A bumpy road that leads to FOREVER!

Hi, my name is Traci and I have been asked to write down our adoption story... So here goes. I have to admit that I am not quite sure where to start. I feel that I have personally seen adoption from pretty much every avenue; my little brother is adopted, my best friend placed a child for adoption, I have numerous nieces and nephews who are all adopted, and then my husband, Jake, and I have chosen to grow our family also through adoption. I think I am just going to start with the journey Jake and I have had through adoption, its heart break, its endless roller coaster of emotions, and its happy endings.

Jake and I were married in 2001 when we were 19 years old. We knew we were young and we didn't want to have kids right away, but because of some health issues with myself, we knew we couldn’t wait forever to start trying. So we waited until we were 21, then I went off birth control. That seems easy enough, until it wasn’t. We gave it a good year and then sought out help.

My first doctor I went to started me on Clomid ® and told me to “relax” I was young everything would be fine. He never offered any “reason” or further testing to figure out if something was wrong. So after 6 months of that, I went to a fertility specialist. That’s when we started with some intense treatment. After 6 months with the specialist, who diagnosed me with PCOS, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, we decided to keep up with treatments, but also put our papers in for adoption. Fertility was never successful, but adoption was! 10 months after having all our paperwork and homestudy’s approved, we got the call.

A young woman in Arizona had chosen Jake and I to be the parents of her little girl that she had just given birth to. We were ecstatic! We of course got on the next flight to Arizona, we were 24, we landed, went to rent a car... you have to be 25 to rent a car! I had no idea! Of course I immediately started crying. My poor husband had no idea what to do, neither did the clerk at the rental counter, until he remembered a friend of his that rents to people under 25. Shortly after a quick phone call, Jake and I were on our way to Flagstaff to meet our WONDERFUL birth-mother, Marie, and our gorgeous baby girl, Jessalyn.

Everything went perfectly. 6 months after Jessalyn was placed in our home her adoption was finalized and she was ours. Our story doesn’t end here... When Jessalyn was 19 months old we got another call, this time for a baby boy in Tennessee. Again, we couldn’t be happier. This time, with a 19 month old in tow, we headed for the Southern State of Tennessee. We were definitely old enough to rent a car this time... no worries.

While we were in Tennessee, everything seemed perfect. We all loved our new addition, Colby. He was the best baby ever and both Jake and I felt everything was going to be alright. I want you to remember that last sentence “everything WAS going to be alright.” It’s important in this story. So after spending 2 ½ weeks in Tennessee and spending a lot of time with Colby’s birth family, we headed home with our +1 family and began settling in. That was mid-July in 2007.

Two months later, a call from our agency, there is a problem. Colby’s birth father is contesting the adoption. What”! Again I begin to cry, a very UGLY cry. We were going to lose our little boy. Except I was reassured by our worker that they were working on it and we didn’t need to worry about anything at this point, we were going to court, I mean his birth father had 9 felonies on hi record, no one would give a baby to that. So for the next 15 months we were thrown into a court battle. We went to attorneys, bonding professionals, through paternity testing, we traveled multiple times across the country to fight for our little boy. But to no avail, The Monday after Thanksgiving 2008, 17 months after meeting Colby, we had to put him on a plane and never see him again. I can’t write down the heart break we felt, we continue to feel even almost 3 years later. I miss him every day of my life, even though he was adopted, he was my baby boy.

3 short months after losing Colby we were approached by a high school senior girl who knew what we had gone through and wanted to talk to us about maybe adopting her baby that she was currently pregnant with. Our first reaction was NO, not right now, we aren’t ready and we don’t know when we will ever be ready. But she was persistent and determined to have Jake and I adopt her baby. So we gave in. We were hesitantly excited. She was SURE this is what she wanted to do. Then came the day for her delivery. It was a long day, but we were in this for the long haul. She was still sure this is what she wanted to do, up until after she gave birth. Then the night after the baby was born she changed her mind. Again, I cannot write down the way we felt, not only did we feel this loss, but the recent loss of Colby became so real and so fresh all over again. I was mad, I was hurt, I couldn’t put me, my husband or my daughter through this again.

We had been hurt, very hurt, at this point in time we had an awful taste in our mouth about adoption. We didn’t know what we were going to do to grow our family. So we waited, we prayed, our families prayed. Then finally about a year after the second loss, we cautiously put our papers back in for adoption. Fast forward two years!!

In April 2011 my friend, Lori (also an adoptive mother), called me. She told me she had been contacted by a birth mother in Las Vegas who had a two-year old little boy that she wanted to find a home for. I was nervous and honestly didn’t think anything would come out of it. But I called Val, and she said that she and the birthfather, Jay, knew this is what they needed to do for their son. So I had them to go meet with our agency, and they did! We drove down to Las Vegas a week after being contacted by them, met them, met little Zander, and instantly knew that he needed to be in our home. Val and Jay felt the same way. So that Friday, with all the papers signed, we brought Zander home.

Everything is ok. We knew that everything would be ok. It hasn’t been easy, I never expected it to be easy. But it is what it is, and you take the good with the awfully bad. We are preparing to have Zander’s adoption finalized in three weeks. He fits. He is ours and we love him so much. We don’t ever hear about Colby, he is in my constant prayers. But we have Jessalyn, and we have Zander and we are a family that God created and that He meant for us to be together for eternity. And we will be. It is through adoption that we have been able to have these amazing children. We are blessed, so very blessed.