Controlling what you can, and adjusting to what you can’t – A personal reflection on lessons learned during challenging times

Almost ten years ago, I was in Kazakhstan adopting my daughter. She is now 10 years old and my time in Kazakhstan seems like a distant memory but as I sit at home in the face of the unpredictable impacts of COVID-19, I am reminded of that challenging time.

I headed to Kazakhstan in October 2010 for what was meant to be five weeks. What was five weeks turned into 14.5 weeks given a series of unexpected events that caused the time to be extended. I went to Kazakhstan just after moving to Newfoundland and because I was only supposed to be gone five weeks, I planned to manage my team and work commitments remotely which became increasingly complicated as the time was extended.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with dial-up internet and intermittent warm water. I was discouraged from going outside on my own, especially in the dark, and it was winter when I was there so the daylight hours were few. I was also discouraged from going for a run on the streets and engaging too much with the locals. I adopted on my own and so while my mother joined me for several of the weeks I was there, I also spent several weeks alone. I had no access to any online content. I quickly worked my way through the DVDs I brought with me and, through the kindness of work colleagues, I was sent a hard drive with more content to watch later in my stay. I had every line of every movie I had with me almost memorized and every book read at least a couple of times through. For the first 49 days, I saw my soon to be daughter only one hour a day. That left me with the other 23 hours a day to entertain myself. My adoption coordinator took me to the grocery store once a week. I did have the opportunity to connect with a couple of other women going through the adoption process about five weeks in and we were able to get together when our visitation schedules at the baby house allowed. The time seemed to go by so slowly as I waited for the next hurdle to present itself.

Why am I telling this story? As I sit at home today, wondering what the next days will bring, watching the number of cases climb, the circumstances are very different, but I am reminded of that time - the mental anguish of being in a situation that was beyond my control, watching my business back home suffer, and having to wait day after day for the adoption process to work its way through the system. I was away from family and friends and dial-up internet made it more difficult to stay in contact through anything other than basic email and blog posts. I could get outside but my interactions with others were very limited and my trips to the grocery store were often a challenge to find familiar food. It was so frustrating, the waiting, the uncertainty, the boredom. 

What did I learn from that experience 10 years ago that I am trying to draw upon now?

1)     Take control of what you can control. The more out of control the adoption process felt, the more I focused on things like diet and exercise to manage my stress levels. I would force myself to run around the courtyard behind my apartment building 21 times every two days, as regularly as possible, or at least go for a walk. Once I was able to take my 19-month-old daughter home with me, I pushed her for miles in the stroller, always in the middle of the day - it was good for both of us. I tried to maintain as much normalcy as I could, but I will admit that it took several weeks to accept the situation I was in, the length of time it was going to take to get resolved, and try to ease into my new normal. And even then, there were many moments of frustration throughout.

 I am older now, with both my 10-year-old daughter and husband at home with me and we are all working on our new normal. We are trying hard to do some kind of exercise every day and take advantage of the time to make healthier food choices, although I will admit that does not always work and wine is more accessible than it was in Kazakhstan.

 2)     You can only do what you can do. I was in Kazakhstan trying to work on dial-up internet. I used 500 hours of phone cards between the internet and conference calls. I connected with my team in the middle of the night and it would take hours at any time of the day to download files. It was hard on my team, it was hard on my clients, and it was hard on me. I remember distinctly the day my mother said to me, “…you have two choices, you go home and fix it or you stay here and adopt your daughter.” After week seven, my daughter was in the apartment with me waiting for the rest of the process to be completed so we could go back to Canada and things got even harder to balance. For the first two weeks we were together, I was completely alone dealing with a toddler with a cleft lip and palate as a new mom and still trying to work remotely. As a perfectionist, it was really hard to admit that I was not going to get it all right - that I had to make choices between work and my new daughter, and that I also had to figure out how to still make some time for myself. 

 Today, in my work, I have a team that is less than a year old, and the OSC is still early in its mandate with much to do. I believe in the opportunity that exists in our ocean economy and the role of the OSC in helping to support economic growth. At the same time, I have a mother in Ottawa and in-laws that are facing various challenges and we can only support them through phone calls and suggestions. I have a 10-year-old daughter that is supposed to be homeschooled and not particularly committed to it, and I have a husband who is also trying to get his work done. There is no perfect and I am trying to find opportunities to do better while forgiving myself for never feeling like I am doing enough.

3)     Appreciate the time that you have. At the time I adopted my daughter, being away for 14.5 weeks felt like forever. I was away from my family and my friends, I had limited activities to fill my time and the days dragged on. But almost a decade later as I look back on that time, it was over in a blink. While I spent seven weeks seeing my daughter only an hour a day, I spent the following seven weeks getting to know her before we came back to Canada. She fell in love with the Wiggles and my mother’s spaghetti. We sang songs and played games and spent our first Christmas together alone in Kazakhstan. Once we came home, we never again had such a concentrated amount of time together.

I generally travel a lot for my work and all of a sudden, I am home with a timeline for a return to some level of normalcy that continues to extend. It feels like the end of this is very far away but based on my previous experience, I am trying to take full advantage of this opportunity to spend time with my husband and my daughter because this is a bubble in time, where the whole world has been forced to stop and we have an opportunity to connect in a different way. While it might not seem like it now, before we know it, we will emerge from this and life will get very busy again. And in the future, when we look back at this challenging time, we just may wish we could have some of that togetherness again.

Living in uncertainty is not easy. Our minds wander to all kinds of potential “what if” scenarios as the situation continues to evolve. We are lucky to have access to lots of information but also can be completely overwhelmed by it. So, I try to remind myself of that time in Kazakhstan, of the importance of self-care, self-forgiveness, and thankfulness as my world kept changing.  

While we cannot possibly understand the details of the situation any one of us is experiencing, we are collaborating in an unprecedented way around the world to try to keep each other safe. I am continually trying to balance focus on what needs to be done to help get through the immediate health challenge with looking to the future and what the OSC and I can do to help rebuild our region, our country, and our world.  

While my time in Kazakhstan gave me a little taste of the challenges of self-isolation, I could never have imagined a moment in time where I am sharing this experience with the world. Thank you for all that you are doing to get us through this - stay home, stay safe and stay well!