to gain a sympathetic fifteen pounds each and we have been working it off ever since. I mean the pre-natal journey itself. We had expected to match with someone much more advanced in her pregnancy—maybe six months along—and really not be that involved. But there we were, standing in an ultrasound technician’s laboratory at the hospital, watching the monitor and learning we were having a baby boy. I had never expected to have that experience.
The match meeting took place at our hotel later that morning. It was facilitated by not one, but two adoption agencies: one from our home state of California and one from Stephanie’s home state of Illinois. Together, we all started to talk about a birth plan and post-adoption contact. There were a lot of forms to be filled out and the “transactional” feeling in those moments still makes me uncomfortable. The end result, though, was a successful match! And all too soon, it was time to fly back to California. We were elated and scared to death.
We spoke with Stephanie about once a week after that and swapped endless text messages. We’ve printed many of the early ones so our son can read them for himself one day. It was difficult to know just how much contact we should have with Stephanie at that point. We didn’t want to overwhelm her by texting, calling or e-mailing too much, but on the other hand, we didn’t want her to feel like we weren’t very interested. Sometimes a day or two passed between messages and we silently hoped that the pause was just another day in the busy life of a single mom of two, rather than a change of heart. Then another message from her came, along with a deep sigh of relief.
I had buried my head in the sand about the home birth for three months, hoping that Stephanie might change her mind or the agency would require a hospital so I wouldn’t have to think about it again. That ostrich syndrome was accompanied by a deep-seated fear that, if I couldn’t get my head around it and we couldn’t make it work, our journey would come to an untimely and unhappy ending. We had to find a way. But how do you arrange a home birth when you don’t have a home?
To add to the complexity of the home birth situation, certified nurse midwives are required to have a signed collaborative agreement with an obstetrician in order to practice in Illinois. For some reason, that is extremely difficult to get and doesn’t happen often. The result is an underground group of midwives unofficially performing home births, which doesn’t really work for an adoption where everything needs to be official.
Quite the dilemma! So two months before the due date, we got on a plane to figure everything out together. Stephanie had already solved the midwife challenge: Kathleen Devine, a fitting name for the person who was to deliver our gift from the heavens. Kathy lived about an hour from Stephanie in the neighboring state of Iowa and was thrilled to be a part of our journey. The only catch was that we now had to cross the state line to give birth—not that this was getting complicated or anything.
We also still had to solve the “where” of the actual delivery. First we looked at some vacation home rentals, but the neighboring towns were not exactly big vacation destinations. There wasn’t much in the way of corporate housing either and we were starting to despair when a friend of Stephanie’s suggested the hotel we stayed at when we first visited, which had two-bedroom suites. Stephanie could stay in one bedroom while Eric and I stayed in the other. We toured the rooms that afternoon and booked before we left.
After our rooms were secured, we met up with Julie, our Illinois adoption coordinator, to finalize the birth plan. We went over who was going to be in the room at the time of birth and who was going to hold the baby first. Eric was mostly worried about the noise and mess of the whole thing, since Stephanie was giving birth in a hotel room. But Stephanie reassured us that actual births are less messy than the ones portrayed in movies and on TV. She also said that Kathy would lay out puppy pads to absorb everything and make the clean-up easy. We laughed at the thought of a fully pregnant Stephanie crowning while squatting over puppy pads in a hotel bathroom. It sounded like a comedy series waiting to happen.
“What about the placenta?” Eric asked. It seemed like an odd question, but seeing as the placenta couldn’t really be absorbed in a puppy pad, I guess it was a fair one to ask.
“We’ll put it in the freezer,” Stephanie replied.
“For what?” Eric quipped. “A snack later?”
“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’ll dry it out in the oven and use a coffee grinder to grind it into pills.” Our eyes widened and our jaws dropped when we realized she wasn’t joking. “The nutrients are really good for your body. We can even bake it into a lasagna.”
“You mean plasagna?” Eric joked. We all broke up laughing at the table.
Everything was coming together. It was all very real and only two months away. Eric and I owned nothing baby-related at that point. We’d been told all we needed was a change of clothes and a car seat to leave the hospital, but as there was no hospital involved, we had to make up our own rules. We took our first baby-shopping trip and came back with way too much stuff. Everyone else was banned from buying any baby things until three days after he was born.
While it seemed like forever as we lived it day-to-day, the month of the birth arrived before we knew it. We had been capturing potential names for about two years. Eric even bought me a book of 20,000 baby names for my birthday, as if we didn’t have enough to choose from already. I had a fantasy when we started the adoption process that our birthmother would let us choose the baby’s first name, so that it would match on both of his birth certificates (the one issued at birth and the one issued with our names as the parents after we finalized the adoption).
Reality turned out to be much better than my fantasy. As Stephanie had no attachment to either her married name or her maiden name, she had already decided to give the baby our last name and whatever other names we wanted. For his middle name, we initially thought about asking Stephanie to choose it but, as she had insisted it was our decision, we selected Stephen in her honor. There were a few tears that day. And while everyone around us was getting excited at the pending arrival, we kept his name a secret until three days after he was born.
Having been part of the pregnancy pretty much since the beginning and given the complexities of the birth arrangements, we had planned to fly back to the Midwest ten days prior to our son’s due date. We arrived to a very pregnant Stephanie and settled into our hotel suite together—she (and sometimes her two children) in a room at one end and us in a room at the other end. Josh, the birthfather, stopped by and we all took turns guessing the actual arrival date. We were all convinced the birth was imminent. How wrong could we be?
Every morning we woke up, ate breakfast together and politely inquired if there was “any sign of arrival” before going about our day. Every twinge or cringe from Stephanie prompted the same. After ten days, the due date had come and gone and we were all going a little stir-crazy holed up in a hotel room.
At five days late, we all went to see the midwife to find out if the baby was stressed. Thankfully he wasn’t, unlike his parents-to-be. Kathy handed Stephanie two capsules containing a specially blended homeopathic labor inducer. We had talked before about induction—Stephanie was very clear that she wanted everything to happen naturally—so this was as close to a natural induction as we could get.
On the way back to the hotel, we picked up some children’s paint and spent the evening painting pictures on Stephanie’s stomach to have a little fun and relieve some stress before she took the pills, just in case they worked and tomorrow was indeed the big day. We all laughed together as we painted a giant sun on her belly, followed by a huge rainbow. When we started this whole adoption journey, we envisioned meeting a birthmother close to her due date and never really imagined having a relationship with her, let alone living with her or painting her giant, pregnant belly. We were really bonding and it felt good. It felt right.
There was no guarantee the labor inducer would work, so when we all got up the following morning to have breakfast and watch Stephanie take the first pill, we figured it would just be another day. Lunchtime came and we called the midwife, who told Stephanie to take the second pill. Within about thirty minutes, Stephanie came back into the living room of our hotel suite. She looked profoundly different and announced the baby was on his way. Stephanie had labored for a day