During National Adoption Month, we interviewed families from local AFTH offices to learn about their experiences and will be sharing their stories here. Here is a family from Virginia, who’s adoption journey was bumpy before it was smooth sailing.
In August of 2012, Misty and her husband had met with the incredible people at Adoptions From The Heart, eager to begin their family’s adoption journey. They had completed their profile, prepped their new bundle of joy’s nursery and were now just waiting on a bundle of joy to fill the crib and their hearts.
The first phone call came in January. They were presented with a situation and had a lot of communication with the expecting mother who had chosen them to be the parents of her baby. Once the baby was born, things didn’t go smoothly or according to initial plan. Two days after the baby was born, the birth mother decided to go a different route and Misty was devastated. They found support through their Adoptions From The Heart social worker. Misty’s coworkers were also extremely supportive during a time when it felt as though their dreams of adopting would never come true.
The second phone call came in May. The weekend before Mother’s Day they were presented with another situation and they drove to an out of state hospital to meet the baby. One day while at the hospital, things seemed a little weird to Misty and the nurses made her aware that the birth mother had made the decision to parent. “We took it better the second time around. We were numb and just didn’t even really know what to do. I really started to doubt that adoption was going to happen for us at the point. I started pushing our social worker about what our profile was missing because I wanted to make sure we were doing everything in our power to help grow our family.”
The third phone call came in September. Misty walked in to drop off their updated profile on her way home from leaving early, she hadn’t been feeling well and just wanted to go home and sleep it off. The next day she emailed her social worker to ask how long it would take for the updated profile to be uploaded and viewed by expecting parents. She sent a quick email to her social worker and then received a phone call only moments after from her social worker. Misty recalled, “I asked her if she had seen my email and her response was ‘well no, but I have a baby for you. Come now.’ After getting all the info, I called my husband to tell him the news and we left right away. I was still feeling sick, but there was nothing that was going to keep me from my son, I couldn’t believe it.”
“The first time I laid eyes on my son I melted. The nurses handed him to me and in that moment, that bundle of joy owned my heart. At the very beginning I was very skeptical especially after everything that we had been through. I was open to this working out, but I still was questioning it so my husband and I decided we wouldn’t tell anyone for a ten day period.” On the tenth day Misty’s social worker received a call from her son’s birthmother and having been disappointed with placements twice, she was nervous when her social worker told her about it the next day. She had called to say that placing her son for adoption had been a lot harder than she had expected, but that she knew she had made the right decision in choosing them to be his parents.
“The relationship we have with his birth family is special to us. We are friends on Facebook and keep each other updated on all aspects of life. All of the messages from his birth mother and birth father bring me to tears some days, they thank me letting them watch him grow up and I just want to thank them for letting me be this little boys mom. When my son is older I will show him all the messages from his birth parents, show him how much they love him and want the best for him, just like I do.”
That’s an insightful thgohut, but on the other hand, leaving the decision in the hands of the child doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as being ambivalent and sweeping it under the rug. The two things can be mutually exclusive, even if they aren’t always.