The Call: July 15, 2010

Our agency does not publish the official wait list, so families never know for sure where they are on the list.

Gladney updates everyone monthly about what the average wait is as of that month, and a lovely woman named Grace maintains a very unofficial list, based on the information that families give her. My point is: we had a general idea of the time frame between being placed on the wait list, and when the referral (match) would come, but we didn't know for sure.

Before leaving for a mission trip to North Carolina, I checked the unofficial list, and saw that we were third in line for an infant girl. I thought for sure we would be waiting at least another month.

Other Gladney families had told us to have a plan in place for when the phone call comes. Did we have a plan? No! Did I recognize the phone number when the call came? No!

I thought the caller was a parent of one of the youth missioners, because I didn't recognize the number, so I answered the phone at about 4:30 p.m. as we were piling into the van to go to the YMCA for showers. The person on the other end of the line said, "Hello, Mary, this is Sara."

And I froze.

Sara is our caseworker.

I said, "Is this THE call?"
And she said, "Yes!"

I told her not to tell me anything about our baby until I could get in touch with Chris (who was at the beach with his family.)

Sara said that she could do a conference call with the two of us, and that I should call her when I reached Chris.

Of course, Chris was on the beach and didn't hear his cell phone, and I knew that I needed to get to him quickly, before Sara left for the day at 6:00.

I called everyone in Chris' family trying to reach him, and finally Chris heard his phone in his beach bag.

I told him that THE phone call had come, and that he needed to get to a computer!

He rushed to the beach house, I figured out what to do with the teens who were stinky from a day of work, and then we called Sara back.

With the two of us on the phone, me in North Carolina and Chris at Virginia Beach, Sara told us that our little girl was 5 months old, that her name was "A," and Sara hit the "send" button on an email that contained pictures of our baby.

We squealed when we saw her pictures. Squealed. 

Words cannot express the delight in seeing her face, and the absolute, instant love that we felt for her. We knew as soon as we saw her that she was chosen for us, and we for her. I have no frame of reference for what it is like to give birth and see your child for the first time, but I imagine that it's not unlike what we felt. For sure, she is ours. Meant to be.