Even with the potent anxiety, thrilling mix surrounding a life changing event such as adoption, the Ethiopian Embassy has found a way to make it an even more ramped-up-fingernail-chewing-experience. For me, the knowledge that I’vd arrived in the Bad- Sad Lands was the realization that hit on Sunday night that  I couldn’t pray anymore. That I, a writer, couldn’t reorder my words to pray for an event that I’ve prayed for six weeks now, in truth, eight years with an accurate assessment of time spent, and hopes, hoped.

Monday another thought landed, that quitters don’t achieve. And Martin Luther King was no quitter. And King had more to contend with than the concerns of an adoptive mom-to-be and an orphan wee babe wrapped up in a snare of red tape and DNA tests. Change takescourage.

But I must note that as I stand at the intersection of Purgatory and The Embassy Will Get Back to You, I’ve shifted into a female version of Edison Pena, the Chilean Miner #12, who jogged through his 69 days of entombment below the earth’s surface, moving through the dark mouth of the black tunnel, its jaws yawning open with boredom, or in preparation to swallow him whole. Pena made. Me? It’s a moment by moment proposition.