How I Met My Son: A Single-Parent Adoption Story

August 9, 2022

I was standing with my face pressed against the nursery window. Butterflies swam in my stomach as I waited for a nurse. I had spent my life dreaming of being a mom, but I had never imagined having to ask myself: which one is my son? The email I had received stated that he was a “healthy African-American boy, born today, about 8 pounds.” I looked from one baby bundle to the next: 

Nope, that one is dressed in pink.

No, that one is too small.

No, that one is too cute; he couldn’t be up for adoption. 

Probably nothing can prepare a person for becoming a parent, but I felt less prepared than average. I had just stepped out of my car after a three-hour drive to the hospital. Before that, I had been nearing the end of a long workday. I was teaching an oboe lesson to my student Steven. While working on his vibrato, I put my cell phone on his music stand, open to the Tunable app. We were both staring at it when a text message popped up: 

I froze in place, unable to speak. My student Steven and I had actually both learned–simultaneously–that I was a mom.

I reflected on the email I had received just an hour before. If my previous student hadn’t been late to his lesson, I wouldn’t have had time to check my computer and see the message from the adoption agency, asking if I wanted my profile to be shown to a woman who had just given birth. I had only enough time to reply “YES!” before teaching. 

There was so much auspicious coincidence that day. In the late morning I had received a call from the local Child Development Center. I had been on their waiting list for four years and I was finally at the top. “Do you know when you will get a baby?” the assistant asked. “I have no idea!” I replied, a little too snappily. Now I would need to call her back. And apologize.

I looked up to see the nurse, whose nametag said Jill, walking down the hall. She smiled at me, stepped inside the nursery and wheeled Too Cute Baby out. “Are you sure he’s the right one?” I asked anxiously. She read his nametag: “BUFA.” Boy Up For Adoption. I lowered my shaking body onto a nearby bench and she placed him in my arms.

I looked down at my son, so tiny, eyes closed. This was the moment I had imagined for so many years. I was elated, thrilled, and in shock. “Will he ever feel like mine?” I wondered. I remembered the day I had adopted my kitten, holding her, smelling the shelter in her fur and asking myself the same question. After 20 years, I couldn’t imagine that there was ever a time she didn’t feel like mine. I knew I would soon fall even more deeply in love with this tiny human.

The nurse leaned over and removed his blue and white striped hat. A full head of hair popped out, half curly and half straight, still damp. He opened his eyes for a split second. Four years later, sometimes I catch his eyes and still see that look of the first time he ever opened them. And I can’t imagine a world in which he was not mine.

The next day, after the first of many nights awake with my son, my phone rang. It was the financial planner with whom I had met before I received “the call.” He and I had determined a plan of action for the year. “I should warn you, though,” I said as I was walking out, “That I’m on an adoption list. If I get a baby, everything we just talked about is going to completely change.” When he called me the next morning for a signature, my new son was crying in the background and hospital machines were beeping away. He laughed immediately. “Do you remember what I said yesterday about everything changing?” I asked.

And indeed everything did change. Before that day, I thought I knew how beautiful and how hard life was going to be. The hard times have been harder than I imagined. The beautiful times, though, make my heart swell until it nearly bursts out of my chest.

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