The Adoption Lottery

Another question that people ask a lot is what you do while you’re waiting to be matched. While it’s pretty much just waiting, we get monthly updates from most of the agencies we’re working with about how many times our profile has been shown. There are also situations that we apply to outside of our agencies that Rachel finds on her own through various adoption communities she’s a part of, and those situations are the subject of this post.

We hear of anywhere between one and ten situations a week this way, and if the situation works for us we apply for it. That’s when the Adoption Lottery begins. Pretty much everybody has dreamed of winning the lottery, and that’s kind of what applying to an adoption situation is like. When you buy the lottery ticket you know that the odds are very low that you’ll win, but you still think about what it would be like if you did. An adoption is the same (though the odds are a lot better than winning the lottery). You know that there are a dozen other families applying for the same situation and that the odds are against you, but there’s still that what if feeling, and the hope that maybe this will be the one, that this will be the child you’re meant to raise. You start looking at the date the child is due to figure out how much time you have to get everything figured out, and if it’s out of state, what the travel will be like. How long will you need to be out of state? Are you going to fly, drive, or take the train? What hotel should we stay at? How big of a car do we need to rent? What are the travel restrictions for newborns? All of these questions occupy your mind until you hear back from the agency and find out you weren't selected. But that’s okay. That just means that it wasn't meant to be, and there's no time to worry about what might have been. The next situation is right around the corner and you have to get ready to repeat the process again, because maybe, just maybe, the next one will be the child you've been waiting for.