Hurry Up and Wait

By the end of May, we had completed our home study, and in mid-June we learned we had officially been approved. About two weeks later, we had our pre-matching consultation. I will tell you right now, it was a strange meeting.

Most people don't ask each other for three generations of family medical history before deciding whether they might someday get married. They also don't usually decide ahead of time how many attempts at pregnancy they'll make before deciding it just isn’t going to work out. Yet somehow, that's essentially what we were doing.

The consultant asked us to think through five major areas of preference: the number of embryos we hoped to adopt, the level of openness we wanted with the placing family, race, medical history considerations, and whether we were comfortable adopting embryos originally created using donor sperm or donor eggs.

Those conversations stretched us in ways I never expected. More than once I found myself asking, At what point are we playing God? Particularly when it came to medical history. You may come to a different conclusion than we did, but for me, deciding which medical circumstances we felt equipped to take on carried tremendous moral weight.

These conversations were never about building the "perfect" child. They were about honestly acknowledging the realities our family was already carrying and discerning what we could faithfully take on.

For us, we found ourselves fairly open about race. Medical considerations were a different story. Because of our family's experience with MEN1, we knew we didn't have the capacity to willingly add significant additional medical challenges. For similar reasons, we also decided we were not comfortable pursuing embryos that had been created with donor eggs or donor sperm because of the more limited medical history available.

Then there was a question we hadn't anticipated at all: Would we consider matching with two different families, each with one embryo? Our initial answer was no. We felt we could responsibly adopt a maximum of two embryos, and we had already decided to leave it to God whether the family we matched with had one embryo or two. The idea of building and maintaining relationships with two placing families felt overwhelming.

What if we naturally connected with one family more than the other?

What if one transfer worked and the other didn't?

What if neither worked, and we had to tell two different families we had failed the children they had entrusted to us?

Even beyond that, if we were completely honest, we were really only hoping for one more child.

If both embryos came from the same family and the first transfer was successful, it felt much easier to honor our commitment to return for the remaining embryo. If the embryos belonged to two different families, though, part of me worried we would feel obligated to this other relationship we otherwise might never have pursued.

Even now, a part of me still struggles with the reality that we don't fully get to decide when we're finished building our family. In different ways, that decision has felt outside our control since receiving Jacob’s diagnosis.

So, after wrestling through the relational, physical, emotional, and financial considerations, we arrived at our consultation intending to match with only one family, regardless of whether they had one embryo or two. The agency gently pushed back. They asked us several times if we were sure we would be content with the possibility of only one embryo. We insisted in the meeting that we were firm in our convictions. Then after we hung up the video call, we thought about it some more.

Even under the best circumstances, frozen embryo transfers are successful only about sixty percent of the time. In our case, we also wouldn't know important information before matching. Embryo grading, PGT results if they existed, freezing technique, and several other medically relevant details would be shared only with our fertility clinic after we agreed to the match.

The possibility of needing to go back through the entire embryo adoption matching process, combined with our slowly softening feelings toward the idea of two placing families, eventually led us to change our minds. The next day, we followed up with our decision to be open to matching with more than one family if that's where the process led.

The other difficult conversation centered around openness with the placing family. We knew where we hoped to end up. Our long-term desire was a genuine family relationship. Figuring out where to begin with complete strangers was another matter entirely. The best comparison I can think of is an arranged marriage.

In some ways, both families have a choice. In other ways, they don't. The agency acts as the matchmaker, yet before either family ever speaks to the other, one family is considering entrusting the other with some of the most precious people in their lives. It's an incredible level of intimacy between people who have met through nothing more than a few pages of a family profile. The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. And yet...

It has worked for countless families before us. More importantly, I don't believe we would have found ourselves here apart from God's guidance, so I decided to lean into the weird.

We eventually landed on what the agency calls a mediated open relationship. We didn't want to start with complete openness, but we also wanted to make it clear that our hope extended well beyond exchanging occasional emails. We hoped the placing family would see that we genuinely wanted a relationship with them, while also leaving room for that relationship to grow naturally over time.

After many revisions, countless edits, and more agonizing over wording than I care to admit, we submitted our family profile at the end of June.

And then there was nothing left to decide.

We had spent weeks being asked to make decisions about things I never imagined we would have to consider. Suddenly, all those choices were made, our profile was out of our hands, and we had almost no information left to work with.

We were back in the waiting. Have I mentioned that God seems committed to growing the fruit of patience in my life?

