So I have some exciting news.
On Tuesday, I got a call from the adoption agency. It had been about two months since we'd gone active and they call around then to sort of check in, etc.
I was expecting nothing more than this, until she suggested that I get a pen and paper. Also, I had to plug in my phone because the battery on the damn thing was dead.
While she spoke, I stood in the kitchen, tethered to the outlet beside the coffee maker, scribbling up page after page of tiny yellow post-it notes, which was the only paper I'd grabbed.
It turns out that a birth family who never should have seen our profile, saw our profile and wanted us as the parents of their little girl, their second child, who is going to be born sometime in late September. They live in a state next to ours.
The birth father and the birth mother are in a relationship together and supporting one another with the decision to adopt, having decided before this pregnancy not to have any more children and not be able, financially, to provide for a second child.
The adoption agent said that they loved that we were military and that I would be a stay at home mom and because the birth family loved us so much, she wanted to offer us the chance to take the match.
However.
They normally never would have been presented with our profile, because our financial limit is set well, well below the cost of their adoption- this adoption would cost over ten thousand dollars more.
She gave us until the afternoon to decide how firmly we felt about moving forward. It was about ten o'clock.
The first thing I did was go to our bank account and then I knew it could never happen. We simply didn't have the full cost and we had no other resources. I decided that this was probably a fluke, but good practice for the real thing.
I called Keith and couldn't get through. I called all his numbers- he has many. I reached him at none of them.
That was a frustrating few hours. I went into the bedroom and knelt down by the bed. I don't normally use this posture, but I felt the need to center myself, to physically acknowledge my lack of control over this situation and to allow my emotions and thoughts to become quiet; to let go and yield.
Then I scrubbed the stove and called my dad, who was on the way up into the mountains of Vermont. I called my mom. I called Keith a gazillion times and still didn't reach him.
A few hours later, I finally heard from Keith, who had been in the military hospital- a dead zone for cell phone reception. He sprinted to the office and called me back and when he heard the cost, he told me, with sinking emotion, that we could not do it.
"I got all excited, at first," he admitted. "But it's just not possible."
He called the agent and told her that we would love to take the child, but we literally had X amount in savings and that was every last penny and that alone was well over the financial limit we had set for an adoption.
Then he called me. "That was weird," he said. "She got all excited and then she said she would talk to the directors about seeing if they could cover the rest of the cost."
We both thought that would surely not happen and as we did not hear from her for the rest of the afternoon, we assumed that it did not.
I was resigned to this. I thought, there are literally hundreds of families waiting for just such a little girl. Her birth family will have no trouble finding a home for her. Surely there is another baby out there that is meant to be ours.
"I don't see why they like us so much," Keith said, honestly perplexed. "Have you looked on the site? There's doctors and lawyers... huge houses... Why would they choose us?"
Around five thirty, we heard from the agent. She said that because they were in the business of making families and since the birth family was so attached to us and because we'd put everything we had on the table, the adoption agency would cover the rest of the cost and we would be moving forward with that match.
"Their social worker will call you guys on Friday, and she'll have a lot more information and we'll move forward from there," she said, cheerfully- and sounding very tired.
Keith and I were shell shocked. He looked at me; his eyes were as large as saucers.
Since then, we have been in a hazy of baby daydreams, although it still feels a little unreal and of course, a disrupted adoption plan is always a possibility, however faint.
We already had a name picked out for a girl; for some reason, we were never able to decide on a boy's name. And I have saved adorable baby items from one of my dearest friend's little girl, that I was hoping to use if and when I should ever have a girl.
So there are a lot of swirling emotions around the Indiana household right at the moment. I feel like my identity has shifted on its foundations and even if this adoption does not go through, it won't ever shift all the way back again.
If this adoption is finalized, I don't know what else to think but that God must have wanted this particular baby girl to be raised by us, because the circumstances are so unusual. It almost seems as if they were directly influenced by Him- the odds of being chosen by a birth family who is not directly presented with our pamphlet is very small and this adoption should never, normally speaking, have happened.
In that case, who is this little girl and how can I best assist her to grow and learn and develop? There is so much I want to teach her, to show her that I have to remind myself that she is her own person and will be making her own discoveries.
If she ends up exuberantly extroverted, I shall spend the next eighteen years in an agony of personal growth, attempting to manage a plethora birthday parties, play groups and group activities.
That seems likely. It would be just like Him to send me a daughter my polar opposite, as He is frequently coaxing me outside of whatever box I had been hiding in.
But anyway, all that is in future. In the mean time, there is a lot to move through before we reach that point- including several terrifying phone conversations, meetings, and packing up and moving to the new house.
It's a lot.
