An Adoption Day Miracle

JR and I have wanted, for as long as there has been a JR and I, to parent two children. When we were engaged, we planned to accommodate my desire to experience pregnancy and child birth, and our mutual desire to adopt a child by doing both. One child born of my body, one child born of our hearts.

It became clear after a time spent in unexplained miscarriage hell that both of our children were going to be born of our hearts, and that was more than okay with us. We just wanted to be parents. Within a few short months, with the addition of Grasshopper to our household, we were.

Then, we went through adoption hell trying to add members of Grasshopper's birthfamily to our family.

After those two "failed adoptions" the money to adopt was gone. We have the means to raise another child, but not the means to bring another child home.

And so we planned. And we worked. And we asked for your help.

And then, although I haven't talked about it here, we gave up. I am crying now typing those words, because I'm ashamed to admit it to all of you who have supported us with your money, your time, and your kind words, but the truth is, we gave up.

I checked out books from the library about Parenting Your Only Child, and My One and Only: A Parent's Guide. My eyes welled up every time I tried to sing "You Are my Sunshine" to Grasshopper (a song I have sung to him since the day we met) because I would stumble over, "My only sunshine."

I went so far as to email a very wise and generous blogger named Rita about her decision to parent just one child in an effort to embrace our family of three. The thing that stuck out for me in her incredible response was when she said that she looked around one day and realized that her whole family was already in place. I PRAYED with everything in me to have that sort of an epiphany, but none came.

Instead, an angel came to us via the internet and answered the larger prayer, the prayer that we had stopped praying. She offered to complete our family.

I have no words for how I felt when she contacted me, on Adoption Day, to say that if we would complete our homestudy, and pay for our travel expenses and legal fees, (our hard work and your generosity are allowing us to do that), then she would finance our adoption of an infant here in the US.

Before the week was out, I had spent over an hour on the phone with a very special adoption agency, who said that they understood the place of fear and loss that we were coming from regarding domestic adoption and assured us that they would honor our request to only be "introduced" to birthmothers who had already given birth to, and signed over, their child. Who assured us that our angel was very, very real and that they had the documents and substantiation of funds in place. That we would never receive a bill from them.

I have been trying to write this post ever since. My tears and my awe have kept getting in the way.

But now I've spent the day filling out forms and the evening organizing my laundry room because a social worker will be here, in my house, on Friday to make sure that we have a safe environment and to begin to determine our fitness as parents. It's real, y'all.

It's really, really real.

We still have a lot of ground to cover, before we're able to dive into the deep end of the adoption pool once more, but I'm standing on that first step. My toes are wet, and I know now that angels are real, and mine won't let me drown.