The Ultimate Suburban Rite of Passage: We’re Having a Baby! Or, At Least, We Will Be Having One

So we’re having a baby.  To be more precise, the baby has actually already been had.  He was born back in January to a young woman in Taiwan, someone I’m hoping doesn’t change her mind or anything in the next few months while we complete the adoption process.  His name is Tien-Yu, he goes by “Yo-Yo,” he’s absolutely gorgeous, and in a few months that will be unbearable to endure, he will be ours.

I’ve written before that one of the reasons we moved to the suburbs was that we were planning on having kids.  I didn’t mention that we’d been in the adoption process for the past few years, impatiently waiting for our name to get called.  It’s one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do, sitting and waiting and filling out forms and waiting and checking in and waiting and listening to conference calls and waiting — it just drives you crazy.  You want to be a parent, you’re ready to be a parent, you moved yourself out of your comfortable home in the city so that you could have a home better suited to being a parent, and you’re not yet a parent.  Drives me nuts.

So now that we have a “referral,” it’s more waiting while the adoption paperwork gets processed. More forms, more money, more interviews to make sure we’re not pedophiles.  You would think that it would get easier now, since at least we can see the endgame approaching, a trip to Taiwan to meet him and pick him up.

But it’s actually even more brutal. It’s amazing how quickly the bonding process starts for parents who have been waiting years for a child.  You get a picture of that baby, you get told that he’s going to be yours, and he immediately becomes your son.  That’s the good part.  The bad part is the torture of having a son who is right now being cared for by someone else.  I know it’s crazy, because I haven’t even met him, and all I have right now is three baby pictures and a report on his medical condition, but HE IS MY SON.  And he’s in someone else’s care. Someone else is feeding him, bathing him, taking care of him if he gets sick, putting him to sleep at night.

Imagine having your baby in the hospital, and then being unable to see him for six months while he sat in foster care.  That’s how I feel right now.  I have to sit and wait for probably the next six months while Taiwanese bureaucrats process a bunch of papers that will allow me to take my son home.  To paraphrase Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally,” when you realize that you are going to spend the rest of your life as a parent, you want the rest of your life to start RIGHT NOW.”

So I’m going a little crazy here, even while I exult in this new feeling of being a father.  This is, after all, what I signed up for.  Six months.

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  1. […] that we’ve announced we’re going to be having a baby,  friends of ours keep giving us that whole, “oh boy, you don’t know what you’re […]

  2. […] that we’ve announced we’re going to be having a baby,  friends of ours keep giving us that whole, “oh boy, you don’t know what you’re […]