I don’t know why this has been on my mind lately, but it’s probably because everyone has been writing on the blogosphere about what they’re thankful for. It’s probably odd that my mind wanders to our failed adoption when I think about being thankful, but that day had so many different possible endings, and I’m so thankful it ended the way it did.

Imagine our tension, as Big T and I sat in a labor room of a strange town for nine hours with the hostile extended family of a woman who’d asked us to parent her baby. The extended family wanted the mother to go through with an adoption because her current children were in and out of the foster care system. They were worn out from having to pick up the pieces that were broken from addiction. They were hostile because they hadn’t expected the mother to pick a couple of vegans, and voiced that we shouldn’t be allowed to adopt because any child we’d raise would die from a lack of protein. Things got more awkward when the family left the room and the mother began asking us for money, which we absolutely would not give. Big T and I were stuck in there, unable to leave, and had no way to communicate besides sending frantic texts to each other trying to figure out what to do. Do we figure out a way to leave? Or do we wait to make sure the baby is going to be okay? A few minutes before the baby was about to be born, the mother went into a panic because she was nervous that she did, in fact, know who the father was. She said the father was probably her ex who was in jail. She must have read the concern on our face, because she changed her tune and assured us that the guy in prison couldn’t be the father because she’d had six miscarriages from him and was certain he couldn’t get her pregnant. *sigh*

We wound up walking away from the situation, although I doubt the mother would have placed with us if we’d stayed. Her family was really unhappy with our lifestyle. It would have been better if they could have found parents they were more comfortable with or decided to parent themselves. I do wish they hadn’t been so mean to us, but it is what it is. I think the mother wound up deciding to parent and took her baby home. I still don’t know if she was trying to manipulate us the whole time in order to get money to fund her pregnancy. I’ll probably never know. I think about her a lot though, and wonder if she and her children are okay. I hope she was able to get help, find a job, move in with her grandma, ditch the boyfriend, and be a great momma to her family. I don’t know though, addiction is hard to overcome, and after seeing her family interact it didn’t seem like she would have the support she needed.

The day after that awful experience, I sat sobbing on a curb outside of Graceland, with the Heartbreak hotel sign behind me in the distance. We couldn’t get an early flight home and didn’t want to sit in the condo we’d rented with a bunch of unused baby stuff, so we went to Graceland instead. I cried the whole time and was too sad to care about what I must have looked like. While we were in Memphis, my best friend M cleared the baby stuff out of our home in California, and I gave my mother (who’d flown out to meet us) our car seat so we didn’t have to explain to everyone in the airport why it was empty. It sucked. My best friend M had a bag of tortilla chips waiting for me in the car at the airport, because she knew what I needed when I was down.

The whole thing was crazy znd I still can’t make sense of it. My point though, is that I’m so glad it all went down the way it did. If we hadn’t been contacted because of the mother, we’d still be waiting to go through with an international adoption and never would have pursued a domestic adoption. I’d go through that horrible day a million times over again if it meant we’d have Little T at the end. Parenting Little T is simply the best thing that’s ever happened to us. And for Little T, I am grateful. So grateful.