THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2023 31 child, we followed our social worker’s advice and did not turn it into a nursery. And we continued to travel, although we started to buy travel insurance, just in case we were to get the call and had to cut our trip short. We visited friends in Oregon and California; we went to Peru, to the United Kingdom. No calls came. About a year after our return to D.C., we attended our adoption agency’s annual picnic. We saw all these happy families, which was great for them and difficult for us. Why wasn’t the process working for us? We ran into our social worker, who told us that before next year’s gathering, we would have a child. We wanted to believe her. We had only planned to be back in D.C. for two years, and it was approaching a year and a half already. We understood that we needed six months after placement before we could finalize the adoption and get a passport for our child so they could travel with us to our hoped-for next overseas assignment. One of the things we had been advised to do, to help move things along, was to make sure our network knew we were interested in an adoption placement, in the hope that someone might know someone or something that could help us become parents. Then, while on a work trip to West Africa, I was chatting with colleagues who were also adoptive parents. They recommended someone who seemed to be successful in matching prospective adoptive parents with children. Ted and I decided to write the matchmaker. The Dream Shortly after I returned to the office from my trip, a colleague and friend told me, randomly, as I walked down the hallway near her office, “I had a dream about you.” “You did? … About something good, I hope?” I answered. She said she dreamed that I was a father, with a baby. My colleague’s dream took me by surprise. I could not recall whether I had told her already about Ted’s and my hopes to become parents. In any case, Ted and I proceeded with our The Bond-Osius family, 2023. COURTESY OF CLAYTON BOND Why wasn’t the process working for us?
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