Be sure to read Part 1 of Sam’s adoption story first if you haven’t already! Now on to Part 2…
I was graciously invited by Sam’s birth mom to join her orientation meeting at the hospital where she would be giving birth, which was about an hour away from our house. That day we met with the hospital staff to review her birth plan and asked a lot of questions about how everything would go. This is when we learned the hospital was giving us (Mark and me) a room next to Sam’s birth mom’s room in the maternity unit, so we could help care for him when she wanted us to do so. Mark and I were actually required to stay in the hospital until Sam was released and had to keep him in our room overnight at least once, so the nurses could support us and answer any questions we had about how to care for a new baby properly. This is a standard practice for all new parents at this hospital, not just adoptive parents, and it was so helpful. Despite being around babies what seems like my whole life, those rock star nurses taught us a lot that week.
That first hospital visit — seeing where Sam was going to be delivered — made everything seem so much more real! After the hospital, Sam’s birth mom and I stopped at Culver’s where we shared a meal, more about ourselves and our families, and discussed more baby names we liked. I made it clear these were names I liked for whatever baby joined our family in the future, not necessarily her baby. We were in agreement that if she decided to move forward with adoption, we wanted to name him together so his first and middle name would be the same on both birth certificates.
For those who don’t know, in adoption the child is issued an original birth certificate with his birth parents’ names and info and then reissued a new birth certificate with the name selected by the adoptive parents and their information when the adoption is finalized. At this point, we were thinking Sam’s name might be Noah. (As a sidebar, this is something about adoption I really wish would change. First, the original birth certificate is sealed in our state, so even Sam won’t be able to access it until he’s 21 years old. Why can’t an 18 year old have their own original birth certificate?!?! Secondly, why can’t a child have one birth certificate with their birth family’s and adoptive family’s names on it? At best, thinking as charitably as possible, it’s too much red tape. At worst, it’s an attempt to erase the biological family history.)
Back to my lunch with Sam’s birth mom — We also discussed the adoption plan in the car on the way back to her house from lunch.
We wanted his birth mom to know if she decided to parent or even pick another family for adoption, we would be supportive and feel grateful for the time we got to spend with and to pray for her and her baby. I told her as much and she let me know she was confident in her decision to place Sam for adoption. I respected her feelings, but I also knew anything could happen. He was not our baby in that moment and we kept reminding ourselves of that and intentionally referring to him as [birth mom’s name]’s baby to keep our hearts in the right place.
Shortly after this hospital visit, Mark came home from work and told me one of his coworkers contracted Covid. This person was in another part of the building he doesn’t work in, so we weren’t that worried, but out of an abundance of caution, he requested to work from home until Sam was born. Praise God, his boss and leadership team were very supportive of this. (Both of our employers have been so wonderful throughout the whole adoption process!!)
Over the course of the next few days (while Mark was at home), more and more of his coworkers ended up contracting Covid. Though he hadn’t closely interacted with those who tested positive recently, I panicked. I started thinking through what would happen if one or both of us got Covid and couldn’t go to the hospital for Sam’s birth. Would Sam go into temporary/foster care until we were healthy or would he get to stay with his birth mom until then? It was an incredibly stressful couple weeks waiting out the clock to see if we would end up getting sick. Pair that with an uptick in my seasonal allergies and you can imagine how nuts I was acting.
I even called the agency to see what would happen on the remote chance we did have it. (For anyone curious, the solution was to send alternative family members who had passed CPS background checks to the hospital in our place. Thankfully we had more than one family member willing to do so if needed.)
Praise God, we had multiple negative tests and it was looking more and more like we were in the clear. I let Sam’s birth Mom know we were taking tests, but was really trying not to stress her out with birth coming up so soon. I had so much anxiety about it though, more than I’ve ever had about anything I can recall. I’m not typically an anxious person, so I was doing everything I could think of to keep myself calm. The things that helped the most were speed walking 5+ miles per day and praying the rosary. I was also pumping both of us full of vitamins. In hindsight, it’s obvious this was an outlet for my stress over the whole situation, and the Covid scare was what I chose to fixate on vs. all the unknowns and uncertainties of the coming weeks. I needed to keep reminding myself that God already knew what was going to happen.
At our agency’s recommendation, we ended up isolating from one another (on opposite sides of the house, using separate bathrooms, etc) for the final week before Sam’s birth on the off chance that one of us would get it and the other wouldn’t. I kind of laugh at how extreme this was now given all the negative tests we took, but you have to understand my mind set at the time. I was devastated at even the remote possibility of not getting to be there when Sam arrived. Living more or less separately was not how either of us had pictured the last week before we grew our family! (Poor Arwen was so confused going back and forth between where we were each sleeping.) It’s especially funny when I remember I accidentally used Mark’s toothbrush for a moment earlier that week, so if he had ended up sick, there was zero chance I wasn’t getting it.
Part 3 coming soon!