My Hopeful Heart

For part one, see here: Our Adoption Story: In The Beginning

Four days after our home study was complete, we got our first call. I had just started driving home from work when the phone rang. I don’t usually answer the phone when I am driving, but for some reason, this time I did.

I was absolutely shocked to hear it was the agency calling us about a possible birth mother. We hadn’t even been approved yet, and here was our first call. She wanted to know if we were interested in two possible situations. Of course we were! I was so flabbergasted that I am pretty sure I was a complete idiot. I don’t even know if what I said made any sense. I had to ask her for her name and number twice.

When I got home I called her back and got the information about the possible birth mothers. One of them was due in two weeks, so she needed our profile as soon as possible. I wasn’t quite finished with it, but I told her I could have it done by the weekend. I had parent teacher conferences the next two days so I couldn’t work on it until Friday. I spent all of Friday and Saturday working on it. I finished it at 8 o’clock on Saturday night. About 15 minutes after finishing it, the agency called to see how I was coming along.

We set up an appointment to meet on Sunday to drop it off. (I live in Utah and Sunday’s are sacred here. Hardly anyone works on Sunday, especially if they are LDS, which she was. She REALLY wanted our profile.) She had told the birth mother about us and the birth mother wanted to wait until she looked at our profile before making a decision. I felt really good about this, and perhaps it gave me a false hope. I spent the next week on pins and needles waiting to hear if she chose us. I finally got up the nerve to call to see if she had picked someone yet, and she hadn’t. I figured if she hadn’t chosen us by then, we probably weren’t going to be picked. And we weren’t. But we still had hope because there was another birth mother looking at our profile.

Over the month and a half that we were active, we went through this six times. And six times we weren’t chosen. We had the attitude that OUR baby would find us, and that it wasn’t meant to be our baby if we weren’t chosen. It was still hard, but we knew none of them were meant for us. We continued to wait for someone to pick us.

As we waited, we figured out that this was going to happen really fast. We got our money in line and ready to spend, and we started to talk about names. The first five situations were all girls, so we had decided on a girl name. It didn’t dawn on us that we needed to narrow down a boy name too. Things were happening very fast, so we only focused on what was happening now, which were girl situations. And then the sixth call was a boy. We started talking about boy names, but had a difficult time narrowing them down. We made list after list of boy names until we crossed off enough to narrow it down to about ten. We felt okay about that. At least if the agency called us to tell us we were picked, we would have a couple of weeks to choose.

And then the agency called us. It was “THE CALL.” Actually, it didn’t start out as THE CALL. It started out as just another rejection. “The birth mother didn’t pick you, but……”

To be continued….

[Please forgive me for putting this in "chunks." It is just really long and the only way I can get it done is to do a little at a time. Eventually, I'll put it on its own page.]