A Mother's Day to Remember

"The worst part of life is waiting- The best part of life is having someone worth waiting for." - Jessica Brumley

On Friday, May 2nd, 2014, the best part of our life began! Just in time for Mother's Day, which in past years has been a bittersweet holiday for me, we received unexpected news of our adoption referral. The past week has been an absolute whirlwind of emotion, activity, joy and anxiety! It is surreal, and perhaps one of the unique gifts adoption offers. One email, one phone call, and your entire perspective, your world as you have known it, shifts instantaneously to allow this new reality to exist. Instant parenthood. It is bliss, and also barely believable. Jamie and I keep looking at each other and bursting out in tear-filled laughter with the crazy joy of it. This is real. This is our life. We finally have a child, a face, a name, a son…to wait for.

REFERRAL DAY:
Friday, May 2nd, 2014 was special to begin with. The evening before, I had taken my soon to be five year old niece, Lydia, to Beauty and the Beast at Shea's Theatre in Buffalo as a birthday gift from her Uncle Jamie and I. Because it was a late night for our little Lydia, she spent the night with us and I took a personal day off from work to spend some time with her before taking her back home. Jamie went to work, as usual, and I was in the process of cooking breakfast for Lydia when Jamie called from school. "Are you sitting down?" Dread crept up through me as I seated myself across from Lydia at the kitchen table and answered, "Oh, no. What  happened? Is everyone ok?" Lydia stopped coloring and watched me, eyes wide. Jamie was scattered and stumbling over his words. "Hold on, I need to pull this email up and read it to you word for word. I'm confused. I think…Just listen." He read a brief email stating FANA was offering us a child, that we should set up an appointment immediately with our pediatrician to review the file, and that Jerri, our Families of FANA director, wanted us to call her immediately. She said she was available to meet with us Sunday afternoon to go over the child's information. She also mentioned that we needed to keep the information confidential for the time being. Then, my husband's voice, broken with emotion, uttered, "I think we just  got our referral."

Later, when my sister's husband, Rick, came to pick her up early from our house, Lydia told her step-dad, "Aunt Heady is crazy! She smiles when she cries!" And it was true. With Jamie's news, I burst into tears, while grinning from ear to ear. "What?" "How is that even possible?!!" We didn't know of any other couples who had received referrals in early May. We had been certain that the next referrals we would see (and we were praying hard that one would be ours) would be in July at the FANA Family Picnic and Golf Tournament weekend. It had never even occurred to us that it could happen before then. Both Jamie and I were caught completely off guard and emotionally vulnerable. The tears just wouldn't  stop. Jamie decided to come home from school immediately and I called my sister to make new arrangements for Lydia. When Jamie walked in the back door of the house, I ran to him and we just held each other and sobbed for several minutes. Was it possible? Could our years of waiting, wishing, yearning, come to an end so suddenly? We knew nothing. The email included no information about the age or sex of the child and we were baffled by the suddenness of it all. Why now? Why us? Then again, if this was real, if a child really was waiting for us…There was no question to answer. Yes, yes, and praise God, "Yes!" We were ready.

We called Jerri together and tried to get more information only to find out we needed to have a pediatrician appointment on the books before she could release background and medical information to us. It was important to Jerri that we would be able to properly process the information we were given, with an expert in child development. She made it clear that she was not an  expert and couldn't play that role. She told us to get the appointment and then call back. I, growing increasingly anxious about the validity of the entire scenario, pushed to meet sooner. "How can we possibly sit on this until Sunday?" "We will get the appointment, one way or another, just please tell me we can meet with you today or tonight! I will come to your house at 10pm with a bottle of wine, if need be!" I chirped. "We need to know." "Get the appointment and call me back," was the answer. Poor Jerri, she was in the process of packing to leave town for an overdue vacation, and she had received our referral late Thursday night, with no warning. Now, she had to deal with me…and I was pretty much finished with patient. I was persistent and insistent. If she knew something about our child, our referral,  our family to be…Well, I wanted to know it, too! Thank God Jerri has lots of experience and tolerance for waiting moms like myself. She stayed very calm and centered as I started to spiral into a delirious kind of high speed anxiety.

Somehow, amongst all the other details surrounding our adoption paperwork and process, we had missed a detail. We were already supposed to have a pediatrician waiting in the wings. This way, when we got our referral, we could call him or her up and get an immediate appointment. Well…We didn't have a pediatrician, but I was bound and determined we were getting one within the hour! We called Jamie's sister who lives near us and has two boys and asked for recommendations. She gave us the names of a few places she and her friends liked and we started making phone calls. I also called my general doctor's office and asked for a referral. Our first choice was Kenmore Pediatrics because we had heard great things about them and we knew other FANA families had gone there, so they would have adoption experience. But, it took us several phone calls and some internet searching to find out that they had merged with Delaware Pediatrics and were at a new location. Lucky for us, once we understood this, the rest was smooth sailing. I called the Delaware Pediatrics office, explained our situation and they were incredibly kind and helpful. The receptionist even had one of the doctors get on the line and talk to me for a bit. "Congratulations! How are holding up? This has got to be a pretty emotional day for you," Dr. Schank said as he took the phone. I was so grateful for that acknowledgement. Immediately, I felt at ease and I put him on speaker phone as he walked Jamie and I through the next steps. He was booked solid but suggested another doctor in the practice that he thought would be a good match. Then we were back on with the receptionist who booked us early Tuesday morning for a consultation with our new pediatrician, Dr. Joyce Zmuda. We called Jerri back with grins on our faces and left a breathless voicemail. "We've got our appointment! When can you meet with us? Please call us back and tell us what will work for you…We can't wait to find out more!"

