Adventurers all

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

G. K. Chesterton

 

 When I get lost in the car I call it an adventure. I learned this from my step-mother and some people like the concept less than others. Perhaps it's not the concept but the squeak of "it's an adventure!" as the driver executes a 3-point-turn about, hoping to once again find the way

 

Last night, Ivo admitted the difficulty he was having at explaining our (as yet) unsuccessful adoption attempt to people who had (lovingly) optimistically expected us to return to Zürich a family of 3. "That's why I've written those sad blog entries," I told him. "I was hoping that they could do the job and prevent the pain of explaining it more than once."

In truth, I'm also afraid of a family-that-cried-baby situation (like the boy-who-cried-wolf). That our loved ones will have a hard time maintaining hope for us now that hope didn't help this time. But, it's an adventure! 

Our social worker often tells us to tell her the story of our current experience. I think that she's trying to get us past the pain of the immediate situation and remind us that in future, the sting will be less and aided by the new experiences and knowledge we'll have then. It's also going to be the story we tell our future child. 

I told Ivo that fairy tales and children's stories have wonderfully paved the way for this. The little bird has to ask a number of people/animals/vehicles, before he finds his mother. Goldilocks has to try her first two options before lighting on the perfect chair for her tush.  So too will our child know that  we first looked this way, then we looked that way and then we found the right path that would lead us to one another. 

In the meantime, this chapter of our search truly is an adventure. Though we'll likely return without a child, we'll also be returning home with full hearts and memories of an incredible year. We got to visit with my family more often than before. We jumped out of a plane, Ivo ran a marathon, we traveled Rt66, we stood inside a Redwood tree and saw naked wrinkly old men next to little girls dressed as Ariel. We met incredible people and met new sides of ourselves. We cried together with the physical hurt that the adoption process can sometimes cause. 

In November, we'll be back in Zürich and will even be a family of 3 (once we've picked up our lil' basset hound puppy). Switzerland won't let us have a home study until our marriage license is 5 years old, so we'll have until March to decide which route is best for us (US or Ukraine) and then we'll get back on that horse, all the more ready and knowledgeable about what to expect from ourselves, if not from the Swiss bureaucracy.