Adopting a child from China is a long and arduous process, but despite the delays, the heartache and the endless paperwork, it is above all a journey of hope, writes Marie Flannery

The most frequently asked questions in our lives these days are, "Any word from China?" or, "How's the China thing coming along?" The China thing is a long slow process. When we first put our name down for adoption we didn't think that four years would pass before we would get to hold our baby.

And now that we are, hopefully, only about one year away I try to think of ways to shorten the year. I will break it down into 12 months and set myself a task for each month. Twelve tasks does not sound as long as one year. And the time will pass and we will say, "That was a quick year."

Someday our little darling will know how much we wanted her. She will know that for every day that we did not have her, we imagined her, pictured what it would be like to hold her, thought about the woman who would give birth to her, and her circumstance, where in the big huge world of China is she standing right now? Are people being kind to her? Is it raining? Only one more January . . . one more February . . . with just the two of us and the two dogs.

And there are a million questions. Why so long? A girl or a boy? Why even adoption in the first place? I suppose it all started when I was born, or maybe before or maybe after.

Anyway my eggs, my poor eggs. Despite all the modern advances in fertility treatments, four IVF's, homeopathy, acupuncture, napro technology and much deliberating over whether to have a coffee or not, we failed in the getting-pregnant stakes.

After each failed IVF life would go back to normal as we knew it and I would go golfing. A lot of life is discussed between tee and green. I remember very clearly, after one failed IVF, having a conversation with a friend going up the fifth fairway. She said, what about adoption? And I remember thinking that if I couldn't have our baby then I didn't want anyone else's. But my heart was broken and my golf had deteriorated rapidly since I had stopped taking the IVF drugs and everything seemed pointless and I started to think that if we adopted a baby it would be our baby. And we wanted a baby.

It took  A while for us to realise that maybe our only chance to have a child would be if we adopted, and one night we just knew that we would adopt. I remember the moment very clearly. We were lying in bed and we just decided. It was like a weight had been lifted.

I was to phone the Western Health Board the next day. A couple of months had passed since a failed in vitro attempt, and suddenly adoption gave us hope again. But by a strange twist of fate, out of the blue and without medical intervention, the next day I found out that I was pregnant. So all thoughts of adoption were banished. We were going to have our own baby.

Would our baby have blue eyes and blond hair, like all her cousins. How would we fit the car seat? Should we put carpet upstairs? What would the dogs make of it? Would I be able to wheel a pram and walk two dogs at the same time? Names were in our heads. And for three months we dreamed. But we never got to hold that baby. Despite being closely monitored and taking drugs to support the pregnancy, I miscarried at 14 weeks.

We were so sad that we forgot about the hope that we had felt when we decided to adopt, and so it was several months later before I rang the health board to inquire about adoption. And so began the process. That phone call was in September 2004.

People had said that it would be a long process, we just didn't realise how long. But when the forms came from the HSE, I remember thinking that it was no wonder. It took days to fill in the forms and weeks for Garda clearance forms and doctor reports to come back. The statutory declaration of status form had to be sworn before a commissioner for oaths. We had to decide on two referees. The application form included space for every address both of us ever lived at . . . and the dates of residence. And because we had spent some time in the US, we had to get clearance from the criminal history systems board.

The parish priest had to sign a form, and we had to gather our long-form birth certs and marriage cert. It all seems fine until you have to get it all together, and as Jim was born in America I couldn't just pick up his birth cert at the local registrar office.

One couple we met had married in Spain, which was all very romantic at the time, but not so when they tried to get their hands on their marriage certificate. Yet life seems to be one big irony having fun with us, while this couple are six months back from Russia with their beautiful son, I spend my days with other people's children, golfing with a midwife and longing to hold a little darling who will look nothing like her cousins.

Two booklets came with the forms. One was on understanding the adoption process and another on intercountry adoption and there was a list of recognised countries and the whole thing was a bit overwhelming. Because we knew that it was going to take ages. And how do you decide which country you want your child to come from? And are we doing the right thing? And how much will it cost? And will we be too old? But eventually everything was gathered and the HSE had all they needed to know about us for the time being.

There would be adoption school, home assessments, more questions, some answers. We would make new friends. And somewhere a little baby will be born and lose its mother, I will try to come to terms with the loss of my beautiful mother, and all the time there is hope that I will soon become a mother.

Everyday we think of China and it seems that in this waiting game, when we tick one month off on this end, another gets added to the other end. So what was supposed to have been a nine-month wait from the time we sent our documents to China has doubled. But our hearts are in China now.

And so we wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. But the amazing thing is that our baby is alive. Somewhere in this world is a little darling that we are waiting for. She may be in her mother's womb but she is alive. Her little heart is beating. And we are waiting.

• This is the first in a series of occasional articles by Marie Flanneryabout adopting a baby from China