We are waiting for a referral. Waiting isn’t active enough for me — I need progress. So I’ve been checking the adoption agency’s hotline and other adoption agencies’ bulletin boards. Other people’s progress is more satisfying than the slow march of the calendar, which is the only visible sign of our own.

My new hobby has been the waiting child photolisting on my agency’s web site. For anyone out there who is not familiar with the adoption process, a “waiting child” is an older child, or a young child with special medical needs, who may be hard to place. These children are matched with families in an open process, not the usual next-on-the-list process. Prospective parents get to review their histories and medical files before they accept the referral of the baby.

Several weeks ago, I noticed a photo of a very cute little Korean girl. Her medical diagnosis sounded frightening, but there was a little addendum stating that her “development was age-appropriate.” As a parent, I have learned to give considerable weight to developmental evidence. Medical tests provide data points, but a child’s behavior does as well. Looking at the photo and description, I was confident that there was a family out there that would request that little girl’s referral and be willing to brave the scary-sounding test result with her.

Earlier this week, I noticed an updated photo and some follow-up information. They had repeated the test and found that the original finding was mostly resolved. Intrigued, I called the agency and asked if the girl had been referred to another family yet. She had not, although a few other families had requested information on her. I asked to see the file, thinking that by the time I had someone review it, she would already be matched. The agency faxed it right over, around 11:00 a.m. Around noon I took it to my doctor’s office, and by the time I returned from lunch the doctor had left a message. “Nothing to be concerned about; a common incidental finding that never results in anything.”

Husband and I talked it over and decided to proceed. I called the agency, still expecting that the girl would have been matched. She had not; the coordinator explained the process going forward. They would call a “match meeting,” asking all the social workers to inform the interested families that we wanted to go ahead by a certain date. The other families would have the opportunity to step forward for consideration by the deadline. The selection criteria were simple: The family who had been waiting longest would be matched with the baby.

That was disappointing news, as we have been officially on the waiting list only a month, and any other family considering this baby is likely to have been waiting much longer, even up to a year. Our only hope was that the other families involved could not have been that serious, or they would have asked for a match meeting themselves. Wouldn’t they?

It doesn’t look that way. The match meeting is late tomorrow, and we have been told that at least one other family has come forward, and they have “probably been in process” longer than us. It seems wrong to me that another family would profit from our initiative, but maybe they were just about to pick up the phone when we did. Or maybe they will decide not to come forward at all.

The protocol, we are told, is that the coordinator will call the social worker tomorrow, and the social worker will call us. Since our social worker is out of the office tomorrow, she told us that “if the coordinator can reach her,” and then “if she can reach us” in Chicago, where we’ll be on vacation, she’ll call us tomorrow evening. Otherwise, she’ll speak to us on Monday.

(Deep breath here while I ponder the humanity of a social worker who is unwilling to make a single phone call over a weekend, or perhaps she hasn’t caught on to that whole cell phone/voice mail thing?)

We have not told anyone about this, until just now. (Hey, a locutionary post. I always knew that linguistics training would be relevant somewhere.) The reasons for our silence are not hard to imagine: It’s likely to fall through; we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up; we don’t want to get our hopes up. These are the same reasons you keep mum on a pregnancy until the first trimester is safely past. When disappointment strikes, you won’t have to go through the bother of telling anyone. But you do lose out on the support of people who might otherwise be pulling for you.

So, pull, please. There may still be some hope for us. And, if not, there is an adorable little girl out there who is about to get matched to a wonderful family, which is a cause for celebration.