What I Want You to Know is a series of reader submissions. It is an attempt to allow people to tell their personal stories, in the hopes of bringing greater compassion to the unique issues each of us face. If you would like to submit a story to this series, click here. Today’s guest posts is by Tasha Via.
Nobody can ever prepare you enough for the toll that adoption can take on a family. Nobody ever talks about how hard the aftermath is, or that the child you have grown to love may never be able to come home with you.
Let me preface this by giving you a little background. We have been in the process of adopting from Uganda since last November. It would have been a fairly quick process if everything had gone as planned, but we all know that international adoptions just don’t ever happen that way. We were prepared for the set backs that are a result of the Ugandan culture, but we were not aware of the possibility of something going wrong on the American side!
Let me preface this by giving you a little background. We have been in the process of adopting from Uganda since last November. It would have been a fairly quick process if everything had gone as planned, but we all know that international adoptions just don’t ever happen that way. We were prepared for the set backs that are a result of the Ugandan culture, but we were not aware of the possibility of something going wrong on the American side!
After leaving our home on September 26th, with our 3 biological children, going through every roadblock possible (or at least it seemed like it at the time), we were finally granted legal guardianship of our new daughter. We packed up our bags and were ready to go home, only to be denied her US VISA at the Embassy level in Kampala on November 16th.
I ended up having to fly home alone (I was 28 weeks pregnant) with our other kids on a flight that was meant to be for our WHOLE family! My husband stayed an additional 2 weeks to prepare more documents for the continued fight for our daughter as our paperwork got forwarded to Nairobi for more investigation.
I’ve heard of how difficult it is to adopt, as a matter of fact, I used to work for an adoption agency, but I don’t know as if I’d ever heard of THIS kind of thing happening. That this was even a possibility!
Not to mention the emotional factors that come into play after you come back from being overseas for so long, especially if you are not returning with your new child…
The deeper we dug the more we found out that this sort of thing does, in fact, happen, and we are not alone. We are finding out that we still have hope and that we still may be able to bring our daughter home, which is not what we had been told prior to the denial.
Our adoption journey was supposed to be over now and the next chapter was supposed to be beginning. We were all supposed to be home together celebrating Christmas as a family of 6, living happily ever after, but instead of making new traditions with our growing family, we are left waiting, with our daughter in a babies home 8,000 miles away, as we pray for the end of this process to be completed quickly and that it includes us all being together!
It would have been so nice to have known that we were not at the end when the Embassy denied our daughter’s VISA, as we were crushed and thinking that she would never be coming home with us. Maybe it was false expectation on our part, but we just feel as though people are afraid to be real about their experiences sometimes, and I think it could be so beneficial if more people knew, even the hard stuff to talk about!
