“Wow! Wow! Wow!” That’s all I could say yesterday as we left Bethany. I was in awe with how God moved on our behalf. The meeting was a mix of emotions; it was moving, it was tense, it was humorous. We did not know what to expect. As you saw in my last post I was pretty freaked out. There were other things that happened that added to my anxiety.
As I mentioned we have been visiting pediatricians. One of the pediatricians asked a lot of questions about the birthmom’s background. This made me wonder and I wanted to look at the profile more closely. Here is an example of how information is displayed on our portal when a new birthmom is ready to view families:
Due Date
Gender
Race
Prenatal Care
Drug Exposure
Medical History
Mental Illness
After each category, information provided by the birthmom appears. There is also a summary that contains more information or expounds on the information in the categories. For our situation, everything looked pretty clear and we were comfortable with what we saw. I decided however to look at it again with more analytical eyes. My thoughts were that there could be some history she just opted not to tell. I emailed “Lana” with more questions. I didn’t hear from her for several days. I was frantic. It turned out she was out of town. Whew! Ted and I talked to her on Thursday night. The original plan was to meet her about 30 minutes ahead of our planned meeting for 10 am on Friday. But there was a change of plans so we planned a phone meeting. We asked about things in the birthmom’s history and she said would investigate to see if the birthmom had given more information to her case worker (with our agency, the birthmom has a case worker and the adoptive couple has a case worker and the two communicate about their clients). She had told us that the birthmom had been pretty tight lipped and this made her caseworker a little uneasy. What? Why the hell didn’t you all tell us this before now! I remained calm. Lana promised to try to get our answers for us. She also told us that if this is too uncertain that we don’t have to go with this birthmom. She could put us back on the market so to speak. She texted us back about 15 minutes later to say that the birthmom’s caseworker, didn’t have the information we asked for. She had asked the birthmom, but she was unwilling to share.
After we ended our call, I was approaching wreck status. I knew that being chosen by a birthmom didn’t mean that everything was a done deal. But it’s rare, with our agency, that once a mom chooses a family that things don’t go through. So this was terrible news to me. I even thought maybe we should not have told people. This was just too much. My husband came to the rescue once again. He’s turning out to be quite the faith warrior. Ted said to me “Baby, we’ve done all we can do. Just pray for the best and let it go. No need to get all upset.” I didn’t want to listen to him, but he was right. As we sat and ate dinner, we continued to discuss it. We came up with plausible explanations as to why the birthmom had been so secretive. We also wondered if some of the things we did know were actually untrue or at least not the full story. After all of our figuring and discussion, we just came to the conclusion that it is what it is and that things would work out. As difficult as it was, I made a silent plea, Lord if this isn’t our baby then let us make peace with it and I believe you will bring the right one to us.
That night I fell asleep early and woke up around 2 am. I struggled to go back to sleep. I was anxious, but not the bad kind of anxious, like waiting on medical test results. I was ready to do this. The morning of the meeting I got up cleaned the house a little bit, and cooked breakfast as if we didn’t have the biggest meeting of our life in a few minutes. Our mood was light. We even joked around. I asked Ted, “I hate to be superficial, but have you thought about, what if the mom is ugly?”
He said, “Yeah!” as if he were saying of course I have, it’s natural to wonder. He continued, “That’s why I wish we could have seen a picture!” We both cracked up and shook our heads. Hey we keep it real here at OHD. LOL!
This story is too long for one post so part 2 is coming right up!
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