Adopting My Son Changed My Understanding of Family
We were ready to try again. This time, Eric and I worked with an agency. We’d passed background checks, completed adoption trainings, and were just waiting for a call. Then it came. “She wants to meet you,” Kaitlyn, our agency representative, told us, so we canceled everything. On a Wednesday morning, we drove two and half hours to Boise, Idaho, to meet a 32-year-old pregnant woman named Nicole.
Kaitlyn prepped us before the meeting with a list of questions: the ones Nicole might ask us, and the ones we were not allowed to ask Nicole. “Stay focused on her,” she said. “Ask about her interests, what she likes to do for fun.” She encouraged us to bring Nicole a token of our appreciation, so I made a batch of cookies, rich and chocolatey with a hint of orange. But what if she doesn’t like chocolate? I worried. What if she doesn’t like orange?
We’d been waiting for more than a year. People kept telling us that you never really know love until you have a child of your own.I wanted to say. But I did want to be a parent, to fully understand how it might change me.
