Dear Birthmother,

We recently hit a bit of a speed bump in working through our second adoption process:  the letter to the birthmother/family.

My word, you'd think the Dear Birthmother letter would be the easiest part of the adoption process. Not so....for us, anyway.

Writing to perspective birthmothers without assuming how they feel or sounding like we're trying to convince them why we're better than them or anyone else to raise their unborn baby is a difficult feat. I read books on how to write these letters and sifted through tons of examples that other families had written.  I was tempting to pick and choose ideas from these samples and weave them together in my own words.  It didn't work.  It rarely does for me.  I had to start from scratch - from my heart.  I wrote the raw rough draft and my husband helped me fine tune it to really say what we wanted. I hand wrote the letter (which turned out to be four pages long) on some stationery that I designed.  Two copies:  one for the local office and one for the office in a different part of the state.  All we can hope is that what we said in the letter, is just what our birthmother needs/wants to hear.

Then our lives got a little crazy with my husband's ridiculous overtime hours spent fixing recurring problems at work.  Our 22 month old was going through her own phases and days were feeling REALLY long.  I began to get worried that turning in this last bit of paperwork would mean that we were absolutely ready for a baby.  We had about THREE hours from the time we got "the call" about Gianna to the time we met her and took her home.  I know it doesn't always happen like that, but I also know it could.  What if we got a call in the midst of this crazy time and then I had to deal with everything going on AND a newborn.  I'm no spring chicken, and I was more than a little concerned.

Things have slowed down a bit and we've regained a bit of our composure.  It'll be about 2 weeks and we should be officially certified and ready to, well.......wait.  We'd love to have a few prayers to help us make it through this part of the journey.  We're not sure if there will be another baby at the end of this road, but we do take comfort in the fact that God knows.

Our Dear Birthmother Letter