I’m still not sure there will be a moment when we know, without a doubt, that any particular child is *right* for us. A few people have said that there will be times when we are at least more comfortable, more optimistic than we were with the first match. That there will be times when we won’t have nagging concerns, and when the worries we do have will be the normal, natural ones that you would expect to have.
I think that is what we are experiencing now. We have a new match, and we are much more comfortable with this one, much more optimistic. We think this one has real potential, and we’re excited and looking forward to talking with her case worker.
I had decided, long before the information arrived in my inbox, to try not to imagine this child in my home already. I know how difficult that made it to say no to the first match. But then I receive the information, and… they sent a picture with this one!! If I thought that the last child study made the adoption seem more *real*, imagine how I reacted when I opened this one and saw a picture of her! I know that the first child was real… of course she was real… but words on a page just don’t have the same impact as a picture does. I can put a face to the name this time.
Interestingly, though, I’m actually having a harder time *picturing* her here… even with the actual picture. I’m not finding the similarities between her and our current children like I did with the first match. I’m really not even tempted to imagine them hanging out together, doing each others hair, or fighting over clothes… all things I imagined with the first match.
I think it’s probably better that way. I think that having any expectations about how the child will fit in with our family and how she will interact with our other children could turn out to be a bad thing. What happens when things don’t turn out as I expected them to, or as I hoped they would? Will I end up angry? Disappointed? Resentful?
What do you think? Are expectations good or bad?
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By the way, the first two matches have both have first names that start with the letter “A”… which made us joke about whether the case workers are just working through the alphabet until they find the right one! What if the right one happens to be named… oh, I don’t know… Vanessa??