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.

I found out about the girl a little while ago from an emergency request sent out by my agency. “We have a little girl suffering from a life-threatening disease with an eighty percent survival rate in developed countries but that can’t be treated in country.” I double-checked the statistics in several medical journals, and sure enough, it looked like a pretty good shot. I sent off a message to Christian to find out if he minded if I requested more information on the girl. He thought 80% sounded like a pretty good shot, too.

The first parts of this girl’s story that were returned to me weren’t promising. She’d been given introductory treatment several months ago, a treatment that 95% of children respond to, and it didn’t take. With that information, her chances of surviving five years plummeted. I asked some questions about the tests they performed and what drugs were actually used in the treatment–afterall, she’s not in the West. I looked up studies run in India and China on the disease. I located a pediatric oncologist near us that had taken part in some interesting European trials. I found out stem cell transplants improve the prognosis somewhat, that Austria has the best cancer survival rate in all of Europe. I grasped at any little straw I could get. And then I made a mistake.

I asked to see her picture.

I knew better. You can’t be unbiased if you looked at a picture. The moment there’s a picture, numbers turn into a person. In this case, it was a bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked little girl with creamy milk chocolate skin. “How could this happen to her?” The voice in my head screamed, “She’s a fighter. Her odds of dying can’t possibly be 2 out of 3.”

Christian, who was spared the agony of the picture, read all the plummeting numbers and reports that I presented him with an engineer’s eyes. “I just can’t do it,” He said. “I can’t take that shot.” I knew it, and I couldn’t ask him to. It was crazy, a 50-70% chance of heartbreak.

Except that my heart was already cracked. When I finally accepted this wouldn’t be our daughter and sent the email to our agency saying such, I felt something slipping through my fingers. I had lost something that I never had. I can only hope that someone else picks it up, someone who can beat the odds.

I arrived at Dalian airport shortly before 6:30am for an 8:00am flight. By the time I made it to the front of the only economy line open to check in half the airport’s morning flights, it was 7:00am, and the woman at the check in counter informed me in Chinese that check in for my flight had already closed. I don’t have the vocabulary in Chinese for “check in has already closed, you poor bastard and there’s no way I’m going to do anything to help you such as tell you where my supervisor is because I really, really want you to miss this flight, you spoiled American,” so there were a series of panicked phone calls to Christian and the ticket booking company (which was closed!), as well as some swearing at two separate agents both of whom refused to check me in for a reason I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until I went to the trouble of asking for a representative who spoke English that I was directed to a manager and she explained what was going on and checked me in anyway. It was 7:10 am at this point, and the final boarding call was already being made on the loud speaker for my 8:00am flight.

Of course, all the lines at security were super long. Though one woman, seeing me utterly horrified, mentioned that it was okay for me to cut the line since my flight was being repeatedly announced and all that. So I did, and no one said anything about it. After security, I ran to my gate, dropping everything from the pockets of my coat twice before finally arriving, short of breath and in a daze, confused as to why the flight’s staff were giving me quizzical looks. They didn’t seemed to notice that they’d been doing “final boarding” calls for five minutes. The plane ended up taking off at 7:35am, though to the end all the schedules continued to say 8:00am.

Despite the inauspicious start, the rest of my day in Beijing was quite fabulous. I went to a wonderful Ashtanga class at Fine Yoga, I found an imported food store filled with such hard-to-find delicacies as sourdough bread starter and red lentils, and spent far too much time oggling the books in some tiny Foreign language bookstore (not the big one near Tiananmen). In fact, if not for the inconvenience of spending forty five minutes getting my fingerprints taken and turning in documents at the Embassy, the entire day could have very well been one marvelous birthday present (you’re not getting out of my birthday that easily, though, Christian, but if you do want to give me another day in Beijing…). Heck, even the embassy was pretty fun. The guards had a great time going poking around my yoga mat and the groceries I left at the front gate and the officers in charge of my fingerprints and taking oaths and what not were all pretty jovial.

After the embassy, I had to spend some time hunting down a suitable box so that I could check my groceries on the flight home as I was pretty sure Christian’s giant bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup (not to mention my much coveted bottle of wine) would be declared a liquid. That done, I still made it back to the airport with plenty of time to enjoy a leisurely dinner at the awesome Thai restaurant in Terminal 3 as well as a cup of (not-Starbucks) coffee afterward.

Then it was back home on an eight thirty flight and straight to bed with dreams of all the organic brown rice pasta I didn’t buy gnawing at my brain.

