And now...The (beginning of the) Rest of the Story

At the end of a long weekend in the mountains with family and friends, you would think that a young teenage girl would want to just plug in her Walkman and tune out on the ride back home with her parents. Instead, I was interested in the Paul Harvey show (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rest_of_the_Story) that played on the radio as we rode along. It was always so interesting to hear the real end of the stories we all thought we knew. After seven months off from writing the story of our growing family, we now present the rest of the story.

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When we first moved into our new home in Denver, we received a fragile heart-shaped tree ornament from a friend in San Francisco who had purchased it in one of those tiny shops in the Castro. Eggshell thin and light as air, it was a bright rainbow striped heart with tiny bands of gold nestled between each stripe. A proud beacon of love on our colorful Christmas tree, its shine held a special attraction for children. Of course, that attraction, combined with its fragility, would conspire in its eventual demise.

I remember that ornament tumbling from the branches of our tree and bursting into a cloud of tiny shards on the floor during our annual Winter Solstice party just as one of the youngest guests was reaching for it to express how it was her favorite. The night before, we had stepped out the back door to gaze up at the full moon winter solstice eclipse at 3:00 am.  I remember thinking it was peculiar that the moon was so dark red, yet all the news reports leading up to that night referred to it as a “blue moon” because the timing was so rare. That fleeting moment in our back yard together, with my arms around Tiffany under the red blue moon, would be made even more auspicious by the fact that it would happen to be just days into our only pregnancy. However, the baby’s heart would stop beating just a few short weeks later, in February. I’ve always looked back on that moment when that beloved heart-shaped ornament shattered as a potential sign of that heartbreak to come.

When our agency finally collapsed in 2013 and our adoption group scattered a few months later, we all tried to maintain our connections with each other. But as others rushed to sign up with other agencies, we felt utterly finished. We concluded that if a baby didn't join our family by just falling into our lap, it wasn’t meant to be. We’d give it a year to see what happened and then we’d finally be done. We’d most likely be a family of two, which would be fine with us. We have friends who have come to that decision naturally, without having to endure any devastating mistakes in the process, and we could certainly also take that path. We could simply take a deep breath, close our eyes and paint over the giraffe on the wall, and the elephant trunk, and have a great big yard sale for the rest of the baby stuff that had accumulated in bright boxes and lined the shelves of our empty nursery. The “baby’s room” would become the “meditation room,” and we could have a life of rest and thriftiness that would eventually lead to early retirement and vacations in Spain. Besides, we already had children in our lives, just other people’s kids. We could spend fun times with them and then go home to hypothesize about various styles of parenting and then contemplate our next vacation once we got bored with that conversation. That actually didn’t sound so bad at all when we talked about it last year. And, honestly, it still sounds pretty good.     

Just a couple of months later brought an interesting twist. It was a day full of signs and messages sprinkled with hope and caution. The last step in being done with the agency we had been working with was for them to send us back the profile book that had been sitting on their shelf for the previous year and a half. One bright autumn day, we came home to two packages on the porch. One was the profile book in a torn paper grocery bag with no note or anything attached. “Well, I guess that’s the official end of that,” we said to each other.

The other package was an unexpected gift from a friend in South Africa. It included two sweet heart-themed gifts. One was a simple string of wooden beads tied with twine which lead to a larger heart made of wood. The other was a string of soapstone hearts each stamped with the words love, hope or joy. These particular friends have always been very supportive of us over the years. They have three children and are a true model of positive parenting, always nurturing and engaging with their kids. It’s really beautiful to witness. They make it seem very possible (and even rewarding) to be parents. They later shared that they just sent the package for fun, not for any special reason.

On that evening when we received our profile book that finally closed the chapter with the agency and that special gift of hearts, we were also particularly distracted by other news. That day, we had learned about someone who knew someone who was intending to place her baby for adoption and was looking for a couple to place him with. All of a sudden we had a big decision to make. Should we hop back on the adoption train? We had seen it derail several times and were beginning to feel pretty comfy with the idea of jumping on the child free train headed in the opposite direction. Suffice it to say that the adoption “adventure” had been a really, really, really bad trip. But this was still exciting and positive news, or at least we would have certainly seen it that way in the past. It was just a shame it was coming years later than we would have liked. But…there we were anyway. We stared at the new heart-shaped ornament we received on that truly auspicious day and considered that at least this one was made of wood. Maybe it wouldn’t shatter this time.

Not wanting to ever succumb to blind hope and get hurt again had driven us to be extremely cautious with our expectations. We spent the following three months waiting for the birth mother to decide that she wanted us to parent her baby. We kept our secret close to home and only allowed the occasional “what if?” to creep into our dreams. After our trip to Costa Rica in January, we learned that she did in fact want to place her baby boy with us and that she would be due in March. We also learned that she had been hospitalized for preterm labor multiple times during this pregnancy and that we should be ready for a preemie.

Now when we see that wooden heart hanging in our home, it gives us a sense of peace that this time our hearts won’t be broken. As for the other string of hearts, we put that over the door to his room to remind him of how much love he’ll give and receive each day, and how glad we are that he finally made it home to our hearts.

Miraculously, she carried him to full term and we were there for the delivery and discharge of our little boy. He’s now six weeks old and we have yet to figure out how to describe what we’ve been feeling since March 14^th (Pi Day!). We’ll make every attempt to get back into this blog with more frequent updates. It will certainly be more fun to write the posts again. Feel free to stay tuned if you want to. We have a lot of catching up to do.