12 months after camp ended, we were back again. It was a completely different experience leading up to our time away; I felt like a teenager who aches to be back at summer camp all through the school year because that’s where she really belongs. I couldn’t wait to get back and see everyone and just immerse myself into their lives again and as soon as we arrived, it felt like coming home, being surrounded by the family we decided were our own.
That summer changed my life for a completely different reason. During our second night, sitting around after most everyone else had gone to bed for the night, Jess and I were presented with what felt like a miracle. One of the staff had a client who was 7 months pregnant and was looking to place the baby for adoption. This was just a recent decision, so she hadn’t started working with an agency and as we were sat around talking about our futures, the staff broached us about the possibility of us becoming parents to this child.
We were in shock. Things like this don’t just happen. No one just sits down beside you at a campfire and offers you your dreams, it doesn’t happen, but it was. To paraphrase one of my favourite quotes, it felt as though someone had handed me the moon and I didn’t quite know what to do with it (LM Montgomery). I wanted children, Jess wanted children and while we had danced around the subject of how that would happen, we hadn’t decided on anything at that point so suddenly our tentative talks over greek take-out became serious, life-changing conversations over s’mores. At that point, I hadn’t entirely put the idea of actually carrying my own child behind me but the more and more we talked that week and the more I talked to Jess about the heartache and pain I had gone through with my previous stillbirth, this vision of our family was becoming clear: we wanted to adopt. And by the end of those weeks away, we decided that we wanted to try and adopt this particular baby.
Everything moved so quickly at that point. We began to research all of our options and because we were on such a short timeline, we had to put the puzzle pieces together very quickly if we wanted this to even be considered a realistic option. We met with the mother, signed up for the first available adoption PRIDE course (the course that all adoptive/foster/kinship parents have to take in Ontario), and found a private adoption practitioner to facilitate our home study. Luckily, at the time, our home was quite small so there wasn’t much we had to do to physically prepare it for a child, but between the medical, financial and emotional aspects of the home study, we had a lot of work to do. In the meantime, we made one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make while travelling the adoption route: we got attached. Before anything was on paper, before we even truly began to understand the legal hoops we still had to work through, we let ourselves become attached to this mother and this child. Between the two of us (and a dozen of our closest friends) we picked out her name and began using it out loud. We were so in love with the possibility of this child that we missed the warning signs completely. Without disclosing too much, there was far more to the relationship between the birth mother and her boyfriend then we understood, there were other family members who were showing an interest in keeping the baby, there were signs about previous CAS involvement, which made it far more complicated than just a straight forward, birth mother initiated adoption. But still, we were in with all of our hearts. Our home study was completed and forwarded on to CAS for their approval, we went to the ultrasounds, we stashed away clothing that we couldn’t resist, we picked out a stroller, and the day the birth mother called and told us that she had been born, I leapt out of my chair at work and we raced to the hospital to meet her. Because our home study hadn’t yet been approved by CAS, the baby would first be placed into foster care but the CAS worker involved was incredibly kind and arranged for us to have visitation rights so that we meet her immediately. She was perfect, red full cheeks and squishy little eyes. There had been some complications during the birth, so she even had a tiny little Ng tube running down her face, but it didn’t even register in my head as I counted all of her fingers and toes and rocked her in my arms. In that second I wanted the entire world to meet Paxton Charlotte.
Then it started to crash. The nurse that night told us that the baby may be dealing with hydrocephalus and suddenly words like “spina bifida and brain shunt” were just being tossed around and no one thought anything of it because at that point, we were just visitors who were allowed to know the information. I had no idea what any of those words meant and had no idea what any of them would mean for the future of this child, or our futures. Did it mean that she had spina bifida? Did it mean that she would have delays? Were we finding ourselves in the world of special needs parenting without seeing it coming? I began to panic and question what we had done and spent the next day thinking about all of our options. That night, we planned to go for another visit and we brought a blanket from home so that we could introduce Paxton’s smell to our dog, Ellie – that felt like a positive step. And then we walked into the nursery and there she was, so tiny and beautiful and just laying there looking as though she had been waiting for us to arrive. I picked her up and Jess pointed out that I immediately started the “mom sway” and the crashing stopped. There was only one option for us.
Sadly for us, we weren’t the only ones with options. The next day the birth mother called us to tell us that she had changed her mind, she couldn’t go through with placing her child and she took the first steps on her own journey. We were angry and then broken-hearted and then just disappointed. But when we weren’t paying attention, something else worked it’s way in there: hope. We came to terms with the birth mother’s choice and were able to look back and see some of the warning signs in hindsight. We realized that there were lessons that we had learned and we realized that Paxton Charlotte was not meant to be our child. We wanted her to be ours, but she wasn’t meant for us. But through her, we learned so much about ourselves, our expectations and our strength as a couple as well as individuals. We saw that we were prepared to be parents, to love in spite of everything else, to accept anything that comes our way. And luckily for us, our next anything was Jacquie.
While we have photos of Paxton, we choose not to share those on social media – both to protect the birth mother’s privacy as well as to have this little piece of our history just for ourselves. In her place, I’ll give you some new photos of Lily though, because she truly is the best part of this entire journey…