Bummer.

Unlike some of the other Consulates out there, like, say, the Guangzhou Consulate, which oversees all adoptions of Chinese orphans by American citizens, the Shenyang Consulate, wedged into a little barbed wire block with the Japanese Consulate, the Russian Consulate, and the North Korean Consulate, is a humble little place with a crazy amount of security.

Having learned my lesson on our two previous trips in the last two years, I pre-warned my dear consulate people that I would be arriving with a non-American. All of his information was entered into their little list. Still, when we arrived, we were greeted with a guard who glanced once at the Red cover on Christian’s passport and shook his head.

“He’s on the list,” I prompted. The guard when a step further by walking the passport inside the barbed fence to another guard inside the booth, who also shook his head.  The first guard returned with the passport and shook his head once more. “They know he’s coming today. He’s on the list,” I insisted.

Guard one eyed me hesitantly before returning to guard two, who now obviously annoyed that we weren’t leaving, finally decided to pull out a booklet that was presumably “the list,” shuffled through it without much interest, made some notes, and we were finally waved in. It was an inauspicious beginning to what was actually an okay visit.

We had two tasks to complete on this adventure. The first was we to notarize more than a dozen separate documents, mostly mundane things like birth certificates, tax forms and whatnot. The second task was to file a document asking the U.S. government for permission to adopt. As part of this petition, we also had to have our fingerprints taken for an FBI background check. Fairly straight forward stuff for the most part. However, the Shenyang Consulate had never dealt with filing a petition for an adoption from a country that isn’t China. Makes sense since we’re in China and all, but it’s really a bad sign when you expect to be able to file a document with a certain office and the person working there asks, “So how are you going to get this to the Immigration office? Are you going to mail it?”

A bad feeling crept up my spine as I nervously pointed out that I’d been on the State Department and USCIS’s website and was under the impression the consulate was equipped to handle our petition, steeling myself for what I felt must surely be the inevitable denial and an insistence that I call USCIS when I get home.

However, the lovely government worker did no such thing. Instead she offered up, “Huh. We’ve never done this before. Let me just call the USCIS office in Beijing and see if we can accept it.” This was the beginning of a three and a half hour learning experience for everyone. USCIS was consulted several times. Signatures and sworn statements were done as well as a course in proper fingerprinting. Those government officials could have oh-so-easily turned us away, but instead they were game for a new adventure into bureaucratic paperwork, and it was awesome.

So thank you my little consulate, you guys rock. Though you really ought to do something about that fellow in charge of your list to get in.

“Have you uploaded the puppy pictures yet?”

You see, life was not challenging enough. I’m on a forced vacation for an indefinite period of time because the fate of the English language tv show I host is in limbo. Actually, this is sort of convenient, since it means I’m presently unemployed which in turn means I don’t need proof of employment and also have loads of time to track down Chinese police clearances and make sure the cat’s up to date on his vaccines. It also means even after tracking down those police clearances, running the cat to the vet, and tackling the usual grocery shopping, I have still been able to get home early every day this week to take Nico outside so Ayi could do some extra special things like wash our huge windows with a toothbrush. What’s more, all this free time–when I’m not double and triple checking lists of documents I didn’t even really know existed once upon a time or organizing said documents so that they’re easily retrievable at a moment’s notice or rearranging the piles of things Ayi’s not supposed to touch so that we don’t look like complete slobby packrats–allows me the leisure to run our new golden retriever puppy, Gaudi, outside every fifteen minutes just in case she has to go.

Because nothing says “upright, responsible parents” like buying a two month old puppy a week before your adoption homestudy…

…And if I ever get a free moment, you won’t believe how cute these puppy pictures are…

The package arrived last week with the good news that an agency on the other side of the largest ocean in the world is interested in representing us in an adoption that will take place on the far side of yet another ocean. Along with our acceptance letter, was a bunch of paper work, including contracts and document releases to sign, as well as a darkly humorous (well, if you possess my perverted sense of humor, anyway) questionnaire in which we got to pick which “special needs” we were or were not willing to accept in our potential offspring (Missing limbs? Yes. Deformed limbs? No.). After some very strange and pretty wrong dinner conversations (“Well, yes, I can see your point, but I don’t really want to have to go to kidney dialysis every week.”), we sent our signed copies back across the sea, along with a hefty pile of gold.

And I guess that means we are now officially expecting our second child (although this is promising to be one freaking long pregnancy).