The Best Gift

It was 1986 in the dead of a cold Chicago winter and my husband and I were sitting in a doctor’s office awaiting test results. When the doctor entered the office in his crisp white lab coat, my gaze immediately shifted to his face to see if I could read the results from his countenance. He was not smiling and his eyes stayed on the folder that he slowly placed on the desk before us. My heart sank. When he began to speak, all I heard were the words “I’m sorry”, “sterile”, and “in vitro”. The rest of what he said was lost to me. He thanked us for coming and we walked out into the cold. We didn’t know what to say to each other so we rode home in silence. When we arrived, we were greeted by our 7-year old daughter who ran up to us and asked “so am I going to have a little sister or brother?” The question was like a knife in my heart because I knew that we would never be able to provide her with the sibling that she so desperately wanted and the child that I would never have. So I retreated to my bedroom and cried for what seemed like an eternity.

My depression lasted for a few weeks but eventually I was back to my old self. At work one day while talking to a coworker, she asked me if I’d ever considered adopting a baby. I looked at her like she had 3 heads and said an emphatic “No!” I wanted to have my own child and adoption seemed just too far fetched to me. Besides, I’d heard that it was too expensive and the wait too long, so it was not worth considering. She admonished me to check into it because she knew a couple who’d adopted a child through an agency in Chicago and they were very happy. I didn’t want to think about it at the time but the idea kept popping into my head over the next several weeks for some reason. I reluctantly mentioned it to my husband who was surprisingly open to the idea. So we went about our business in looking for an adoption agency. The process was nothing like I had imagined and went fairly quickly. I was still not completely sold on the adoption idea but I thought, why not at least check it out?

The year was now 1988, the beginning of Spring when everything was just starting to come to life. The day finally came to meet our baby candidate. He was 5 months old and was born to a teenage mother who’d already had 2 children and could not care for him. The baby had been in foster care since he left the hospital just waiting on a family to take him home. When I walked into the room, this chubby little boy with a crop of curly hair and Michelin tire arms looked up at me and immediately reached out his arms for me to pick him up. I did and my life was forever changed. We made eye contact as he tried to pull my earrings from my ears. He had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen and the softest, chubbiest cheeks that begged to be nibbled. He even looked like us! So we spent the next hour or so getting familiar with him and learning about his background from his foster mom. He was a very happy little boy and he took to us immediately, which shocked his foster mom. She said that she’d never seen him take to strangers the way he took to us. Well, that sealed it for me.  At that moment, I knew that we'd been given the best gift -- the son that we had prayed for.  God showed me that unconditional, heart-stopping love for a child does not have to be one that comes from our loins. My heart melted when I held him because I knew that this baby was made just for us. 

Fast forward 25 years later, I am the proud mother of a brilliant young man who has a quiet strength about him. The love I feel for him is absolutely no different than if I had birthed him. My daughter got the brother she wanted and I got a son who has made me proud hundreds of times over. He is now a dad himself to a beautiful daughter who will be 3 years old on Christmas Eve. She is the spitting image of her daddy with the Michelin tire arms and soft kissable cheeks that I nibbled 24 years earlier. She is another blessing and I’m so glad that I acted on the urging that would not let me leave it be. 

God has blessings for us all wrapped up in packages that we don’t think we’d ever open. This one was the best gifts that I've ever received and I'm so, so glad that I had the honor to raise this phenomenal human being who has blessed my life in countless ways.