The agency estimates that matching usually takes two to four months. Compared to many traditional adoption journeys, that's remarkably short. Three weeks in, it felt incredibly long.

One thing the agency told us has been especially interesting. They've found it causes more harm than good for waiting families to know every time their profile is viewed or passed over. I am not sure my personality type was necessarily considered when they made that policy. We were told we were always welcome to ask where things stand, but unless a placing family has chosen to move forward with us, they generally encourage families simply to wait. Which sounds very reasonable when someone explains it to you before you're the one waiting.

After twenty-one days of what felt like deafening silence, I finally came up with enough excuses to justify reaching out for an update.

I’ve learned over the course of this journey that Jacob and I handle uncertainty differently. I run toward it; he is far more comfortable letting it come to him. But somewhere in those three weeks, I finally understood something deeper about why I run.

I want to shove things that feel big and scary firmly into the past.

The past is fixed. For whatever reason, my brain doesn't spend much time asking what-ifs about things that have already happened.

He, on the other hand, is much more comfortable leaving difficult things out in the future, when every possibility is still available. Once something moves into the present, decisions have to be made. Options disappear. Analysis paralysis, or maybe conflict avoidance, becomes very real.

I want to narrow the possibilities to one concrete solution as quickly as possible. Jacob wants to keep things abstract to preserve as many possibilities as he can for as long as he can. Have I mentioned that we both balance and infuriate each other?

By this point, my mental if/then statements had become sophisticated enough that I convinced myself one carefully worded email could gather enough information for me to sufficiently predict the future and stop spinning in circles.

My imaginary decision tree had enough branches to keep me occupied indefinitely.

If Nightlight had stayed on the timeline they originally gave us...

then a family (or families) should already be making a decision on our profile.

If that decision was yes...

then technically we should have already received an email, but perhaps we'd receive a profile first thing the following week.

If the answer was no...

then we were probably looking at another two or three weeks before another family reviewed our profile.

If Nightlight wasn't actually on the original timeline...

then all bets were off.

My goal with the email, therefore, was simple. I wanted to know whether a family was currently reviewing our profile, roughly how long they'd had it, and whether we had been matched with one family or two.

At 9:45 am on Friday morning, July 24th, I finally sent it. By the end of the workday, I still hadn't heard anything. I reluctantly accepted that I'd probably have to wait until Monday. At exactly 5:00 p.m. on Monday, an email finally appeared. Our profile was under review.

I was elated.

News.

Finally, something to help pin down the timeline.

Then I read the email again, and again. It answered exactly one question. Unfortunately, my brain immediately used that answer to generate several new ones.

We still didn't know how long this family—or families—had had our profile. We didn't know whether there was one family or two. And then I realized something else: we also had no way to know whether another family had already reviewed our profile and passed. Oddly enough, that possibility didn't bother me much. 

A rejection simply meant we weren't the right fit. Honestly, I wanted placing families to be selective. If we were potentially going to share children with another family for the rest of our lives, I wanted both of us to feel completely at peace with the match.

Besides, I could think of all sorts of perfectly reasonable reasons someone might pass on our profile. We live in Alabama, and as much as I love living here, I've also lived in Baltimore long enough to know stereotypes are still alive and well. Someone once expressed genuine surprise that I wore shoes. Some placing families specifically hope to help couples who haven't yet been able to have children. Others might feel our faith was too prominent. Maybe our profile felt too polished. Maybe they weren't dog people. When all someone knows about you is a dozen or so carefully curated pages, there is inevitably a certain amount of judging the book by its cover. That's simply part of the process.

If anything, learning that someone had already passed on us would have been encouraging because it would mean profiles were moving, and Nightlight was finding potential matches fairly quickly. What I couldn't seem to tolerate was having no idea what was happening at all.

Monday evening, I sent a thank-you email. By Tuesday morning, I had sent another, politely trying to ferret out a little more information. Tuesday came and went without another response. By then I'd noticed a pattern. Our matching coordinator seemed to operate on a minimum two-business-day response time and almost always answered emails at the very end of the workday. Recognizing the pattern helped, not much, but enough.

Wednesday morning, our usual playgroup shifted to an afternoon trip to the pool because one of our friends' daughters was sick. Our son and I arrived first. Since I was a pool member, I waited in the parking lot to let everyone else in.

While my son and I sat together on the tailgate of my car, I decided to check my email one more time, just in case.

I think my heart stopped.

Instead of a response to my questions, I found two emails in my inbox.

We had been matched. One for each family.