The owner of the adoption agency arrives, and lets us know that the birth parent counsellor and the birth mother will be there soon. It's just as I thought - bad conditions on the road. We sit and chat for a bit before the doorbell rings again.
I try not to stare at her wonderful, round pregnant belly. I try not to think about first impressions, and what she is thinking when she sees me for the first time. Everyone hugs hello, and coats and boots are removed. We all complain about the weather.
Right away, we go to the nursery, since it's on the main floor (our house is a bit odd... the bedrooms are all on the main floor, with the kitchen and living room upstairs). We stand there in the finished room, and I can see she's impressed with all of our hard work in getting the nursery ready. I want to show her all of the things we've carefully purchased and borrowed, but I know that my excitement over this adoption is met by her sorrow and sadness, that it has come to this. I mute myself as much as I can, but hope that she can see that we are truly ready to parent her child.
We move upstairs, and sit on the couch. I won't go into details of what we discussed. She had questions for us, and we had questions for her. One of the things discussed was openness... she was pretty sure she wanted a closed adoption, because she knew this was an incredibly difficult decision for her to give up her child. We expressed that it was up to her, but that we were more than willing to have an open adoption later on if she wanted to get into contact with us.
Because of this possibility of a closed adoption, I had a list of questions for her. What was her favourite food... her favourite subject. What kind of music did she like. What things she hated. All things that one day, her child might wonder about her.
I asked her how her pregnancy was, because I knew, once this little girl grew up and became pregnant with her own baby, she would want to know to see if their pregnancy journeys matched.
We had tea. We had pastries. She asked a question which led to me talking a bit about infertility, and old wounds bled fresh. I cried. Around the same time, she cried talking about how hard of a decision this was, placing her baby up. My only regret in our four hour meeting was that I didn't hug her at that point. I wanted to, but I held back, mainly because I think I would have completely lost it.
She was heading to the hospital after our meeting. We said our goodbyes, I said thank you a dozen times. We packed up some leftover pastries for the hospital room, joking about how bad hospital food was.
And then they left.
I'm pretty sure I fell asleep within minutes of lying down, exhaustion catching up to me. With work the next day, and potentially the baby being born, I needed every bit of sleep I could get.
