Well, ultimately, children belong only to themselves, and they are just lent to us for a little while. So from that perspective, someone lent me a literal person. He is the best birthday present ever in the history of gift giving, and I get reminded of it every year on my birthday because his is just one day after mine.
This is a long and emotional story. Heather's version is longer, and--you guessed it--more emotional.
My oldest son, Ryan, was 18 months old when we moved to TN. When he turned 3, we were ready to expand our family and began a long adoption journey. That was early 2007.
We signed up through an agency, jumped through hoops, attended classes, got fingerprinted, put together a spiral bound photo book describing and showing what great and deserving people we were, and were put on the wait list in July 2007.
And wait we did. After about a year of nothing, we got matched with a birth mom. We met with her, and everything was good to go. We painted the guest bedroom and set up nursery furniture that had been in storage since that one time I
built Ryan's bed. Then, a little before she gave birth, we learned that the birth dad had never signed off on his paperwork. He kept saying he would, but didn't. So that's a pocket veto. In TN, both birth parents have to agree. Or if they can't find the dad, they put out ads in local newspapers. Yep. We left the final meeting with her feeling like we'd been punched in the gut.
A few months later, we were matched again, but with someone much earlier in her pregnancy. Once she felt the baby move, she decided to parent. Turns out that about half of all "done deal" adoptions end up this way, with the birth mom changing her mind. And who could blame her? Certainly not us. For this one, we had guarded our hearts a lot more, so the sting was much less. We assumed our "horror story" was over, and now we'd just have either smooth sailing, or at most, small bumps.
Fall 2008, we decided to put our house on the market and find a larger home since surly we'd be matching again soon. Well, as I'm sure you can recall, that was not a great time to be putting a house on the market. We weren't quite this desperate...
Early in 2009, we matched again, this time with a woman pregnant with twins. Twice as nice! We went to trivia night at the Mexican restaurant with friends who had twins and called our table Team Gemini!
After a couple of months, we fell in love with our current home and bought it. It was the big model home in a new development that had stalled out for almost two years, so the builder was willing to buy our old house to get some movement in the neighborhood. As an aside, it worked--within months, the neighborhood started growing again and has gone from 70-80 homes in 2009 to over 1200 in the past decade.
Then, on the Ides of March, 2009, the twins were born. The birth mom called us at 3am and asked Heather to attend the birth. We visited the kids a few times in the NICU. We called people close to us, all excited.
A few days later, she decided to parent the twins. In TN, a birth mom has 10 working days after the birth to change her mind. Again, who could blame her? Not us, but it hurt--still hurts, a decade later.
On April fools day, we moved into a very empty feeling 5 bedroom house. We did not set up the nursery. We did not get back onto the agency's wait list. My wife canceled her maternity leave, and went back to work. You know, delivering babies.
Fall came. Ryan started Kindergarten. Hard as that is for normal parents, it was super tough for us. I'm a stay at home dad, and was supposed to be busy raising baby #2.
Then on Nov 3, Heather read this in her daily devo: Heb 10:36 “You need to persevere, so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised.” That night, she asked me about setting up the nursery, and I agreed.
That weekend, we had a friend visiting us. She was in the middle of her own overseas adoption. It was national adoption month. One our pastors dedicated her adopted children that Sunday. We didn't tell any of our other friends that we'd set up the nursery.
My birthday is Nov 9. I was feeling old and down about everything. It was Tues, Nov 10, and I was having lunch with the NashDads, the stay at home dads group that I was a part of until Ryan had gone to Kindergarten. We were at Joey's pizza in Brentwood (it's since moved to Nashville and half a dozen other pizza places have come and gone in its old location). The guys were asking me, "How the adoption process going?" and I was saying, "We're about to get back onto the list."
Then my phone rang--my flip phone from the late 90's, because I refused to get a nice phone until it was also a camera and a palm pilot and not an apple product (iPhone 1 had came out in 2007, but yikes the $$$).
Heather was on the other end. "There's a woman here about to give birth to a boy, and she wants us to raise him."
Heather's side of this is much better, so I'll just quote it. And she likes bold--she's a bold woman, what can I say?
November 10, 2009 was a Tuesday. I was on ER call. That means that if a patient comes in that doesn’t have a doctor at our hospital they would be assigned to my care. I get assigned to this call about once a month. Shortly before lunch I got a call from one of the ER doctors. There’s a patient here in labor, she not from around here, and by the way she didn’t know she was pregnant.
After getting the patient admitted, I stepped out to do some paperwork. Later, as I came back to the room to check on her, nurses looked at me and one said in a very slow, deliberate voice, “Dr. Rupe, the patient wants to give her baby for adoption.” The entire room turned to see my response. The unit had watched us go through our loss, they knew what we had been through and how much we wanted a child.
At that moment I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest. I managed to ask, “Would you consider my family, we have been waiting a long time to adopt a baby?”
“Yes” she simply said.
I then turned over her medical care to one of my partners and stepped into my office to hyperventilate. I called Russ and told him about the possibility.
I then turned over her medical care to one of my partners and stepped into my office to hyperventilate. I called Russ and told him about the possibility. Then I picked up the phone to call Jessica to ask her to pray (remember I hadn’t told her about setting up the nursery), and I noticed that I had a voicemail from her. Her message said, “Heather, I had a dream last night that you had a baby. You have been on my heart and I've been praying for you all morning.” Wow. I was shaking as I put down the phone, tears began to flow.
We later met with the birth mom later and asked why she'd come so far to our hospital. Being from a ways north of Nashville, she had literally driven past quite a few hospitals on the way to Williamson. She wasn't sure, she just got in the car and drove.
Just to clarify a point here: Heather was one of 4 doctors partnered at that point in her career, and her practice was one of a couple taking ER call. That puts the odds of her being the one to walk into that room on that night at a very low number.
As for the birth mom "not knowing she's pregnant" part, it's a legit thing. I'm sure it's partly denial, but I saw the birth mom the day after she delivered, and she was tall and thin--didn't look recently pregnant to me. I mean, they made a reality show about this exact thing a while back.
We went to visit the baby in the hospital that Wednesday night. It was small group night, and when we walked into our house full of people, 5 year old Ryan boldly announced, “For a long time there has only been 3 people in our family, but we prayed for a baby, and now we have 4 in our family.” And we did.
We were on pins and needles for the next10 working days, because what was most surprising to me was that we immediately fell in love with the boy. As much as the agency tried to teach us not to get attached during those 2 weeks, the heart just doesn't work that way.
Six months later, the giant-est judge ever signed off on the final, final paperwork.
Because yeah, in Tennessee, the state has six months to change its mind about your adoption. Anyway, we were never worried about this, but it still was a great moment at the conclusion of a fantastic story!
I'll close with the wall of Carson's childhood nursery.
