Ok faithful readers. First, thanks for staying with us! Talking with everyone via our blog has been one of the unexpected joys of this process. We moved the blog to be a bit more anonymous considering the personal things that we talk about and the decisions about agencies that we are making.
Next, an update on the whole decision process.
After struggling a lot over this, we decided to change agencies. We officially broke up with Lifelink last week. It was hard. We didn’t want to burn any bridges, but we wanted to be honest about why we pulled out of their program.
I'm happy we made the decision, but I still feel uncomfortable. I keep running through all reasons for making the change. Concern that Lifelink was a bit unstable and in flux after their recent merger. Annoyance at the slow (and often lack of) communication with the home office. Disappointment that their wait times between referral and travel call have increased significantly. Frustration that they were not upfront with us about the EP issue. Fear that the EP backlog and 10% reduction in visa issuance would cause wait times to increase further by next year.
In general, we just didn’t feel like we could rely on them through this process, but more concerning is that we aren’t sure they would communicate rapidly and openly throughout the adoption.
All those reasons make perfect sense.
And yet I fuss over the decision.
So I have another conversation with myself. I say, “you have to trust your gut.” And my gut was saying “there's a lot of things here to be uncomfortable about.” So we looked around and seemed to have found an agency that is a better fit. But that damned gut isn’t feeling better yet.
I need to remember my new commandment “make one decision at a time.” We can't know what issues we may run into with our new agencies, but we do know that we are not comfortable with Lifelink. We must move forward.
Our new agency is AIAA. And we are moving forward with our homestudy too, and will be using a second agency named Special Children. I'll tell you more about both of them in a later post.
Moving forward again does feel good. Perhaps I'll feel calmer once we get more of this process under our belts.
I just started reading your blog and wanted you to know that is the most articulate, informative blog on Korean adoption that I have come across.
ReplyDeleteMy husband and I are at the very beginning stages of thinking about Korean adoption, and I am finding your blog to be immensely helpful.
Thank you!
Tara
Tara, thanks for making my day! I'm so happy that you've found information here to be helpful. I have learned so much from other bloggers out there and included some of my favorits in our blog list, so be sure to check them out. It's great to get the info from folks "in the trenches"! All the best on your decision process and I hope to keep our conversation going.
ReplyDeleteI wish my gut felt 100% good about our decision, and it doesn't quite, really. But it feels better than it would have if we hadn't made this change. So I'm going to focus on that. As our LL social worker told us, the route you take leads you to the child who's supposed to be yours.
ReplyDelete