"Please continue holding for the next available agent"

I thought of a wonderful analogy today for how Stephen and I are doing in the adoption process.  I'm sure you or someone you know, has at some point called a company and been placed on hold.  You have to speak to an actual human being to get what you need, but you are met with this recording, "Please continue holding for the next available agent".  Sometimes the recording will give you some line like, "Your expected wait time is 10 minutes." or other times they just keep replaying ads and jingles.  You sit there with the phone to your ear for a while, waiting patiently.  After a while the recording recycles, and the click of the tape makes you think someone has finally picked up your call, but alas they haven't.  You return to waiting, but this time you put the phone on speaker phone so that you can continue doing other things.  You're still listening to the recordings, but you've decided to give attention to other things while you wait.  After a while you look at the phone and think, "My goodness, how am I STILL on hold?!".  You start to consider hanging in there and waiting longer, hanging up and trying again later, or you decide you really don't have to have the information anyways.  Now you're having this inner dialogue, "How long do I let myself wait?" "I sure do have other things I can be doing that would be a lot more pleasant that listening to this recording." "Have I slipped into the black hole of calls on hold that never get noticed?"

So goes the volleying of how long you stay on hold.  I'm sure it parallels a lot of decisions that require waiting in this life, but it popped into my head this morning as a pretty good representation of how it feels to be in the adoption process.

Current Adoption Information:

• 35 families in the program, some that are matched and some that are not
• 12 birth mothers in the program at all different stages of the process
• 6 families have waited longer than us