Our Chateau: National Adoption Day, Reflections in 2012

Today is National Adoption Day. This month all over the
country courts are finalizing pending foster-care adoptions.? In celebration, let me tell you a few snapshots from our story:

Before meeting James, we had never considered adoption. My husband and I were newlyweds at the time and we had married young. We hadn?t even started to think about making a family. Then I took a job as a first grade teacher. One day as recess, James, my most over-energetic student, pulled me into an empty kindergarten classroom. ?We sat on plastic chairs that were a foot and half off the ground and he asked if I would be his mom.

Six years ago, five days before Christmas, I drove over to the place where James was staying. It was unusual to see a white person on that street. I knocked and no one answered. I could hear people inside, so I knocked again. Eventually a teenage girl answered and said James wasn?t home and that she didn?t think he would be coming back to that home again. She wouldn?t give me any more information. The next morning we had to fly back to the Midwest for the holidays. I went to church and stuffed my first prayer request into our prayer box.

When we returned from the holidays James was staying in a new group home. We started visiting him every day. Very quickly, we feel irreversibly in love. We told the social worker who?d been assigned to him that we wanted to adopt James.? A few weeks later, while my students were at recess, I got a call that forever changed our lives. ?James wasn?t in school that day. ?I was told social services had decided what everyone else already knew, that staying at the group home was not in James? best interests. The woman on the phone told me we could pick him up for good that afternoon. We raced over after work. ?James was waiting with one garbage bag full of ratty clothes and broken toys.

We drove home. James had been to our apartment many times before. He knew the way. But, this time I told him was different, this time he was coming home with us for always. As we drove, I also told him that he probably shouldn?t call me Mrs. K anymore (that was what the first graders called me.) Through the rear view mirror I watched my tiny boy in the back seat. He had been quiet this whole time and then a smile began to spread across his face.? James has dimples when he smiles.

Cautiously, he asked if my new name ?began with an m?.

I told him it did.

He was glowing by this point, ?Is it Mom??

Since that moment we?ve always been James? mom and dad.

The process from that night to finalization was a long one. But in our hearts finalization happened in that moment, the first time we heard James call us ?mom? and ?dad?. ?? It all started with a little boy who wanted a family and a belief that we belonged together. In the United States, more than 100,000 children in foster care are waiting for permanent, loving families.?(Read more at the One Day Project.) Please, consider foster care adoption.?

Source: http://ourchateau.blogspot.com/2012/11/national-adoption-day-reflections-in.html

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