Ten

This process is going to have a lot of emotional highs and lows, and tonight feels like a bit of a low.

We had a meeting with our social worker earlier this afternoon. Her name is Kate and she's a very kind, sweet woman, and Nghia and I are both looking forward to working with her. I feel like we are in good hands with her. The purpose of the meeting was for Kate to go through the rest of the adoption process in detail, to answer all of our questions, and to describe all of the possible paths we could go down before we get legal custody of our baby. I guess it's thinking about some of those paths that is making me feel so melancholy tonight.

I've said before that we could fall into the category of adoptive parents that are chosen, the baby is placed, both birth parents terminate their parental rights at the hospital, and we take the baby home. This is the scenario we are desperately hoping for. But there are other possibilities as well...

If the birthmother lives in Pennsylvania then we're going to have a rough road in front of us no matter what. In PA the birthmother cannot relinquish her parental rights for 30 days. (In NJ it's 72 hours.) This means that a baby could get taken from our home because for those 30 days the baby will live at our house. Kate told us that when you're in this situation you sort of have to tell yourself you're just babysitting for the next 30 days. It might be your baby, but it might not be. It might be your child's sibling, but it might not be.  And there's nothing we can do about this. We can't refuse to work with a birthmother from PA.We have to be willing to work with all of the states that our agency works with. At the end of the 30 days we will find out if the baby is ours or not. If it's not, if the birthmother decides she wants to parent after all, then we have to say goodbye. Someone will come to our house and drive away with that baby.  I know myself well enough to know that there's not a goddamn thing I can do to stop myself from loving that baby after taking care of him or her for a month. This possibility literally hurts to think about tonight. And it is a very real possibility.

When we got in the car after the meeting I could tell Nghia was feeling as overwhelmed as I was. He asked me what I thought and I said that I'm worried and scared. I'm worried about a baby being taken from our home, I'm worried I will get attached to the baby, I'm scared to lose a baby that I love.  I asked Nghia how he felt about the meeting and he said that it seems like we're choosing to go through an awful lot of hardship to get this baby. Why would we choose to do this? I can see why people who are desperate to become parents, people who don't have any other possibilities, would have no choice but to go down this scary road. But we do have a choice. We do not have to do this.

We were quiet for a long time, each of us lost in our own little worlds of fear and sadness. After a while I said, "I still want to do it."  And Nghia said, "So do I."