My Adoption Plan
My Adoption Plan
As most adoption stories goes I was told I could not have kids or it would be really hard to have kids. To my shock when that little plus sign popped up. Never in my life time did I think I would ever have an unplanned pregnancy. I thought I would defiantly need to try to have a baby, especially with me being on birth control and what doctors told me. I did not believe I was pregnant for a good while. At my eleven week checkup I got an ultra sound and that’s when it hit me. I was placed in a spot I never imagined being in. Where do I go? What do I do? It used to be all about me and now it was time to see that it’s not going to always be my way. I had to put this baby first, but how? My daughter’s birth father wasn’t really around but I did have little contact with him. He was the first one who put adoption in my head, but of course there was a little part of me thinking I could be a single mom. I remember sitting at the counter talking to my mom, mind you I was a 22 year old working very part time still living at home. I was talking to her about my choices. Talking about parenting and how I would do that. When I came to realize that it wasn’t in my plan. I looked at my mother and said “you know mom, I don’t feel like this baby is mine.” That’s when I decided to look into adoption.
Now it was up to me to make an adoption plan for my baby. With my mother’s help she reached out to a friend who adopted all of her children and helped us on where we should start. This is how we found Forever Bound Adoption. Steve Sunday came over to my house helping me stay as comfortable as I could being pregnant but also in a very new and scary situation for me. Talking with Steve my plan started to fall into place. He walked through everything with me and answered all my questions. I sat in my room looking through families and trying to think of the perfect family for this sweet baby I was carrying. I felt embarrassed that none of these family I was looking at for hours didn’t really feel right. I called Steve asking if there was any more to look at. Lucky for me he had just gotten in four new families. When he brought them to me and I looked through them, one family really stood out to me. I just could not put down this book they made on their family. I had fallen in love. When Steve left my mom asked me “so Riss what do you think?” in reply I told her I thought this was my family. With a smile on my mother’s face she said “you got that feeling also?” In that moment I knew this was my baby’s forever home, but I just had to meet them.
Still trying to figure out an adoption plan, I meet this sweet loving bubbly couple. Their beautiful daughter with bouncing blonde curls, who was shy at the start, but soon fell in love with my mother as they started to play. This kind loving mother started talking about an adoption plan her and her family was looking for. It hit me that this is what I was wanting, yet my little brain couldn’t put it into words and here she is, talking as if she was in my head. Taking a step back a little, my dad wasn’t really okay with the thought of me placing his grandbaby. So you can imagine my fear as he said he was going with me to meet the family, the family I was already in love with! I was thinking he might scare them off. When my dad asked them, “How can you love this baby as your own,” my heart fell into my stomach when the soft spoken adoptive father said, “We are all God’s children, no matter how they come to us we are all family. I couldn’t imagine loving a child less.” Now my dad was on board with the adoption. We talked about an open adoption and I guess you could say the guide lines. I couldn’t love this family more, or so I thought.
My plan wasn’t finished when I thought it was. One night I talked with my mom about my labor plan after being taken to the hospital, thinking it was time to have the baby. (Let’s just say remember to drink a lot and when I say a lot I mean a lot of water!) Talking to my mom I realized my adoption wasn’t finished. I got this wild idea to ask the adoptive mother to be in the delivery room with me. When she happily agreed I knew that my plan was complete, but the adoptive family had other plans, which I am forever blessed with. Sharing this beautiful experience with my daughter’s forever mother it grow us closer. They continued the plan by making the adoption so open I feel like family. My family feels like family. The day I signed my rights over and watched this little miracle go with her family, I learned that I did not lose anything that day. I gained so much more! Now my open adoption plan was complete.
