The first time my husband and I went to an informational session on adoption, I found it hard to sit still. They had these delicious cookies and I was much more interested in them than listening to the social worker. I was not like the rest of the moms there. I had been pregnant before. Surely I would become pregnant again.
We lost our first daughter when she was 37 weeks. She died before she even had a chance to be born. I delivered her still, after hours and hours of labor to a very quiet delivery room. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
Fast forward to a year later, and all I wanted was for me and my husband to get the chance to parent a child. We were robbed of that experience, and we were beyond mad.
I thought going to an adoption meeting would somehow wake up my ovaries or jolt something in my husband and magically get us pregnant. My heart was not in adoption, and I was anxious to go home. The percentage of birth mothers who changed their mind was too high, and the amount of children who were born with addiction or defects or frankly anything out of my control was just way too terrifying to me.
Fast forward almost another year. We had undergone several medical procedures, had one false positive, and cried more tears than I thought was possible. Still no baby. It was time to look into adoption again.
This time, we went to a different agency. I was not at all interested in the cookies. I wanted to learn how I could become a mom and I wanted to learn it NOW. The statistics were the same as the other agency, and yet I was not worried anymore. This was the path I needed to take to become a mother again.
We left that meeting in November. We felt giddy with excitement and knew that we were following our hearts. After all we had been through, we knew we wanted to be parents, and it did not matter how.
We had months of classes and meetings. We had piles of paperwork. We held a fundraiser and made our story public. We poured over our profile book and imagined what we would look like to a pregnant mother. What would make her choose us? We just had to hope.
We were all set to be shown to prospective birth mothers on President’s Day. We stopped breathing every time the phone rang. We knew our baby was close.
They said it could take one to three years. We laughed. No way would it take that long.
We were chosen in the middle of the month of March. The temperature was cold outside, but we were warm with excitement and joy and happiness. Our daughter was born on the last day of that month.
We drove to the state in which she was born and she was discharged to our care. She never once felt like anything less than ours. She is just as much my daughter as was her sister whom I carried.
Adoption saved my family. We are grateful for it each and every day. When we were ready, it was there for us. Our daughter was there for us. And we have been a family ever since.
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