment situation stabilized.
Four months later, we both had new jobs. I contacted CAS again, and told them the good
news. They reopened our file and we got
back into the adoption process.
Then my wife got pregnant! Well, we chatted with our rep again at CAS,
it was recommended that we put the adoption process on hold again. Sadly, that pregnancy ended up in another
miscarriage. I contacted our CAS rep again, to get things
rolling again. Our Children’s Aid
representative replied exactly:
I am so sorry to hear that
your wife had a miscarriage and you have my sympathies. Please take all the
time you need and don’t worry about having your file closed. It really
sounds like you have been through a lot lately and understandably need some
time. I will wait to hear from you keeping in mind that you want to
complete your probation period and needing time to heal.
I called her on the phone and asked her if this was the
best course of action. She explained
with us losing our jobs, and the miscarriage in a relatively short period of
time, we really needed to take time and properly heal before bringing a child
into our home. Ok, that kinda made
sense. Enough with the on again, off again as far as
our file was concerned.
So, after we stabilized our jobs, and healed as best we
could, I reached out again to our CAS rep.
Once again, let’s get back on track and really focus on getting this adoption
done!
Our rep replied that our file was closed and we’d have to
start all over from the beginning!
Losing any paperwork, money spent and momentum. Everything gone and having to start all over from scratch.
To this day, I still haven’t gotten over the fact that
our rep, in writing, told us to take a break, take time to heal, and not to
worry about having the file closed and then did exactly that, closing our file! It was their idea to take a break, and then they close the file
on us? Not cool.
My wife and I were just really emotionally spent. Most people wouldn’t understand the emotions
we went through during that process. On
again, off again. Back and forth. At the
time, it was the most emotionally draining time in my life. We decided, maybe it just ‘wasn’t meant to
be’.
...and that's where I'll stop the therapeutic note of... let's call this Emotional Pain Part #1 ... to be continued...
#torontoCAS
