How to Find Hope When Everything Seems Lost: What Our Third Failed Adoption Taught Me About Resilience and Letting Go
When the baby isn’t due for another 8 weeks, a Sunday morning call from your adoption agency can’t be good news.
It wasn’t.
“Unfortunately, she fell at work yesterday and lost the baby.”
I couldn’t even process it. I managed to say, “Oh my God. Is she okay?” All I could think was that a fall bad enough to end the life of a baby would be a fall bad enough to hurt the mom.
The Baby We Couldn't Adopt
She explained that our match was a woman, who I will call "Sarah," who was in rehab for opiate use, who didn’t know that she was pregnant for 24 weeks, and was clean as of the moment. Sarah's mom also wanted a partially open adoption and wanted to talk with me via phone that day. The baby was a boy, she was here in the state (as opposed to China), and she was due in just 8 weeks!
The Child We Couldn't Adopt
In looking through these gorgeous faces, a 5-year-old boy stood out to my husband and I. In his picture, he’s smiling and leaning in, and there’s a spark to his eyes. In reviewing the brief overview on him, it said he had a condition where the ribs grow inward and often constrict the heart and lungs. Seeing that, it made sense to us that his bio also mentioned that he tired easily with exercise.
We had no idea what we were about to find out.
4 Things to NEVER Say to Someone Who is Adopting
As an adoptive parent, you know that you'll have to deal with unwanted comments for the rest of your life, especially if the child looks different from you. However, I don't think most of us knew the things we were going to deal with in the process of adoption.
In the hopes of saving some other "in-process-to-adopt" parent some grief, here are four things never to say to someone trying to adopt, and what you should say instead: