“Going out every night. Conceiving children in bar restrooms with strange men. But I just loved her through it.”
‘Are they ALL yours?’ My husband loves to whisper, ‘Not all of them are mine. My wife went through a wild phase.’
‘I’m so happy, but honestly a little confused. I really thought we were going to have twins… Exactly one month later, we were contacted by our second attorney. I just knew someone was missing.’
“I knew I couldn’t sit around and wait any longer. The feeling was urgent. Our baby needed us now and no one was going to fight harder for that baby to join our family than me.”
‘I hit bottom. Knees to the ground, ugly tears in the shower. My friends stepped in. They didn’t ask what I needed because honestly, I’m in so deep I have no idea what I need.’
“We have three new foster children and the trenches of trauma and grief are deep. My village stepped into the trenches and sat with me. They didn’t ask me what I needed, they just started providing.”
‘Who should wear the mommy bracelet?,’ the nurse asked our birth mom. ‘Jessica. She’s her mommy.’ She placed the bracelet around my wrist, and handed me my daughter.’
“I wanted to be able to tell my daughter that she threw her head back when she laughed. How she dipped her fries in mayonnaise, but mostly how much she loved her. How she begged me to make sure my daughter always knew.”
‘Her piercing blue eyes were mesmerizing. ‘This will be too much for your family to handle,’ we heard. ‘She will live in total darkness. Total silence.’
“We woke to a text. These people helping us couldn’t understand how we could move forward with adoption until we were certain SHE WOULD LIVE. I responded verbatim, ‘WE WANT THIS GIRL NO MATTER WHAT.’”
‘If she says mama, I won’t be able to go through with it.’ I never would have imagined the child we adopted would be my own cousin.’
“She never told him she was pregnant with me. To this day, he has absolutely no idea I exist.”
‘Yes of course, bring our boy home,’ I blurted out quickly. I started to panic. ‘Now is there one baby or two babies?’ He moved the probe and we saw it. ‘You’re pregnant, with twins.’
“My phone began to ring. My eyes rolled. I was still very bitter. ‘Hi Mrs. Amanda.’ Wait what? Is this for real? I looked down at my belly – I had two babies in my tummy who needed me, and now this? Really?”
‘Mrs. Morgan? We have a 3-year-old little boy in the PICU. He’s been here 6 months and needs a home.’
“‘6 months in the PICU! Why?!’ 3 months, because he was sick. 3 months, because no one would take him home.”
‘The phone rang with a call that turned my life upside down. It BROKE ME. I thought I had moved on, turns out I was wrong.’
“I naively thought, ‘not us!’ Here we are in the middle of a story I could never have imagined. They were my perfect storm.”
‘Normal people had 9 months to prepare for a baby. We were given 2 hours. We received an unexpected phone call. All of a sudden, we went from 0 to 2 babies!’
“I laid there while she took hundreds of pictures. She said, ‘Let’s see if I can get THEM to smile.’ I replayed her words in my head over and over again. I ran to text my husband that we were having TWINS! She said, ‘Not twins… triplets!’”
