A baby among the reeds

I have been away far too long. I have wanted to write but my new life took over. I wrote this about a month and a half ago (April 10), I couldn't discard it. They were my thoughts and feelings during a truly amazing time in my life. Going back and rereading it has revived that whirlwind of a time that I'll never get to relive except through writing and photos and the recesses of my memory. I have to keep it somewhere.

This morning, and by morning I mean an early 2am-type morning I got up and I didn't need to. Steven is on baby duty. But I awoke to the familiar chordles that bubble up from a bassinet in the corner of our room.
My first conscious thought was of a baby floating in a basket among the reeds in a river where a woman was going about the daily routine of primping and preening. Their meeting would set in motion one of the greatest stories ever told.
Several millennia later I was on my way to get my hair cut and styled a fresh look something that would give me an extra spring in my step, a mini boost. Well, something else floated into my life as I approached the water. In an earlier post I likened it more to a shooting star crashing into us and shifting the course of our lives. But was our life course really shifted? Maybe this is the course we were always on. I think our path had a hairpin turn in it, we just couldn't see it.
Buddhists believe that a baby's soul chooses it's parents. Something that I as an adoptive parent must subscribe to. We had no hint, really we hadn't even acted all that deliberately, we had yet to devise our new game plan. At that point we just carried on with the course of our lives attending to the mundane, a bank run, haircut, gosh i can't remember what else was on our docket for that day, February 19, 2009.
Sure we had every intention on being adoptive parents and yes we have been waiting. But we ended up with some of that surprise factor that we never thought we'd have.
Steven and I scheduled a meeting with a lawyer we had chosen to formally initiate our relationship and begin the private domestic adoption process. We met, discussed, talked fees, shook hands and walked out of his office like deer in headlights. Enter a whole new list of buzz words and phrases that would become a part of our daily lives as we took on the full-time job of finding our baby.

Advertise. "Business" cards. Networking. 1-800 numbers. Interviewing. Web sites. Are we starting a business? Yes.

Local, interstate. Are we taking a trip? Yes.

How to talk to a birth mother. Key questions to ask. When to refer to our lawyer. Becoming a counselor? Yes.

Creating a profile. What to write and how to write it. Distributing that profile. Are we graphic designers, why actually, yes I am! Are we English teachers, actually yes, Steven is.

So it is not as if we entered into this venture without any credentials. Ha!

After about 45 minutes of living with the shock and realization of how our lives were going to change with this monumental task before us, we got a phone call, our baby had found us. In the parking lot of my hair salon our baby floated into our lives among the cars in the parking lot. That call set into motion the most emotionally overwhelming 24 hours of my life.

 

Comments

[Jennifer]

I am typing this through tears. I am so happy for you and your husband. What a gift!
Congratulations again.

[Mary Gregg]

Amazing post and an amazing story! How wonderful life can be!