The agony of waiting, at this point, was almost more than I could bare. I cycled through joy, then anxiety and fear, then anger at the lack of information and finally back to calm and hopeful. We knew if Jerri could meet us, it would be out in the Southtowns, so we headed out to Jamie's credit union in Hamburg to work out the financial end of things. We've been steadfastly paying down debt and making all sorts of adjustments in our lives (packing lunches, making our own coffee, driving one car instead of two, limiting social expenses, eating at home) to prepare our financial house for a referral. Still, we knew the remaining expenses were more than we could handle on our own. So, we figured we might as well get right on top of that controllable aspect, while we waited to hear back from Jerri. By late afternoon, we had made it over to Jamie's parents' house in Hamburg where we waited for her phone call. By now, we had alerted our parents and sisters of the possibility of the referral, but we knew we couldn't share the news with anyone else just yet. Jamie's parents convinced us to try to relax for a bit in their hot tub, so we put our phones within arms' reach and tried to be calm…But, of  course, our heads were spinning with questions.

The phone finally rang around 4:00pm, just a few minutes after we had gotten into the hot tub! Jamie couldn't get the speaker phone to switch on with his wet fingers, so I did my best to ascertain the news based on his responses. He hung up grinning and said, "We're on for 7pm!" Suddenly, all my anxiety dissipated. This was it. This was happening. Tonight. We were going to meet our child, at least on paper, tonight. We spread the news to both our parents and sisters and made plans to reconnect with them late that night, after we met with Jerri and Annie, who will soon replace Jerri as director of our FANA families organization. We cleaned ourselves up and joined Jamie's parents for an impromptu dinner out at Red Lobster and then came back to the house to kill another hour before we could go. We both crashed for a little bit, exhausted from the emotion of the day, and then we were back in the car and headed to Jerri's to receive our referral.

When we first arrived, it was nervous small talk as we settled around a large kitchen table prepared with wine, glasses, and some paperwork. As Jerri chatted about her upcoming trip, I glanced at the small stack of papers on the table, covered by her notebook. A little white edge stuck out and in black print I made out the name "Eli." Impertinently, I pointed at it and burst out, "I'm so sorry, but is THAT our referral?" "Eli?!!" Jerri smiled and nodded, "Well, yes. I guess you know now…It's a boy!" Still stunned, I stammered, "But, Eli.." She handed me the paper and said, "Yeah, it is an unusual name, isn't it? We've never had an Eli before." Jamie and I stared at each other through tears. "It's the name we chose," I managed to choke out. "We picked that name for a boy almost twelve years ago…" Annie laughed out loud and shook her head. "Well, I guess it is decided then!" Jerri told us that she had hoped we would consider keeping his given name because it was so beautiful, while I tried to process what was happening. Our little boy's birth mother had given him the same name we chose for him? It seemed providential. It was incredibly comforting. I took a deep breath and continued to read along as Jerri read the papers out loud. "Eli Lopez Ramirez, born September 25th, 2013."

We learned that our little boy is seven months old. He was born three weeks premature, but his birth mother had an otherwise normal, healthy pregnancy and delivery. He has a few medical concerns that we needed to review with our pediatrician, but nothing that scared us or overwhelmed us. After a half hour or so of reading and discussing. Jamie asked, "Can we see his picture?" Jerri explained that she believed sometimes the pictures could cloud your judgement and she wanted us to hear all of the information before we attached it to a face. Jamie said something like, "We work with hundreds of kids a week. We know that they look different to you once you know them and care about them. They all become beautiful…" and I remember preparing myself for the possibility of a picture of a child I felt no connection to or even secretly found a little odd looking. It didn't matter. I knew I would love him, regardless of what that picture looked like because he needed me to be his mama and I needed to give him all the love I'd been saving for a child. But, Jerri finally revealed his picture and we both gasped and welled up at the sweetness of his big dark eyes and plump baby lips. "He is beautiful," Jamie managed to whisper as we squeezed each other's hands and took in our first look at our son, our Eli.

It was other worldly. We left the meeting with our photocopied picture and a few pages of faxed information on Eli and drove back to the Holden's house where Jamie's parents and his sister, Kelly and her family eagerly awaited our return. Jamie walked in touting the pic and a huge grin. Everyone cheered and then we attempted to share all the details of the meeting with them. Then, we were back on the road and driving down to Eldred, Pa (2 hours south of Buffalo) to my parents' house. On the drive there we discussed Eli's formal name and decided on Elias James Holden. Eli had been our chosen name for a boy ever since we started talking about parenthood, but at first it was Elijah, formally. When we decided to adopt from Colombia, we researched Spanish names and found the Spanish version of Elijah was Elias, which we grew to love even more. James was my idea because I liked the way it sounded with Elias and it was Jamie's given name as well as his father's middle name. I also liked the idea of giving our adopted son his "real" father's (versus his birth father's) name as a symbol of family stability and true belonging. At first Jamie wasn't sure how he felt about giving our son his own name, but it had grown on him and when we talked about it that evening, we both felt certain about our choice. We arrived in Eldred shortly after 11pm and my mom and sister met us at the door, giggly and antsy with anticipation. We made the big reveal of the picture in our living room and spent the next hour discussing details, staring at the three photos we had, and shaking our heads at the wonder of it all. Finally, we stumbled up to bed, happy and ready for sleep.

The following days were so full…I do want to record the details to share with interested family and friends, but also to someday share with Eli. But, I think I will have to catch you all up over the course of the next few days. I had an amazing Mother's Day. The love and support Jamie and I are receiving from family and friends is incredible. We feel so blessed and so grateful to be Eli's parents and to be bringing him into such a warm, loving community. It feels as though life is beginning all over again for us. Such great adventures are on our horizon. Thank you for walking this road with us. We are full of  love and joy.