fuenf neun scaling the alps

This week I have some painful emails and phone conversations on my to-do list. We’re pulling the cord on our adoption, so all parties involved need to be notified. It was a tough decision, but one I’m surprisingly okay with now that it’s been made. In fact, it’s like a giant weight has been lifted and I can finall

y breathe a little easier. I haven’t been able to breathe since we arrived in Austria, and that’s a freaking long time to go without oxygen.

For those who’ve been keeping tabs on this particular journey of ours through my haphazard Facebook updates, here’s what happened. Shortly after we moved here, Christian had to acquire health insurance.

Because he works in Liechtenstein but lives in Austria, we’re not covered by Austria’s national health plan yet the law requires us to be covered (not to mention that as a family, you just kinda have to be covered by insurance anyway). He spent months shopping around and talking to agencies and putting up with my badgering. “I don’t care what the plan has. Just make su

re it covers the next kid,” I would growl whenever the topic came up.

At some point, Christian received information from one insurance company that any insurance company in Austria must cover an adopted child. This left Christian free to sign us up for the fanciest plan we could afford with a different company. Fast forward to the crisis of last month when I fell in love with a child with a possibly terminal case of Leukemia. Even before discovering how serious

the situation was, Christian sent a query off to our insurance agency to see how much our rates would increase if we adopted the child. The company’s response: your rates won’t increase because we ain’t covering it!

Umm… Excuse me? What? After several panicked phone calls, we discovered that a) we’re locked into a two year

contract that we can’t get out of without Christian quitting his job or relocating to another country and b) Austria doesn’t care whether or not private insurance covers an adopted child. Oh, and c) we are possibly the only people in the entire country who’ve run into this problem.

Adding further pressure to the mess was our impending home study update. Because so much had changed in our

move, we needed to have a fair number of things edited in our home study. Both our adoption agency and our social worker had told us not to complete an update until right before our adoption approval from the U.S. was about to expire because the waiting times in our country have jumped exponentially since we signed with our agency almost two years ago. Thus we were running up against a wall, since as part of the U.S. government’s approval process, we’d need to prese

nt proof that our adopted child would be covered by our insurance provider.

Even then, it probably would have been possible to complete our home study update. Both our “insurance guy” and myself

found it very strange that it would be potentially possible for a child to fall into an insurance hole in Austria. There’s probably a program wherein the government would have picked up the child if it was rejected by private insurance, and they probably would have been willing to say as much in writing.

However, for all our e

fforts, all we would have earned would be the opportunity to wait some more. In the past year, since we officially earned a place on our agency’s waiting list and thought the wait would be another year and a half (tops!), our agency has placed 6-9 months worth of families, and announcements have been made suggesting the system is just going to slow down eve

n more this year if not grind to a halt. Even the unethical agencies operating in the country we’re adopting from have seen their projected waits jump.

When Christian and I had made the decision to adopt, it wasn’t because we were out of options. I mean, sure, there was no way in hell I was going to give birth to another child in a Dalian hospital, but if we had been so inclined, we could have figured out a solution. No, we decided to adopt because i

t seemed silly to give birth to another child when there are so many children out there in need of parents. There are still so many children in need of parents. That certainly hasn’t changed. But if you’re waiting in a possibly 2 year long line that’s just growing longer by the minute, there comes a point that the child you’re waiting for doesn’t quite have that need. There are thousands of people who would fly across the world for a shot at being his o

r her parents, and some of those people don’t have the luxury of a choice. They’re in that line because it’s their last shot.

And for all of that and more, our adoption journey has come to an end. It’s been an expensive learning experience in terms of time, money, and emotions, but something we apparently had to go through in order to strong enough to tackle what awaits us in 2011.