Part 1
Being the planner I am, I wanted Todd and I to have a baby
during the summer so I could go back to work in September. After losing two
babies in a year, Todd and I were heartbroken.
The day I was in the hospital, August 18, 1995, waiting for
the surgeon to come get me to remove my baby girl, I was laying on the gurney
waiting and I cried out to God, “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? I just want to be a
mother.” Suddenly, a weird peace came over me from the top of my head to my
toes. A voice I swear I heard said, “You will be ok.”
This little Church of Christ girl almost wet my pants cause
l wasn’t raised with that talking stuff!
There were a few complications so I had to remain in bed a
few days. I was watching some Dateline story about Chinese adoptions. I told
Todd I could be a mother to one of those.
Now mind you, I had about taken an elder’s wife’s head off for
suggesting adoption earlier.
Todd told me to look into it. A few days later I called a
number I found in the phone book for International Family Services. Come to
find out, they were in Friendswood, where we lived at the time. An information
meeting was going to be held two weeks later in September.
We went to the meeting and found we were too old for Chinese
adoption at the time. So the owners said they had two babies in Vietnam. Immediately, we knew Vietnam was where we
needed to be because of my sweet Vietnamese cousins. We told them we wanted a
girl.
Fast-forward a week. I got a call at school letting me know
I could have the little girl in Vietnam. I ask when she was born….. August 18,
1995, the very same day the doctor was taking my little girl from my body and I
heard that “voice.”
We worked as fast as we could get our dossier ready. I was
obsessed. At the end of January, Todd and I took off for Vietnam. On January
30, 1996, we were handed our precious Amber Mai.
Once again, because I was a planner, we needed to have our
next child three years after the first. The closer it came to the time I needed
to get pregnant, the more stressed I became thinking about the possibility of
losing another baby.
Todd was transferred to Big Springs around that time. So off
we went with our little girly!
One night at the end of July 1998, Todd and I decided it
wasn’t worth what I was putting myself through with getting pregnant, etc. We
made the decision we would wait till Amber turned 5, went to Kindergarten, then
I would go back to work and we could save money to adopt another Vietnamese
child. Whew, glad that was decided. Todd ran to the store to get us some milk
while I sat out on the porch thinking about the peace I again had.
The phone rang and on the line was our dear friend who was
the director of the adoption agency, who helped us get our home visits, etc.
done.
She asks if we would like a Vietnamese boy who was to be
born in a week. A Vietnamese girl had come in and was 9 months pregnant and
wanted a white family who already had Vietnamese children to adopt her boy.
“Uh, when do you need to know this? “ “By 8 in the morning.”
Oh!!!
Todd comes home from the store; I ask him if he would like a
little boy the next week. He said, “I just went to get milk and come home and
we have been offered a baby boy?”
Two days later, Todd, Amber and our dog Tiffany, went back
to Houston to meet this girl and her sister. Phuong said she wanted us to have
her little boy. She was 26 and had come over to this country when she was 13
with her family. Joshua’s birth father Vihn had only been in the country for
two years.
A week later, Josh wasn’t quiet ready to come into this
world. We waited another week and Phuong was induced. I was with her at the
hospital. She told me she didn’t want to be a part of his life because she
didn’t want him to be confused. She said to make sure he always knew she loved
him though, that I was his mommy now. To be continued...........
