The Adoption Fiasco

Well, I was sitting in church the other day and this other woman was talking about how she had taken in foster baby that they wanted to adopt. Unfortunately, three days after they got the baby, the court decided that the baby should be returned to her biological mother. The woman was expressing her emotions on how hard it was to deal with such a blow and it got me to thinking about my own adoption fiasco and I realized that I hadn't written about that. In April, during a dinner with my family, my mom casually threw out the question, "so do you want a baby?" Duh! She already knew the answer. It turned out that my aunt, who works with teen mothers, had a 15 year old girl who wanted to put her baby up for adoption and was interested in doing a private adoption. Hubbie and I kind of shrugged it off but both of us started thinking about it a lot. After a weekend of thinking about it, both of us agreed that we felt strongly that we needed to look into this. My husband used to be very anti-adoption. He had this idea that the only babies put up for adoption were crack-babies. So it was a huge step for him to go in this direction. We spoke with my aunt who agreed to be our third party in communicating with the mother and we contacted an attorney. I was surprised how easy it is to do a basic private adoption--a case worker needed to do a home study, the attorney would take care of all of the paperwork, and we needed to have the baby in our home for 6 months before we could legally adopt. So we began to get all of our ducks in a row. We were told the baby was 3 months old, absolutely beautiful, good natured and loving, half spanish/portuguese, healthy, and well-taken care of. I asked a lot of questions because, as a teacher, I've seen the affects of bad beginnings on my 8th graders. I had a student who had a lot of issues as a 14 year old because he wasn't held as a baby or another student who has major anger issues because of how he was treated until he was adopted as a one year old. The mother was 14 years old when she got pregnant and had her baby and had just turned 15 years old. She had originally wanted to get an abortion but being Catholic, her mother made her carry the baby. She had then wanted to give the baby up immediately but her friends convinced her that it would be fun to raise a baby. So she tried for 3 months but realized that she was just too young to be a mother. She was being raised by a single mother and her family was on welfare. So she turned to my aunt for help. Dad was older and wanted nothing to do with the baby and had been deported to Portugal.
Things were looking good and running very smoothly at first. We were setting up a time to come down and meet the baby and preparing our home to possibly have a baby in it in the next two weeks. I got the paperwork to get time off from work and everything was ready. Then everything fell apart. My aunt called the girl's home to set up a time for us to meet the baby and the girl's mom answered, let's call her Grandma Meanie. Well, it turned out that the grandma didn't know anything about the adoption. She knew that her daughter wanted to put the baby up for adoption but didn't know that she had done anything about it. Grandma was furious and went ballistic on my aunt. She declared that the baby wasn't up for adoption and never would be. The worst part was that it wasn't because she was so attached to the baby. She told my aunt that "she wasn't letting her daughter off that easy and that she needed to learn her lesson." I flipped out when I heard that. She wanted to use this baby to teach her daughter a lesson? I didn't know what to do. I wanted to contact a social worker, get a team of lawyers...something. Meanwhile, the girl was asking my aunt if it was true that if she left her baby at a hospital or church, that they would take care of him. Finally, I decided to write a letter to the grandmother apologizing for going over her head, telling her about myself and my husband, and asking her to reconsider. But before I could deliver the letter, the grandmother had a huge blow out fight with her daughter, and the girl and baby moved out and moved in with her grandparents in Durango, Colorado. And just like that, they were gone and I had no way to contact the girl. I hope and pray that this poor girl and her baby are okay. Even though I never met them, they are deep in my heart. The hardest thing was that originally we were told that the baby's name was Gage but later found out that that was his middle name and that his first name was Wyatt which was what Hubbie and I have always planned on naming our first born son. I saw it as a sign that this was meant to be. There seemed to be so many signs that this was meant to be but...dead end. I had a hard time dealing with it at first, it was like a failed round of IVF. I wondered if God really saw me as such a terrible candidate for motherhood, that he had to block every route. But I healed eventually. I know that I'll make a wonderful mother someday and I know that God loves me and has a plan for me...it's just all about timing. And it was a good learning experience. I at least know more about adoption and my husband has opened the door to that possibility in his mind, and I hope that that young mother and her baby are in a better environment because of all of this.