MAKING A FAMILY

I have said here before that we went through many many years of infertility, miscarriages, hormones, surgeries, and on and on. The one area that I haven't really talked about is our attempts to adopt. I was so completely naive. I thought for sure that we could have a house full of ankle biters without any problem, cuz after all we were a really cool couple. We called doctors, lawyers and indian chiefs (not really, but that completed part of a rhyme I remember form childhood) and I managed to tell every living soul that I had ever met, and even people in the checkout line at the store, that we were hoping to adopt. In our state there is a 6-8 YEAR wait and I wasn't about to wait that long! Lo and behold, a local attorney called us and said he had been made aware of a baby girl that had been born and was being placed for adoption. I was ready to snicker and thought..wow, that was easy. Yeah, right. At 5 am the morning we were to head to the hospital to meet our new daughter, the phone rang, it was the attorney telling us that mom and baby had left the hospital around midnight and were no where to be found. If that news wasn't bad enough, we found out 6 months later that this baby was found in a warehouse, still the size of a 1 month old, and had apparently been lying in her bed for possibly 4 or 5 days cause mom was in the slammer for selling drugs and didn't bother to tell anyone that she had a baby that might need a bottle or clean diaper. I wanted to screeeeem! That little girl was living a hellish life and her life would have been dramatically different if we had been able to be her parents. This isn't the only time an adoption fell through for us but it was the worst one. At least the others were loved and cared for as far as we knew. To this day I wonder about that little girl. She was placed in a neighboring county foster system. She would be a teenager now. I hope she is ok. This isnt the end of our story, tomorrow I will fill you in on the most amazing chain of events that made me a mom.