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by: randomtrout ”...despite the fact that we were exhausted, we couldn’t sleep. It was 4 hours of hell for us.” --------------------------------- When we decided to adopt, we knew that adoption is a lot different today than it used to be. The agency no longer matches up children with adoptive parents. Rather, the mom and dad get to choose the adoptive parents for their child. And they get to meet the adoptive parents and possibly have an ongoing relationship with them into the future. They call it “Open Adoption” — where the child and her adoptive parents have a relationship with her original mom and dad. My wife and I were very excited about having an ongoing relationship with our child’s first mom and dad. Even recent research shows that Open Adoption is not only good for the child, but also the mom who relinquished her child. So when we got “the call” that someone had chosen us, we were thrilled. We met Beth and Lee the next week. Of course, everyone was nervous. I was nervous, my wife was nervous and both Beth and Lee were nervous. When I’m in a nervous situation like that, I make a point of being overly nice. That’s how I handle my nervousness. Lee, on the other hand, talks when he’s nervous—talks and talks and talks. Since he’s young, he talked about things that are cool to young men: driving fast, car accidents, drinking, partying, video games. It was not the easiest conversation to have. At the end of that meeting, it was suggested that we get together again, which we did. Lee was not able to make it, though, so we met with Beth and her mother. We got to know Beth better. It was a much different meeting than the first one. For the next meeting, Lee and Beth came to our home. That was a lot of (self-imposed) pressure on us, but it was one of the best meetings we had with them. As it turns out, that would be the last meeting with Lee and Beth together until the birth. Lee didn’t talk nearly as much and he didn’t talk as much about getting drunk and driving 90 miles an hour. It was after that meeting that things started falling apart. About a week and a half later, we heard from the adoption agency that Lee did not want to relinquish his child. Beth, however, still wanted to move forward with adoption, so we remained involved. We met a couple more times with Beth and her mother and they told us that Lee was “having a hard time with it,” but they seemed confident that in the end, he would do it. THE CALL came (not “the call,” but THE CALL) at about 2:30 a.m. on May 2—Beth was in labor. What with waking up, showering, collecting our things and driving the hour and a half to the hospital, we got there at 5 a.m. We saw Beth briefly then waited in the waiting room with Lee. About an hour later, Jacob was born. As an adoptive parent, it’s hard to know how to act at the hospital with the dad watching everything you do. The hospital staff knew that we were going to be “the parents” and they called us “Mom” and “Dad” right in front of Lee. We even got to be in the nursery with Jacob before Lee did. It was an awkward situation. Later that day, the adoption case worker came with paperwork, but the hospital did not have a notary, so the paperwork could not be completed. She told Beth and Lee that she would be back the next day with another person from the agency to notarize whatever it was that needed notarizing. She talked with us briefly in private and asked us how we were doing. We asked if Lee would indeed sign the papers and she said that he had not indicated he wouldn’t. The next morning, we got a call from the case worker. This was not like the other calls. This was the bad news call. Lee was not going to sign relinquishment papers. He wanted to take Jacob home with him. She thought it would be better to minimize any complicating factors, like having us around, so we left the hospital. We were in complete radio silence for about 4 hours. There’s waiting, and then there’s waiting. Adoption in general involves a lot of waiting. There’s waiting for people to answer questions, fill out paperwork on your behalf, getting appointments scheduled; waiting for tests/forms/various-other-processes to be processed. Then there’s waiting for the choosing. Waiting for “the call” and waiting for THE CALL. This waiting, these 4 hours of limbo, was much different. This was a moment-by-moment kind of waiting. The kind you experience when you’re sitting in a waiting room while a loved one is in surgery. The kind that makes your heart race whenever the door opens and you think for a split second that the doctor (the one doing the operation that you’re concerned about) is going to walk through. Every time the phone rang, I jumped and my heart started racing. We ate, but we weren’t that hungry. We tried napping, but despite the fact that we were exhausted, we couldn’t sleep. It was 4 hours of hell for us. When we finally got the call from the case worker, she asked if we were still in town. We were. She asked if she could meet with us, so we went back to the hospital and met up with just her. Beth and her mom had left the hospital and took Jacob with them. Lee was threatening legal action, so they left before he could return with a lawyer. The case worker explained the situation to us. Beth still wanted to move forward with the adoption, but Lee did not. We had three options: We could walk away. This meant that either Beth would have to parent, herself; or find a different set of willing adoptive parents.We could move forward. This meant that Jacob would be placed in our home, but that it could be a very temporary situation. He may end up going back to his mom.Jacob could go into some sort of temporary foster care while this got worked out. So, Jacob would be placed, but not with us. We chose to move forward. But since we were exhausted, we went home and slept on it that night. We went back the next day (May 4) and picked up Jacob. He came home with us. He was our son. We loved him. We held him. We changed his poopy diapers. We sang to him. We fed him. We talked to him. We took pictures. We even cried with him. We loved him. He was our son. Family and friends visited and brought gifts. People brought food—we had fabulous home cooked meals without having to cook ourselves for two weeks straight. We had more baby clothes than we knew what to do with. We took him to the doctor. He passed the exam with flying colors. We took him to church and all the church ladies ogled over him. We took him on walks to the park. He slept, ate, cried, pooped and peed and sometimes he would just stare. We loved him so much. He was our son, and we were his parents. And we were good parents, too. In the mean time, we heard that Lee claimed to have contacted a lawyer and he would have Jacob back home before the end of the week. That week went by without a call from a lawyer, so we thought he was bluffing. But that call came the next week. Lee was not bluffing. Through his lawyer, Lee successfully stopped the adoption process. We heard on Monday, May 15 that Jacob would have to go back home to his mother. We spent the rest of that day holding Jacob, and feeding him and crying and changing his poopy diapers and singing to him. This was the last day for us to be his parents. The last day he was our son. We brought him back to his mom and grandmother the next day. We were no longer his parents. He was no longer our son. That’s it. That’s the story. “So how is this a Story About God,” you ask? In the words of Job: Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. View the story online at: http://www.storiesaboutgod.org/index.php/stories/story_page/give-and-take/

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