False alarm

There are three main reasons why I started writing this down. 1. I find it easiest to process my thoughts by writing them down. 2. I want to remember what happened and how it felt for my own sake and perhaps down the road when I can remember and empathise with someone on a similar journey. 3. If anyone wanted to know what was in my head then here it is.

I didn't realise how many false alarms there would be. When I say 'how many' I mean two, but that's all we've had so far so the current record is 100%. After a month on the vacancy list we had two calls in five days. Different children, different stories and on both occasions a judge decided to make a decision which meant there wasn't a baby in our house that night.

The second time was much better. Although I still thought about the baby a lot and it was pretty distracting for the day that we were waiting to hear, I didn't have to go to bed for the afternoon and I only feel the occasional pang rather than a constant knot! It sounds a bit dramatic to sound like you're grieving for a child you haven't met and I don't think that's what it was. A part of me is desperate to get on with a job that I'm so passionate about and feel so much for but I think it's also that a placement means that the crazy number of questions we have about our immediate and medium term future slowly get answered. What will our life look like with a baby of x age? How easy will it be to go away next month? etc etc.

I'm not an especially patient person (that is potentially an understatement) and I've found that in the two days since our last phone call I've expected another purely on the basis that we had two close together before. It doesn't work like that. A fact that I remind myself of whenever I feel like sitting in the house and looking at my phone waiting for it to ring! It could be tomorrow, it could be in three months, just like before.

Getting a call again did make me think of a couple of things - we don't know how the carseat works and the car is a total mess. It's hard to walk the line between being totally ready if we needed to pick up a baby in an hour and spending so much time trying to be ready that your life is consumed by it (being simultaneously ready for a child anywhere between premature and 18 months old is a bit tricky).

So even though it feels like we've had a week focussed on fostering we're still where we were at the beginning. That's ok. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'd love to have a baby to care for but I'm choosing to treat the time as I have as a blessing. I went out to lunch with a friend and then shopping yesterday afternoon and I made and posted brownies to my sister doing exams, significantly trickier to do if I had an infant on my hands ;)