Meanwhile back in the Green Room…

Life in the Green Room is an analogy carried through from my two previous posts comparing the adoption journey to a play and seeing this matching stage as a period of waiting back stage before being called back into the action in due course.

The good news is that we are by no means left completely uninformed or unlooked after as we wait back stage.

We have an Adoption Support Worker (ASW) who we have met once now – and who will come out and see us about once a month whatever the news (or lack thereof) to build relationship with us and reassure us that we haven’t been forgotten. In addition we are now within a network of events and groups designed to support us.

But it is still a waiting game. A ‘game’ that seems to vary from day to day and week to week in its level of difficulty – unless of course it is my competency at ‘playing’ it that is fluctuating!

Some days I find myself jumping whenever the phone goes: “might this be THE call that introduces us to our new child?” and other days I don’t.

Some days the fact that we are waiting pops into my mind 10 times a minute, on other days it is much less.

Some days the waiting seems to physically hurt, or at least physically sit with me in the pit of my stomach and other days it rests more gently in the edge of my consciousness.

But every day life goes on – not quite as usual as there are books to read, training notes to summarise / absorb, emails and invitations to training days and support groups to process and daydreams to be had – but pretty much in the same way as it always has done.

Emotionally it is comparable to a tide coming in and going out – with my impatience / anxiety being the waves reaching further and further up the beach.

At high tide the waiting seems to engulf me and leave little space for anything else and making it hard to imagine that such heightened expectation will ever subside.

Thankfully though it always does. Imperceptibly at first and without any obvious prompting the tide slowly goes out and there is space once again for pressing on with the here and now and preparing for the longed for, daunting, exciting unknown ahead.

Last week was definitely a high tide week for me, this week – well if not low tide it’s at least low-ER! And who knows what tomorrow will bring!