Life took an abrupt turn for my neighbor that spring day. Their long laid plans to attend a concert that evening went out the window. Their way of life as happily married couple forever changed with one phone announcing the arrival of their first child, a boy. They didn’t call the doctor. No, an adoption agency called them.
We had met as newly weds. We each has purchased our first homes on the same block – a house away from each other. Through the years, my husband and I made our way to the hospital every couple years and returned with one bouncing baby boy after another. Our neighbors had politely celebrated each new arrival and than had gone home to their large, neat, always clean house. At some point, they quietly began visiting the medical clinics, asking and answering questions, taking tests until they realized their only option – the adoption agency. Again they submitted themselves to an ordeal of papers and probing home visits all in hopes of having a baby placed in their home.
And then they waited. They waited much longer than nine-months for their baby to arrive. Finally, that phone call announced his arrival on Friday the 13th, “But it is Good Friday!” they assured us. And we all smiled, wiped away our tears of joy for them and their new little boy.
Immediately, their lives changed as their entered into a phase of sleepless nights, dirty diapers, food smeared high chair and all the packing necessary to take a simple trip to the store. They accepted it all because they loved their new son. Quickly nights up with baby became mornings of preparing him for school and then entrance into high school. As an adult he bought the house across the street and he and his own family added more joy to his adopted parents’ lives.
My cousin and her husband waited much longer and had more than one experience of being told, “I’ve changed my mind, you can not adopt my baby.” As middle age loomed, they became missionaries in Slovenia. It seemed like they had barely settled into life in Europe when they were called back to the states – a baby girl awaited them.
In a flurry of activity they flew back, gathered baby items, went to showers, rushed through her adoption and all the other paperwork they needed to take her to Slovenia. Recently sang in her first school choir concert, a tall, lanky, beautiful child.
I love adoption stories. I think I read “The Family Nobody Wanted” three or four times. A childless couple Carl and Helen Doss wanted more children after adopting a son. When the social worker wistfully mentioned the lovely children needing adoption, but looking different than they family, they decided to adopt the children that did not quite fit other couple’s ideal: Older children, mixed race children, children with physical and mental needs. Children that even couples wanting to adopt did not want. The Doss family discovered that no child is truly unwanted. Children just need to be loved, taught and nurtured.
That truth compelled my niece and her husband to go to Ethiopia to adopt their son. With an international adoption, the paperwork and process took time and money. He finally came home as a toddler with an infectious smile. His adoptive parents and older siblings took turns making sure he knew he could count on them to be there for him.
The spoke to him, read him books, told him stories, pointed out the doggy, the kitty and the horsey. They practiced identifying “Leg, arm, foot, eye.” They waited for him to respond with the correct word, to say more than the few beginning sounds that every child uses.
What little happened with him, happened slowly. He took his time beginning to walk. The language never flourished as it had with all their other children. “He had a poor beginning. He is just catching up,” his parents said. They said that until their concern sent them to many doctors with many questions. Time and again they carried their growing boy to the professionals for more probing, more tests and more questions.
Finding a diagnosis took forever. Finally, they began hearing a cascading list of diagnoses: autism, seizures and a degenerative neurological disorder that bit by bit has robbed him of his ability to walk, communicate with words, even hold a cup by himself or even turn over.
But it has not robbed him of his adoptive parents, his siblings or the warm, loving community in which they live. Time and again neighbors and family have provided help, funds, a moment of relief and a listening ear.
Proving yet again that while adoption brings an abrupt change to any family, it can also be the vehicle for a greater blessing in many lives.