Shoveling Away Hopelessness
What a storm! We got about a foot of snow in our neck of the woods from a long, overnight storm on Saturday and Sunday. In typical Colorado fashion, it began to melt yesterday and made for a relatively easy effort to scoop it up and pile it on the lawn and garden for some additional moisture until the next dump, which started this afternoon.
At about mid-day, I became increasingly frustrated with Monday's version of The Wait. I did mention that there were glass-half-empty days, right? Well, yesterday was one of them. I was stir crazy in front of my computer and decided that a lunch hour spent shoveling the melting snow in the beaming Colorado sun would provide just the physical release I needed.
When I came back in, there were urgent email messages from a dear friend. She wrote that her heart was pounding and that I needed to get in touch. This is a friend who has occasional leads on mothers who might be considering an adoption plan for their babies, so my heart began to pound too. We played email tag for a bit and then she shared the news. She had received a call from a Spanish-speaking woman wondering if my friend's office was where adoptions happen. I felt so relieved that we went to all the trouble to send out our adoption notification cards to friends and family last year, and more so that some people haven't forgotten our journey and still think of us first when a random potential opportunity passes their way.
She didn't have a name, just a phone number, which she had gotten through an interpreter. I immediately called one of our Spanish-speaking friends to see if she was willing to follow the lead. She was! We wrote out a script with a few key questions and she was left to make the call.
In the meantime, Josh and I exchanged a few emails about what this could mean. There's no telling what our story will end up being and there's no reason that this wasn't it. He spent the anxious minutes deciding to learn Spanish once and for all so that his kids would feel comfortable in either community. I was daydreaming about how cool a story like this would be, one that came from a woman who genuinely wanted to place her baby for adoption and came to us through two great friends.
We got the response within minutes...the woman was looking for a place to find a child to adopt, not place her own with an adoptive family. Luckily, this wasn't a 3 month journey, or even a 2 week one. We knew in minutes that this lead was a dead end.
However, I was relieved at having experienced the teaser. On a day when I was considering the pace of the criminal justice system and that of the independent adoption process, I got a friendly reminder that there really is no way of knowing how our story will unfold. It left me with a renewed optimism that receiving a call from our agency isn't the only way this might happen.
Keep your eyes and ears open. You could be the one who introduces children into our lives. And if you do, I reserve the right to call you during a 3:00 am feeding to thank you personally. But don't let that deter you.
