Wow — it’s getting so exciting to see how God was so carefully directing us toward adoption and toward Zachary! Here’s another journal entry. It is dated April 23, 2001.
Machele, our adoption case worker, has been great! She is friendly, easy to talk to, funny, and encouraging. Our meetings with her have been a blessing.
Our first meeting was a heap of papers and a long list of the documents to come. We took about an hour to discuss the list and some of the process to come.
She mentioned the great need for black adoption. Just that morning she had received an email from Indiana searching for a family that was open to adopting an African American baby. She was thrilled that we wanted to adopt transracially.
We didn’t really get much new information from that first meeting since we had gone to the Bethany orientation earlier and got lots of information then. But that first meeting made our upcoming adoption seem such a reality. Adoption for years had been something we talked about, but now it was the reality. We were really doing it! It brought feelings mostly of excitement but also of nervousness — much the same feelings that a pregnancy brings.
That first meeting also acted as a confirmation for Paul and me. It felt right. We clicked with Machele. She talked of the need for adoption, especially of black children. And it fueled our excitement to be there with her, discussing our adoption.
For homework before our next meeting, Paul and I had a list of possible birth parent scenarios and a place for us to check yes or no whether we would consider such an adoption plan. The list included prenatal care, drug use, tobacco use, rape incidents, mental health, criminal background, HIV, etc. We called Robert, my father-in-law who is an obstetrician, to get his professional opinion on the chances of each of these things affecting the baby. After our discussion with him, we decided to say YES to all of the scenarios — we were open to considering a wide range of birth mothers, birth fathers, and lifestyle choices. We felt confident in saying YES to them.
Our second meeting was the next week. This meeting was mainly for us to go through the yes/no worksheet with Machele, qualifying any item that we wanted to. We began to go through the list with Machele reading the scenario (“Twins?”) and us answering (“Yes.”)
Rape?
Yes.
Learning disability in birthmother?
Yes.
Learning disability in extended family?
Yes.
No information on birthfather?
Yes.
Mental illness in birthmother?
Yes.
Okay. Any limitations or qualifiers?
No.
Okay . . . Mental illness in extended family?
Yes.
Limitations or qualifiers?
No.
Machele stopped and was giddy with excitement. ”I just have to stop right here and show you something!”
She turned in her chair and picked up a small stack of papers. She then excitedly explained that these were two birthmom profiles for which she had no families who were interested. They both included major mental illness — bipolar disorder and schizophrenia– in both the birthmothers and the birthmothers’ parents. Both babies were girls and caucasian. One of them was due to be born in only 3 weeks! The other was due in June. Machele told us that if we were interested in either one of them, she could rush our stuff through and get it going. She was willing to do that since these babies were such a great need. She told us to pray about them and to let her know what we decided.
Wow!! Very exciting! Don’t you love cliff hangers? I am stopping right in the middle of this journal entry just to leave you hanging! :)
