Every year we celebrate National Adoption Awareness Week along with thousands of other Australian families. Mostly we forget that I didn’t give birth to our daughter. She is so wholly and completely loved, as though she grew inside me. She is our measure of normal. But there are several times each year when we stop to remember, with deep gratitude, the arduous journey and the mind-blowing rewards. If not for adoption, I would never have the experience of being a mother, and our daughter would have grown up in an orphanage.
When Michael and I first discussed marriage I remember saying “I have a feeling I may not be able to have children, but I like the idea of adoption”. He agreed. He knew I loved kids, and we both have a natural rapport with kids, so they were definitely in our picture of the future. We filed all this away and promptly got on with university, work, travel and married life.
We loved sport. At the age of 23, I damaged my neck in a waterskiing accident. Some damage was permanent. Six months later, well into recovery, I was involved in a rear-end car accident. The impact was so forceful it ploughed my car into the car in front. My car was squashed between two cars, looking like a deflated piano-accordion. Needless to say my neck was further injured.
With lots of physio and hard work my recovery proceeded well, but the doctors put me on medication. They all agreed: “You will need to be on this for the rest of your life”. “You can’t fall pregnant while you are on this medication”. “If you do fall pregnant you will not be able to carry a child because your spine and neck will not cope”. Starting a family still seemed a long way off, so it didn’t have a huge emotional effect.
Fast forward several years and we decided to think about having a family. To us adoption seemed like a win-win situation. We form a family and become parents, and a parentless child gets a loving and secure home. Easy.
Not.so.easy! We started pursuing adoption in New South Wales and a year later were deemed suitable for adoption. As a teacher and an engineer we seemed stable and well-educated, and they welcomed us with open arms. The downside was that there were only 12 children adopted in NSW the previous year, and that our file may never get chosen. This was devastating news and so we started looking into more definite alternatives. We did not want to wait for years and have nothing happen!
By this time I was working with refugees, mostly African. I really loved their spirit of resilience, their joy and their warmth. They all wholeheartedly supported our idea to adopt from Africa. They’d survived the devastation of wars and famine and seen the many, many orphans falling through the cracks. We planned to adopt as many orphans as we could. Ethiopia was the only African country with which Australia had an Inter-country Adoption program, so we applied and the wait began.
We waited and waited. And waited! The Australian Inter-country Adoption system was exhaustingly slow. It was supposed to take 3-6 months, but took 18 months to get our initial approval. Repeatedly our deeply judgmental caseworker told us she “couldn’t get her head around” the fact that adoption was our first choice, and not the last resort after undergoing numerous other means to form a family. She made it incredibly difficult for us because we were openly Christian and our story was different to any couple she had dealt with.
Eventually I passed all the additional rigorous medicals she required of me (5 different specialists, in addition to my own, all at our expense). We underwent training and interviews to adopt one child under two. Things were moving so slowly we decided to undergo more training and interviews to broaden our chances. We were approved for a child under five. Then we re-trained and re-interviewed for a sibling group. After loads of training and 13 draining interviews, we were approved for a sibling group under 6. We were covering as many bases as they would allow!
Five years passed and all our friends were having babies. Most were up to child number three. It was an incredibly difficult time. We researched Ethiopia, met Ethiopians, and taught ourselves Amharic (the most common Ethiopian language). To take our minds off it, we went to live in the Northern Territory and work in remote area indigenous schools. We endured many phone calls from DOCS- one claiming they had misplaced a $5000 cheque, one claiming Ethiopia had lost our paperwork. Each time we thought it would be “the call” to say we had a child, and each time it was worse news.
Six years into the process (nine if you count our initial stint in the local adoption pool), we were talking in the car and said it aloud for the first time: “Are we ok if it’s just us? Maybe we should quit this gig, raise happy healthy dogs, be an awesome Aunt and Uncle, and travel”. We agreed it was all too much.
That very day, on the way home, we received the best phone call of our lives! A little nine month old girl called Mekiya needed a family and we were chosen for her. We received details and a photo the following week. The moment we saw the photo of our beautiful daughter with her soft curly hair and long eyelashes we were madly and deeply in love.
It was six excruciating months before we held her! She was officially ours, according to the courts, but four days before we were due to fly to meet her DOCS forbade us from going. More paperwork had gone missing. It took another 6 long weeks before we were allowed to go. Each week I would call to ask if they had a date for us, and each week they said “no” and couldn’t give us a date. It was terribly depressing. We had a baby we couldn’t hold and were given no information about the care she was getting.
Finally we flew to Ethiopia, and on May 21, 7 years after starting our Inter-country adoption journey (10 years after our adoption journey began), we held the most precious gift in the world. We were thrilled to find out that in Ethiopia she was lovingly cared for by the Grace Centre who now feed 700 people a day, mostly children. They provide free medical care and education for children. At the moment they are desperately in need of funding and any donations are gratefully appreciated. We are forever grateful to these amazing people.
Mekiya is now six and has been in our arms for 5 years. She is the best thing that has ever happened to us. She is happy and healthy and thriving in Kindergarten. It is a beautiful love story. We would love to have adopted siblings for her, but the Ethiopia adoption program was closed by the Australian Government. There are an estimated 5 million orphans in Ethioipia alone, but according to the Australian Government we are too old to adopt any more. So we continue to give her all our love.
Meanwhile we celebrate National Adoption Awareness Week and are excited to see the changes to adoption in Australia that Tony Abbot is trying to make. Adoption is an amazingly beautiful way to form a family and it needs to be made much, much easier so fewer children are sentenced to life without a family.
For more information about Adoption Awareness Week please visit www.adoptchange.org.au
To donate to the Grace Centre please visit www.gracecenterfoundation.org
