Written by Alissa Kay
One day in August of 2011, my phone rang. I had family visiting from out state. Matthew was napping. I was hesitant to answer the phone. I checked the caller ID and noticed it was our social worker. Well, that sealed the deal. I would take the call… I went in the other room and answered the phone. The social worker shared some details with me and asked if we wanted to be shown. This mom, I’ll call her Natalie, had seen our profile online and was interested in learning more about us. Natalie also happened to live out of state. I was pretty sure my husband would be “all in”, but wanted to talk everything over with him first. Of course, he was happy to have our profile book shared with Natalie. From this day on, Natalie has been on my mind.
A few weeks later, we were out of state visiting family. Not far from where Natalie lived. The social workers knew we were in the area and I was secretly hoping that we’d get a call that they wanted to meet us. It didn’t happen. We packed up the car; got Matthew buckled into his car seat and said our good-byes to family. The car ride was pretty quiet because we thought this was another “maybe baby” that was going to be ours and realized it wasn’t going to work out… we were an hour outside of town, when my phone rang. It was the social worker. She wanted to know if we left yet, that she got a call from Wisconsin and Natalie and her mom wanted to meet us. We pulled off the highway and sat in a Wendy’s parking lot waiting for the social workers from the 2 different branches to coordinate
everything.
We ended up turning around and met Natalie (who was month away from her due date) and her mom a few hours later… it was a heartbreaking meeting. I was holding back the tears with little success. Natalie and her mom were crying as well. They have a sad story. Natalie’s mom was diagnosed with cancer and wasn’t expected to live. Essentially this was the reason for the adoption plan. Matthew was charming as usual and kept everyone entertained… and helped to lighten the mood.
We left and made the 6 hour drive back home… my heart was heavy for this young family. And yet, I was feeling happy knowing we might be bringing home a little girl. Bittersweet can’t even begin to explain it. Through several phone calls back and forth, we got to know the family fairly well over the next few weeks. They wanted to discuss names. We were a little uncomfortable with that because at this point this was their baby girl. Not ours. They wanted the baby to have her grandma’s name as her middle name. After Natalie’s mom; who wasn’t expected to live. It was something we absolutely would honor if this baby girl ended up being our daughter. It would be an easy promise to keep.