Excerpted from an email I recently sent to our clients:

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
1) Three-month long relationship with birth mother in Florida ends in failed adoption and fraud. MySpace.com to receive most of the blame/credit.
2) David and Kerri both equally crushed.
3) Day takes rapid turn for the better with two-hour case review and adoption placement for 5-day old white/Puerto Rican boy
4) Dave will be out of the office through Wednesday, September 27. -
5) For client related matters, please contact Peter Kappus in my absence.

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THE BAD PART:
As many of you know, Kerri and I have been waiting for an adoption placement for a little over a year now. About three months ago we received a referral for a little girl that was to be born in late-August or early September to a mother in Florida. We met with the mother over a video conference and she sent us several packages of family photos and some very nice thoughtful letters she’s written to us. We named the girl together, Elizabeth (Ellie) and felt that we were very lucky to have made this connection.

We were all quite excited, though we’d been trained to be cautious about the adoption process as about 25% of the cases end up with the birth mother changing her mind after she gives birth. Several weeks ago, our natural curiosity lead us to looking up the birth mother on MySpace.com (we knew her first name and the city she lived in, plus she’d given us photos of herself). What we discovered appeared to be a very different story that what she’d told the agency and us. She didn’t mention the adoption at all, on the contrary, she was telling all her friend how excited she was to be a mom. She also referenced a different man as the father than what she’d told the agency. Kerri and I were quite alarmed and contacted the agency. They timidly felt it out with her, taking care to not alarm her or cause her to think we were stalking her or something. The agency came back to us and assured us that everything looked on the level.

On Tuesday the birth mother posted a comment to her myspace page that she was starting to have contractions. We began to prepare to travel and were feeling very excited. Wednesday morning she posted a comment on her myspace page that she’d given birth to a healthy baby girl and was very happy. No mention of the adoption, no mention of us. We held tight for several hours thinking that perhaps she just wanted a little extra time with the baby before giving her up–then she’d contact the agency and they’d contact us. Around 11 AM we contacted the agency in Florida and pointed them to the MySpace page, asking, “What’s going on?!” The agency said they had not heard from her at all and that they would contact their main office in Miami to get some assistance. The two longest, most painful hours of our life later, around 1 PM, the agency called back to say that the birth mother had disconnected her phone number and instructed the birthing clinic she’d been at to not call the adoption agency.

She had vanished. With the girl. It appears at this point that her MySpace.com version of the story was the true one and that the adoption plan was premeditated in order to cover her living expenses and medical bills which we’d paid through and escrow account over the last three months.

Kerri and I have been devastated by the last 48 hours. We are both really struggling to come to terms with the fact that people can be so evil. And, even worse, that a little girl will now grow up in an environment where things like this are tolerated. She’s the real loser here and we wish dearly that there was something we could do. But there isn’t.

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THE GOOD PART:
So, after breaking the news to us, the agency said that about 30 minutes prior to this another child who’d already been born but placed into adoption right after birth was available. Kerri and I were told that we could take a little time (a couple of hours) to think it over, but if we wanted to adopt the child, he was ours. Otherwise, they had other families they were planning on contacting. We spent to second longest two-hour period of our life trying to sort out the horrific morning and the potential of the afternoon.

So, cutting to the chase, tomorrow at 11 AM we’ll be boarding a plane to Orlando, Florida to adopt a 5-day old boy who’s half-caucasion and half Puerto Rican. We haven’t even had time to talk about names, but we’ll be letting everyone know as soon as we have one picked out. I’ve included a picture of him here.

We’ve spent the last year or so preparing ourselves and our family for having an African American child and we do feel a certain degree of loss in that we won’t have that dimension to our family for the time being, but we do feel very fortunate that we’ll be able to give our son a good home and a safe place to grow up. Chloe’s about a week behind in processing all of this, though, she did dive right in to offer up some names, Sssse, Eeeei, and Thomas (she was opposed to keeping “The Train” as a middle name, fortunately).

We’ve officially hit the “expect the phone call any day now” mark and I can sense we’re in the calm before the storm. There’s also this sense that something really great could happen-or something really, really devastating. It’s hard to consider one without considering the other, so Kerri and I are just left with a feeling of numbness which is a sucky way to prepare for your baby.

We had our call with the birth mother in our adoption last week and it was nothing short of wonderful. Granted, it was a fairly akward conversation, but I think we all did about as well as can be expected.

The biggest news to come out of the call was that our new baby girl will be named Elizabeth and that we’ll be calling her Ellie for short (though I suspect some “Ella”s and “Lizzy”s will probably slip in there.

