This is a post that I have been thinking about writing for a long time. It's a moment that I replay over and over in my mind, but putting it into words is so difficult. I don't even know how to begin, but here I go anyway:
It was ten years ago today, on November 3, 2003, that I found out I was going to be a mom for the first time. Jarom and I had been married for almost five years and we had wanted to have a baby for most of that time. We had tried a few fertility treatments, but adoption just felt right to us. After discussing it for a while and praying to know what to do, we chose an agency, were interviewed, fingerprinted, our home was inspected, our finances reviewed and we filled out a mountain of paperwork. Our friends and family wrote recommendation letters too. Six months later, in May of 2002, we got a letter from the court saying that the State of Arizona had approved us as potential adoptive parents. Then we waited. A year went by without hearing anything. Friends would always ask how the adoption was going, but we had absolutely nothing to tell them. Then another six months went by and I knew our certification from the state was about to expire.
This brings me back to November. We started off the month with a busy weekend--Jarom's sister's wedding and my sister's birthday. But Monday the 3rd was a normal work day. I was working at Westwood Dental Center as a hygienist. My first two patients after lunch were an older couple and I walked them both up to the front desk after their cleanings. As I handed their charts to the receptionist, she told me I had a phone call on line 2. I picked up the phone and the caller ID read "LDS Family Services". Normally my heart skipped a beat anytime I saw our adoption agency call, but I knew that our certification was expiring this month and that they must be calling me to fill out more paperwork.
The voice on the other end of the phone was Larry, our adoption counselor and he said, "Are you sitting down?" I grabbed a chair and sat down, kind of confused. He then said, "A young woman has selected you and your husband to be the parents of her baby. It's a little boy due in three weeks." This was the moment I had been waiting for and dreaming about for all these months! Everything around me became fuzzy and all I could manage to say was, "No!" (as in "no way! you're kidding me!") but at the same time I burst into tears. My heart was racing and suddenly I became aware of the people around me. I was worried about how unprofessional I was being in front of my patients. I could see all of my co-workers gathered around me holding each others hands with looks of trepidation on their faces. I couldn't stop crying long enough to tell them I was OK. I tried to flash them a thumbs up, but it meant nothing from somebody who was shaking and blubbering into the phone.
I should interject here that my grandpa had just passed away two weeks prior to this following a brief illness in the hospital. And the month before that I got a call at work saying my dog had died. So everybody at work was worried it was more bad news.
On the phone, Larry told me he would give me time to pull myself together and he would call me back in 5 minutes with information that I needed to remember. So I hung up the phone, explained my good news to my co-workers and got hugs all around. The next thing I did was run to the staff lounge where I could call Jarom. He was so excited about the baby and so thrilled it was a boy. I knew he wouldn't be able to focus at work and would probably be coming home soon. Larry did call me back and I was composed enough to write down some notes and sound half-way coherent.
I was still at work and somehow had to keep going! Luckily, the next patient on my schedule was my brother David. I was so glad he was there so I could tell him and also because he didn't mind that I was kind of in a daze. He was so kind and patient.
Somehow I managed to fumble my way through to the end of the day. We went out to dinner with my parents and told them that they might soon have a second grandchild. They were happy for us, but still kind of cautious. We decided it would be best to keep it a secret from my little sister who was 10 years old. Her tender little heart just couldn't bear the disappointment if this adoption should fall through.
When I got home at the end of the night I called my good friend Becky who is a birth-mother counselor at Catholic Social Services. My biggest question: How am I possibly going to make it through the next 3 weeks until the due date?!
