Longing to Meet my Grandson
The following is a story that my family and I are living right now. I don’t know how it ends. Since my son and daughter-in-law are the main characters in the story, I am telling it primarily through their eyes.
Google the phrase “adoption is a calling” and you’ll see dozens of references. Apparently a lot of people agree with that statement. I know my son and daughter-in-law do. Three-and-a-half years ago, independently from one another, Andy and his wife Jennifer both felt a calling to adopt. “With two biological daughters and a son already, we thought our family was complete, but God had other plans,” they say. “We decided that if God can make room for us in His family, we can make room for a child in need in ours.”
In the United States, there are two ways to adopt children: 1) connect with a birth mother and adopt her newborn baby, or 2) become a foster parent and eventually adopt an older child through the foster system. Andy and Jennifer weren’t looking for an infant, and they decided that foster parenting would not work for their family. That left one other choice: international adoption. “Every child is made in the image of God,” Andy tells me, “and an orphan in another country has just as much need as one in this country.”
Andy and Jennifer wanted another boy, similar in age to their only son. China has a long-standing adoption relationship with the U.S. and is one of the few countries that allow adoptive parents to choose the child’s gender, so they applied to a U.S. adoption agency that worked with that country.
“Adoption, especially foreign adoption, is a particularly strange calling,” says Jennifer, “because in a perfect world it wouldn’t exist. In a perfect world, every mom and dad would be ideal parents; every home would be stable.”
Andy agrees. “Some people tell us, ‘It’s so great that you’re giving a child the opportunity to grow up in the freedom and affluence of America,’ but in reality, it would be better for him to live with loving parents in China than to be uprooted from the only life he knows to come live with strangers in a strange land. But we live in a broken world where we often have to settle for second best. And second best, for our adoptive son, is to come live with us. That means we’re the lucky ones, not him.”
After submitting their application and paying the initial fees, Andy and Jennifer underwent an exhaustive and all-disclosing six-month home study, involving multiple interviews, a comprehensive review of household income, and letters of recommendation from employers, church leaders, family and friends. The adoption agency also required several sessions of counseling to certify their marriage would withstand the rigors of adoption.
Then there were the required education courses. Jennifer explains, “You have to attend an adoption education conference, read a number of specified books, and show a required number of classwork hours.”
All of that is accompanied by filling out miles of paperwork required not only by the adoption agency, but also by the U.S. government, including background checks, fingerprints, passport applications, immigration and citizenship documents.
Through the process, Andy and Jennifer discovered that all Chinese children available for adoption outside its borders have some sort of special need. It might be as profound as a serious spinal defect, or as simple as a visible birthmark. Kids with higher needs appear on a “special focus” list, and that’s where they found a match: a four-year old deaf boy they have named Judah.
“We chose a name from the Bible that reflects our joy in finding him,” they affirm. Judah means “I will praise the Lord.” He will have a Chinese middle name.
“The adoption agency then required us to go to a deaf event and write an essay on a topic related to deafness,” says Jennifer, “but of course we needed that. There was so much to learn; there are so many misconceptions about deafness. Some think a person simply needs to learn to read lips. Others assume cochlear implants are the answer.”
“The thing is, hard of hearing people don’t necessarily look at deafness as a disability,” Andy explains. “We don’t speak Spanish and we can’t communicate well with someone from Mexico, but it doesn’t mean we’re disabled. If we were fluent in Spanish, we could thrive in that culture. In the same way, a deaf child who knows American Sign Language (ASL) can thrive in a culture that speaks the language.”
That’s why Andy and Jennifer are learning the language. For the past 18 months they have immersed themselves in ASL training and are now at the point where they can carry on complete conversations without making a sound. My wife and I have also begun learning ASL, and we hold regular virtual meetings with Andy, Jennifer and our other children to practice what we’ve learned.
In the meantime another year has gone by, and in a normal world Judah would already be in his new American home learning ASL. But ours is not now a normal world. Because of COVID-19, travel to China is at a standstill.
“When COVID started in China all of our paperwork suddenly halted,” says Andy. “Once conditions in China improved, workers were able to finally complete our paperwork, but by then, the United States was experiencing COVID, and travel to China for adoptions closed down.”
Andy and Jennifer have been writing to Judah and sending him photographs of his adoptive family. They sent him gifts on his fifth birthday, but COVID prevented them from sending gifts for his sixth. “It’s the pandemic here,“ says Andy. “We are grieving the time we’re missing with Judah. He’s not our ‘potential son’ or ‘someday son.’ He’s our son now; we are separated from our child and are losing time with him, time we’ll never get back. The ages of three to six are crucial in a child’s mental and emotional development, and we are missing it all.”
Because of that, they find themselves having to constantly keep their emotions in check. Knowing that adoptive travel may not open until the U.S. COVID numbers fall or until there is a vaccine, Andy and Jennifer grieve when they see people doing the very things that keep the numbers high. “Every time we see someone making a choice to be less cautious about the pandemic, it’s representative of why we can’t get Judah,” Andy says. “It’s an immediate association with the pain and lack of control we feel, and it hits us hard.”
What they have been able to control is how they prepare. Through donated furniture, wallpaper and paint, they have remodeled the room that Judah will share with his brother. They continue to advance in sign language. They continue fundraising. And they continue to hope and anticipate.
“We are looking to God to work in some amazing ways,” Jennifer contends. “He’s the only one who can open the window of opportunity for us to get Judah home.”
They have already seen God work in providing the funds for their adoption. By the time Judah comes home, they will have spent thirty to thirty-five thousand dollars in fees, classes and travel. To raise money, Jennifer took on additional jobs, the couple sold household items they no longer needed and held fundraisers. The money was often slow in arriving, but somehow always came through at the eleventh hour. Andy remembers a week when they needed $1600 before they could move to the next step in the adoption. “We had less than two hundred dollars in the adoption fund. Before the week was out, three checks came in totaling seventeen hundred. It has always been at the last minute.”
“We’ve learned that God always provides,” adds Jennifer. “Every time there has been an agency fee due, the money shows up.” She laughs, “We still have about seven thousand dollars left to raise and it’s probably not going to show up until just a few days before we need it. I’ve stopped worrying about when it’s going to come, so we concern ourselves with doing what we can and letting God handle the rest.”
One of those concerns is preparing their other three children for their new brother. “We are trying to explain to them that they are going to have a brother who has had more trauma in his short life than they will probably ever see in the entirety of theirs. I don’t know that they can fully wrap their heads around the challenges we will face when he gets here. I’m not sure we can either.”
“The hardest part for our other kids is not having any idea when Judah’s going to get home. They keep asking, ‘When will he be here? How many sleeps until he comes?’ The girls have each other, but our son in particular is often sad, especially at night. Now that there’s a bunk bed in his room it is very apparent that someone is missing from that lower bunk. So he often sleeps there. I think it helps him feel closer to Judah somehow, and makes the waiting easier.”
So we all wait. We wait for COVID in this country to subside. We wait for governments to reopen travel. And we know that somewhere on the other side of the world, there’s a little boy who may have no idea how long we have been waiting, or how desperately he is loved.
We pray every day he will know that soon.
© Nick Walker 2020
Andy and Jennifer are still accepting donations toward Judah’s adoption. If you are led to donate, please use this link.
My grandson Judah at his orphanage in China
