My wife called me as I was walking into the gym and told me to keep an open mind. The clock started. I had five minutes to make a decision that would alter our lives forever.
That is how the story of my daughter and I started. With a phone call and a decision.
Two years earlier…
But it actually started two years earlier, the month after my wife and I got married. We both always wanted to adopt a child. We knew we could get picked out of a book by a mother who was going to give her child away but we wanted something different. We wanted a child that wouldn’t have much of a chance at life if we didn’t choose him or her. We wanted a child from the system.
So we started taking classes through Los Angeles county in order to adopt a child out of the California Foster Care system. I’ve written about the difficulty of this before so I won’t bore you with the details. But in some ways the system makes it very difficult for good people to help children who need it. I personally wanted to quit several times. Other times she did. But we persisted. We made it though parenting classes and psychological exams and financial screenings and home evaluations and we got certified to bring a child into our home. And we did.
Oh boy
I’m an older brother. I have an older brother. I always wanted to have a boy as my first child. I figured that was one of the perks of adopting before we had biological children. My wife had no gender preference so we told the social workers we wanted a boy.
A social worker called us and told us she had a baby boy who needed a home. So we opened our home. I was a father! For a little while. Then, a couple of months later, our boy was taken away and placed with a family member. I was no longer a father. It was one of the worst weeks of my life.
But life eventually went on. We lost our son just before thanksgiving, but my wife and I made it though the holidays. We visited family in Memphis. We traveled to see some of God’s other children in Ethiopia. We visited Kenya. Life went on. A couple of months after we lost our boy the placement worker called my wife again. He told her he wanted to discuss a possibility with her.
As soon as she got off the phone with him, my phone rang.
“There’s also a baby girl…”
My wife told me to keep an open mind. She said they had three children who needed homes. The first two were boys, but neither of them seemed right. The situations were wrong. But then she said, “there’s also a baby girl…”
She gave me the details. What few details there were. We had only a few minutes to call the worker back and give him an answer. Would we take this foster child? With the idea of adopting her if the situation arose.
We had a few moments to make a decision that would alter the course of our lives forever. A decision that would determine what our family would look like forever. A decision that would fix our future in a permanent way, one way or the other. We had roughly five minutes to make one of the biggest decisions we would ever make.
I didn’t need five minutes. I didn’t need one.
“I can’t say no,” I said.
And several lives changed forever.
To be continued…
