Featuring Joy & Geoff, Big Brother , Little Brother , Sis , and various household (and outdoor) critters...

Wednesday, 5 May 2010

All Over the Map

That's me.

My body is going through the usual routines of daily life, but my mind is flitting about everywhere.

Since getting back from Thailand, my brain has very seriously taken up my more general idea of re-focusing on the adoption plan , and seems to be running on overdrive. Re-focusing on the adoption involves considering when to update our documents for Ethiopia (fingerprints and medicals have expired, and a few things need to be re-done for Ethiopia rather than Ghana, having a homestudy update to do the country switch to Ethiopia, deciding whether to make any significant changes to our child request (ages, etc.), working on toning down the hounds' enthusiasm when people come to the house (before the homestudy update visit, preferably), and so on.

This has, of course, led to more existential musing on my philosophy of adoption, why we have chosen international, why we decided on such a narrow age range, what our whole motivations are for doing this in the first place, and on, and on, and on. Having floundered in programs which never worked out, and then having waited for agency re-structuring (only to find ourselves deep, down in a long sibling list which is moving much more slowly than a snail), it is likely not a bad idea to re-visit our situation. All that time with nothing happening has resulted in a sense of unreality - and a lost sense of direction. Everything just came together so well in the beginning, from discovery of the agency to the opening of a program which seemed great for us - we felt very confident of the path we had chosen. Not so sure what we feel right now, and all the thinking, thinking, thinking doesn't really amount to much. Well, it does - I think it amounts to more confusion. But it also seems that if we don't think and talk and think and talk, that we will end up being in the same spot a decade from now - nothing any clearer, and nothing happening.

The decision-making process is tricky - What do we want? Is what we "maybe" want in line with what we "should" do? Is there such a thing as "should" do, or is the answer just "do something" as long as it is a good and right thing to do (but I want to feel that there is THE right thing for us...so much simpler that way...maybe, but maybe not)? If we do "a" then what happens with "b"? If we choose "c" will we regret not picking "a"? What about timing? When to sit back and wait, and when to act (both have their place, but how to know)?

There, that's basically a peek inside my head these days.

Wish I was the type to dive into tangible, productive projects (at least I would be getting some sewing or organizing or gardening done in that case) in the midst of this murky kind of situation, but no, actually attempting to DO things makes my brain protest with more meddlesome thoughts and distractions.

In other news (because my head is starting to spin typing about my thinking process), our campground opened on the weekend, and we squeezed in a very quick one-nighter (have ended up with lots of Saturday afternoon commitments in May/June, which makes camping kinda tricky). No mice, no water issues, overall things look good, and we are really looking forward to 5.5 months of get-aways. Just have to tell everyone to host their Saturday events at the campground...

1 comment:

Zoe said...

That discernment and decision making is so hard! I know that for us, one step at a time tended to keep moving us forward. I still revisit some our adoption-related decisions... some things are even more solidified and some things I still wonder about. For me there is some trust involved, because so much in adoption is out of our control. When plans have been thwarted in the past, it's tough to regroup, but I wish you much peace in doing so!