If you expect a referral profile to set your mind at ease about who your are bringing into your home, don’t. Whether your referral profile was 3 pages or 300, it is just that–a paper representative of a human being. It does not do him or her justice. I know a lot of families spend days and even weeks pouring over these papers, praying, discerning, reviewing, and looking for answers. Don’t get me wrong. The acceptance of a referral should not be taken lightly and should most definitely involved a lot of praying at the least, but here’s what a stack of papers is not:
1. Conclusive. Especially if you are adopting internationally. Things are left out, lost in translation or even lied about. Sometimes conditions are misdiagnosed or are just the result of institutionalization.
2. Representative. Profiles usually capture your child at one very specific point in time–his point of intake. There may be updates (sometimes monthly) but they usually focus on a few specifics like basic physical development.
3. Complete. Obviously there is so much about your child that does not show up on paper, pictures and/or videos.
The bottom line is that you never know what you are going to get when bring a child into your family–by birth or by adoption. No matter fantastic your pre-natal care is or how detailed your referral paperwork is, you just cannot predict all the ins and outs, positives and negatives.
In Ty’s case, we were prepared for a list of special needs a page long. He came with none of those but an entirely different page. When we received our Ethiopian referral, we almost did not read the profiles. We are fully committed to whatever God has in store for us. Besides we are pretty sure whatever expectations we build based on 20 pieces of paper will be blown out of the water hour by hour once we get the kids home.
More importantly than having a perspective referral analyzed up one side and down the other is to be open to anything just like you would a child you bore and get some solid general training on how to parent kiddos from hard places. No matter what your profile says, you should be ready for an exhausting, exhilerating, challenging, and rewarding journey.