To Hell and Back – Again

I didn’t have a chance to finish blogging about the week when things spiraled out of control Sunday afternoon.

I was going to tell you about a phone call we got from an adoption attorney toward the end of last week. She had called a month ago to see if we wanted to be considered for a situation. In a moment of weakness, I said why not. I knew that this would be a baby that would meet most couples’ criteria, which meant the attorney would be showing several couples’ profiles. I didn’t get my hopes up. I didn’t even tell R about it.

A month went by. I figured we weren’t chosen. Then we got a phone call from the attorney last week. I was going to tell you that we were chosen, that we spoke with the birth mom on Friday and the conversation went really well. That there were still some details that needed to be investigated further, but that it sounded promising. That she was due in the first half of May, in a town a few hours away.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, we got a phone call from the attorney. The baby was born that day. R and I stood there staring at each other for a few minutes in shock. Then we rushed around like crazy people, opening the door to the nursery that we shut back in September, dragging out the diaper bag and suitcase that we had left packed from that disastrous adoption farce.

I was going to tell you about how we threw clothes into a suitcase, packed up the car with our suitcase and baby gear, got the pets and their stuff loaded into the car to take to my mom’s. I was going to tell you about our drive to the hospital, how we were frantically debating names because the baby was a girl and we only have a boy’s name because we haven’t been able to settle on a girl’s name.

In my head, I was already composing the post, trying to be gentle and restrained because I knew it would be painful for some to read, that finally this nightmare had ended for us and we were parents.

We had gotten about five miles down the road when the next call came. The birthmom’s urine test came back positive for cocaine and I think some other drugs, although after hearing the word “cocaine,” the world kind of slowly grounded to a halt and the rest of the sentence just faded beyond my hearing. It also turned out that the baby was actually not premature, but was in fact full term and tiny, which pointed to other significant health issues.

We turned around, came home, unpacked the car and shut the door to the nursery. Again.

And the next day I e-mailed the adoption attorney, told her to pull our profile from consideration and asked her to let the other attorneys in our area know to pull our profile too. This was the third strike in six months. We need to stop putting ourselves through this.