We are getting more and more involved in the referral process on our adoption and the reality of what we are doing–what we are becoming a part of–is revealing itself to be a very complicated and, at times, scary thing. That said, reviewing some of the paperwork we’ve received as part of our referral I came across this single sentence. Written by the birth-mother as part of the process of giving up her child for adoption, I think it captures what this is all about more simply and elegantly than anything I have seen yet.

I’m hesitant to jump the gun on it, but it appears that we may, in fact, have our adoption referral. If all goes according to plan we’ll be traveling to Orlando, Florida sometime in August or September. We don’t know much else about the baby at this point except that he/she is bi-racial and appears to be healthy.

There’s so much wrapped up in this process for me that the process of beginning to “unpack” it all, as my dear old fried and professor Jim Wheymer used to say, is nearly overwhelming. I think we are up to the challenge as a family and facing this all with our eyes open.

We received some information about a possible referral on our adoption process that we are starting to follow up on, somewhat cautiously as it is slightly outside of our pre-defined range of comfort, but no so far that we want to pass. It still feels like a terribly distant possibility and that makes it hard to simultaneously prepare for change and disappointment at once.

It certainly all comes to a head very quickly when there’s a chance of a match and I begin to realize the significance of what we’ve all signed up for in a very different way. That said, I sure hope it works out for us…

We signed up for the adoption process a while ago with the understanding that uncertainty would be involved. As part of our program you have control over a few things – the family health history (as far as parents know of, or will disclose it) – and, well that’s about it. so really don’t have control over anything. The waiting part has been OK with me. Not knowing when, or if, our new child will come to us hasn’t been something I’ve focused on. Rather, I’ve tried to keep my attention on enjoying the way things are. That said, as every day now passes I start to think, “is there something wrong with our profile?” or “was that the right picture to put on the cover?”

In the end, it will all have happened too fast I suspect. But for now, the uncertainty is starting to drive me nuts. It’s going to be such a big change in our lives – two kids, two races, two origins – that I’m just dying to “dig in” and get to work on making it all fit together.

Dear Kiddo – if you happen to reading this, HURRY UP!

There’s a great piece in the NYT Opinion blog, Relative Choices, titled “Being Adopted, and Being Me.” Adam Wolfington is a 16-year-old black man who was adopted by a white family. From his account it’s an incredible loving family who has done a lot of things right in terms of supporting him in his interests and vigorously deffending his role as their child. One account he gives that I found to be great was,

When people ask if she is my “real mother,� she asks, “What do I look like, a hologram?�

Another one:

So Mom and I sat down and I told her the ten worst things people said to me. She wrote them down. Then I made up answers that were funny but not mean. (Mom’s rule is to never make someone feel bad just to get back at them.) Mom wrote these down too. I then memorized the list. Next time it happened I was ready. It felt great! I wasn’t so scared, or hurt (as much), or embarrassed by those questions again.

It’s great to read a success story like this as we go through our adoption process. With so much that can go wrong, it’s nice to hear about something going right.

We’re at this really weird/hard point in our adoption process where our profile is complete and we’re just waiting for a referral. When a case comes up that is just slightly out of our pre-defined risk tolerance the agency contacts us to find out if the case might be something we’d consider. We have had about four or five such cases in the last month and a few of them have been straight-forward “no thanks” scenarios, but many of them are not so simple. They are cases where, for example, there’s a one or two percent change that the baby could contract HIV from his or her infected mother. Now, one or two percent probability is hardly worth thinking about, but man, if we did end up there we’d be pretty devastated. In another less dramatic case the health risks with the child were pretty minimal but the baby was white, not African-American. Our decision there is certainly worthy of a longer post soon, but in the end we felt like we’d prepared ourselves for a bi-racial family and that was where our heart was at.

In each of these cases we are making decisions based on our needs and desires individuals and as a family. We try to consider the child’s situation - Would we be good for them? Could we give them a loving home and lot of opportunities? In nearly every case the answer is yes, but we’ve continued to pass on the cases. It’s so tough to think that this is a chance for us to make a difference for someone that will impact their life. It will also impact our life and that’s been the basis for our decisions so far. When time finally comes for the right case for us I hope it will be an easier decision - one that we can both look at each other and say “yes” enthusiastically. Until then, we continue to look at real-life cases of heartbreak and human struggle and choose to not make a difference. These are all painful decisions for us but they are also a valuable part of the process.

Since we completed our final paperwork for the adoption last week, we have officially entered the “waiting zone” in which the goal is to _not_ jump every time the phone rings. We may be playing this game for a LONG time to come. It’s a weird mix of trying to prepare and “nest” while not getting too ready. It’s all part of the uncertainty of adoption I suppose.