Still Waiting to Adopt

When we began this journey of domestic infant adoption, our adoption social worker told us it could move pretty fast because we are black/African-American parents looking to adopt a black/African-American baby. Apparently, there are not as many non-black parents willing to adopt black babies. And there aren't enough black parents in the system. A few days later, we had a baby girl at home; a beautiful black baby girl. And two weeks later, we experienced every adoptive parent's worst nightmare - a reclaim.

That was March 24, 2014. The whole process from learning about the expectant birth mother, to taking baby home, to the reclaim took less than 3 weeks. Talk about drama! We loved that baby girl. We miss her daily.

I fell in love with Chas all over again as I watched him with Zawadi...

I yearn for him to experience fatherhood for life

After Zawadi was reclaimed, we came back home empty handed and heavy hearted, experiencing this weird, strange kind of grief at the loss of our hopes and dreams of growing our family, desperately missing our little baby girl.  The grief was multiplied as the reclaim scratched old wounds - the wounds of infertility and miscarriage. But as people of strong faith, we found our footing again. And told our adoption worker we wanted to go on with the process, we wanted to remain on the list to adopt.

We are about to enter the month of July, my birthday month - am a fourth of July baby! I should be excited about my upcoming birthday. Instead, I find myself feeling ambivalent about it, and sad that I am getting a year older and still, motherhood continues to elude me. We celebrated our anniversary in May, and that too was very understated. Even sad.

Faith and Chas hanging out in Utah during our anniversary week

This week, our hardworking adoption worker emailed asking whether she could share this blog with a family that had just experienced a reclaim. I said off course, its a blog in the public domain, its supposed to be shared...I went to that family's blog and read about their reclaim. They had their baby for two days before he was reclaimed. They had all these beautiful pictures of their almost son, the nursery, their family - it scratched my healing wound. And reminded me that we, the Ngunjiri-Nowlin family are not alone. There are many others across this nation who are walking this path, waiting, hoping and praying. We are not alone. My heart breaks for this family whose pain is so raw, I pray that they will heal and keep the hope alive.

I am also reminded we are not alone because we have family and friends across the world praying, waiting and hoping with us.

As I try to energize and motivate myself to prepare the nursery - our initial placement happened so quickly we hadn't prepared the nursery; afterwards we didn't have the emotional energy to do it - now I want to do it. I want to go in there and paint, convince hubby to set up the crib, etc. I want to walk in faith, to believe that this waiting shall come to a good end. While I wish that we'd been matched during the summer months, I have to remind myself that the timing is not up to me. The God who began a good work in us, that God will surely bring it to completion. Nothing is impossible with God...not even the intricacies of domestic infant adoption!

So here's to walking in faith, to nesting, to waiting in hope.

PS: If you are in the US, please feel free to share our story with those in your circles. You never know who might know about an expectant birth mother who could potentially be our match, or a black baby who is free to be adopted (we can adopt from anywhere in the US). You can contact us through the comments on this page (I get them first before they post on the page), or email me directly.