You'd think by now there couldn't possibly be any more parts to my stories about the Civil Rights era, but you'd be wrong, as this was a long drawn out change in our part of Alabama, even more than I realized at the time. But I'm going to take a short intermission from that tale to catch up with other things that were going on in our lives.
After I quit teaching, in an unsuccessful attempt to get pregnant, we ended up going to a fertility specialist. That was still kind of an unusual thing to do in those days, but I was having baby cravings, and my DH wanted more than anything to help me out of my misery. We both wanted a family with several children, and here we couldn't seem to even have one. After much testing, it was determined that it was going to be highly unlikely that I would ever get pregnant, so we started the process to adopt a baby. This was before legal abortions, so it was still relatively easy to adopt babies. Even then, though, there was a long process of interviewing, inspections, and of course, waiting.
During the time that we had been approved for adoption, but no child had been found for us, hubby learned that the company would be moving out of Birmingham to a small town in a nearby rural area. This put the adoption agency in a dither. They put our case on high priority, trying to get us a baby before we moved, and they succeeded!!
Oh, and she was so beautiful! She was our 2 and a half month old Gift from God. I may not have carried her inside my body for 9 months, but I had carried her in my heart for longer than that, and she felt like mine from the first instant I saw her. We both felt that way, and never looked back once with regret at our decision to adopt. She didn't "look like us," but we didn't care in the least. She was ours, and that was all that mattered.
nostalgia, infertility, adoption
4 comments:
A lovely story. Thanks for sharing.
Being parents, rather than just a couple, changed the whole direction of our married lives. There's no way I can write just how much adopting her meant to us, Jan.
My partner's son is adopted. No child could be better loved...Gray felt the same as you, when they placed his son in his arms.
He, too, had carried him in his heart for a long time.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful memory.
This was one of those perfect times in our lives, Marion. I wish I could express it as well as you write, but it is a very special memory for us.
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