Where We're Supposed to Be

I don't remember if I've talked on my blog before about the dream I had when I was in my mid teens.  I had a vivid vision, one night, that I would someday be the parent of a brown-skinned boy from Africa...not a baby, but a boy.  I awoke utterly convicted of my desire to adopt some day...more than a decade before I would meet my husband, and long before we would know that we would be fertility challenged.

I don't know why, in all of the years we have been trying to adopt, we didn't get to Africa sooner.  I remember researching countries way back when, and initially deciding that Vietnam would be the country of our choice.  When that attempt failed, it was a fairly easy decision to move our file to China.  It was only when that plan became unrealistic two years later that we made the move to Ethiopia.

When I learned that our adoption file had arrived in Addis Ababa on April 23, 2008, I clearly remember sighing, and thinking that we'd finally landed in the country we were supposed to be in.  We were where we were supposed to be.  It somehow fit.  Frankly, I don't know why we didn't start there in the first place, given the clarity of my youthful conviction...but that's all hindsight.  I've been wondering these days, given the likelihood of our receiving a referral of a single child, whether the real child will resemble in any way the boy of my dreams.