The idea of adopting began with small seeds planted in my heart during my childhood. There were a few books that I read about adoptive families, the sweet couple my parents knew who adopted two biracial infants, a friend of the family whose children spent several months in foster care while I was a teenager. All of it made me start to think that I would adopt at some point in the future
Adoption really began to take hold as an option, though, when several years of marriage passed and those pregnancy tests I took continued to be negative. I was devastated. All I ever wanted was to be a mother and now I couldn’t get pregnant. My husband and I started talking about adoption. The more we talked about it the more we realized that we wanted to be parents and that for us it really wasn’t that important to become pregnant. Why go through lots of medical tests and the expense and heartache of fertility treatments when there were thousands (we later learned millions) of children waiting for families? We wanted children and there were children who needed families. That was the end of it. We decided to adopt and began to look at different programs and options.
Around that time I talked to a young woman we knew through a family friend. Melissa works with special needs children in Guatemala and tries to find homes for them. She was the one who first told me about special needs adoption and we began to be open to that prospect. A few weeks later she emailed me with pictures of a beautiful baby boy who had some special challenges. He was two months old and his name was Erick. We knew he was our son.
We threw together our homestudy and dossier as fast as we could go and airmailed everything to Guatemala. Then the waiting began. We had picture updates and even a few cherished videos over the next few months and we fell head over heels in love with our beautiful son. We, the couple who at first only wanted a healthy baby, realized that there is something special about these children with extra challenges. We also knew that the joy that they bring to their families completely overshadows any extra difficulties they may face. We were ready for whatever life with Erick might mean. We couldn’t wait for him to come home.
February 19, 2006 dawned and we spent our day at church doing a fundraiser to help pay for Erick’s adoption. We came home exhausted and took a much needed nap. My husband woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. It was Melissa. Our beloved baby had fallen asleep for his nap that afternoon and never woken up. We would never hold him, never kiss his forehead and never get the chance to tell him how much we loved him and how anxiously we were waiting for him. Our hearts were broken and, for us, the world would never be the same.
When Erick died, a piece of our hearts died with him. How could this happen? Why did God take our baby, especially a baby that we knew He had led us to? Did we do something wrong? Should we not have tried to adopt?
We didn’t have the answers to those questions, but we did feel God whispering to our hearts that our adoption story wasn’t finished. That He had something special for us if we would just hold on, if we would just trust Him. We clung to that hope and when Melissa told us about another baby boy who needed a home, we stepped forward believing that God would help us through our grief and give us the ability to open our hearts to this new little boy who needed us.