We adopted Addison on November 1, 2006. That means there are several more months of the “This time last year” game. Bear with me. I promise it won’t be too sappy. I feel like I can share, now, some of what I went through last year that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing as we were in the midst of the process.

This time last year, as we approached Mother’s Day, I was deeply in the emotional throws of adoption. It was rough. I was doubting it would ever happen. It felt a million years away. We had just changed agencies and so there was new promise in my heart but still apprehension. I wanted to believe my new agency was everything that others had promised it to be but my instincts told me otherwise. Still, I needed that hope of a more positive experience in my future. But deep down I knew there was more heartbreak ahead.

On Mother’s Day 2006 I looked to my husband and asked him if he really truly believed that we would ever have a daughter. He said yes, with all his heart. I asked him that many times prior and afterward and his answer was always the same. But this time last year I wanted to know if he thought we’d have a daughter by Mother’s Day 2007. I wanted to know if he thought our daughter had been born already. I wanted to know all the unknowns that he couldn’t possibly answer but he said yes, he thought our daughter had been born. And he was right. She was born just a few weeks prior. He said yes, we would have our daughter home by Mother’s Day 2007. And in that instant, I believed him.

A few short weeks after Mother’s Day, last year, I got word from my agency that they had a referral in mind for me and it was days - DAYS - away. We were next in line. By the end of the week, they said. Travel by summer, they said. Get ready! Your baby girl is here! I was expecting to wait a few weeks longer, at least, so this news felt like a miracle to me. FINALLY things were going right. Days passed. Weeks passed. No word from the agency other than “any day now”. Then one day I logged onto the internet and read on a popular adoption email list that a parent with my agency had received her referral and I knew we had been grossly misled. We were next in line!! No baby for us. Many phone calls and apologies later, we still had no clue what ever really happened. There was blame cast in every direction and we felt stuck in the middle of some sort of agency politics. It was ugly. Was it an innocent mistake? Were we lied to and misled into believing we would receive a referral when none was on its way? Did someone else receive our referral? Its times like these that what is “meant to be” and the “red thread” theory feel like a crock of dung, let me tell you. Other people may have handled this news with patience and grace but, for me, it was the bottom of the bottom after a long line of bad luck and unfortunate incidences during our adoption “journey”. I wanted out. I was done. I couldn’t handle the heartbreak, disappointment, uncertainty or dishonesty any more.

Thank goodness for my husband who held me up and kept me going. He supported me while I cleared out the house of every baby thing I had collected up until that point but he did not get rid of them, he just stored them away knowing what I couldn’t yet see ahead: Addison. He stopped talking Adoption with me, let me think we had let it go, let me process my grief in my own way. He did all the work, made all the calls, let me grieve the loss of the process as I had hoped it would go: nice, smooth and beautiful. Oh how naive I was!!! By the time we received our referral in July, I was more than ready to embrace my daughter in my heart even though many more bumps and difficulties would come our way. But I often think about how, had our marriage not been what it was and had my husband not known me like he does, we might have aborted our adoption plans at that point. When I look at my daughter, I see pure love and I also see the faith and endurance my husband, especially, had throughout the process to bring her home.

Although this will be my 12th Mother’s Day, this is my first one as Addison’s Mother.

I’ve been surprised at how often I have been thinking about all the other Waiting Families in the last few days. I now how hard this weekend will be for you all, many of you having suffered years of infertility to boot. You are all in my thoughts. What I would tell you if I could convey anything right now is that it will happen for you too. It may not feel like it, it may seem so far from possible right now. But it will happen for you, too. Just have patience and believe. Believe! Your child is out there.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Adoption, Holidays & Vacations, Taboo Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.