A Personal Note

Where I've Been for a Couple Weeks

Sorry I haven’t posted in almost two weeks. To explain the lapse, I actually have to go back two years.

Kirrily and I have always wanted to have more than one kid, and our daughter Amelia wanted to be a big sister. While we couldn’t have another one biologically, in late 2020, we found ourselves financially able to afford adoption.¹

The process involves not only background checks and loads and loads of paperwork, but also creating a video and website profile about our family. This is how birth mothers who’ve come to our adoption agency learn about possible placements for their child.

We waited about ten months to be paired with a mother, who then almost immediately changed her mind and decided to keep her baby.

Then, just a few weeks after that, we discovered that Amelia had a degenerative and incurable disease, metachromatic leukodystrophy. We put everything on hold, including the adoption process, to figure out if there was anything we could do to cure Amelia, or at least learn how to live with the disease. Her MLD progressed unabated, and she gradually lost her ability to walk, talk, even control her limbs.

But Amelia is still happy to be around people, and still responds to her environment non-verbally. It’s been an extremely difficult time, but we decided that our reasons for growing our family hadn’t changed. We told the adoption agency to put us back on their active roster.

In early December of this year, we got the news that there was a woman who was due to give birth in a week or two! She liked our profile, and chose to place her baby with us. He was born on December 9, a week before Amelia’s 7th birthday. Kirrily flew up to meet him, and after a couple of days, brought him back to Los Angeles.

It took some time adjusting to the newborn sleep schedule, which is when I missed my first daily post. Then, Kirrily’s parents came to visit, and we celebrated Amelia’s birthday together. It was a heck of a week!

And then.

In the middle of the night, we received a text that the birth mother had changed her mind. She wanted to raise the baby herself after all.² It was heartbreaking, just before Christmas, with Grandma and Grandad visiting all the way from New Zealand.

Last Sunday, Kirrily’s dad and I drove up to Sacramento, to return the baby to the agency, where his birth mom would pick him up later.

As we approach Christmas, naturally most of the daily mass readings are about babies and parents: John the Baptist, Elizabeth, and Zechariah; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; Samson and his parents; Samuel and his mother. It was a constant reminder of this new joy that came into our lives briefly, and then was taken away.

I don’t blame the birth mother; giving up a child for adoption has to be the hardest decision anyone can make. I hope and pray she did the right thing, for her and her baby.

But that doesn’t make it hurt less. We’ll all miss baby Nathan.³

1. Adopting a kid is really expensive.

2. According to California state law, she had 30 days to change her mind.

3. I thought about including pictures in this text-heavy post, but it felt inappropriate, since he’s not really “our” baby anymore.