Meeting Colin’s birth mom – Part One

I’ve been wanting to write about this since we brought Colin home, but have not had a chance to do it. I haven’t had the big block of time I need to sit down and cover everything, so I have decided to do it in parts.

Part One

Colin was born on July 9th, and his birth mom signed paperwork on July 10th. We were told that we would not meet her. She was going to be discharged from the hospital on the morning of the 11th. We were supposed to arrive at the hospital at noon on the 11th, after she had left. We were told that we would spend the day with Colin in a hospital room and that he would be released to us that night, when his newborn screen (medical test required at 48-hours-old) was completed.

On the way to the hospital, I was envisioning Christian and me in a quiet hospital room, blissfully feeding and rocking our new baby. We thought it would be a mellow afternoon, and that we would just be waiting until he could be released. We even brought our laptops and a movie to pass the time. I kept thinking to myself, “Well, at least the first few sleepless nights won’t be so bad since I won’t be exhausted from just having given birth or I won’t be suffering from jetlag.” Boy.was.I.wrong. The day turned out to be more exhausting than those two things combined.

When we were about an hour away from the hospital, I asked Christian to dig out the name and phone number of the social worker our attorney had given us. I thought we might be running 10-15 minutes late, and that we should let her know.

Christian got in touch with her, and then was on the phone with her for what seemed like FOREVER. His face turned white and he just kept saying, “Uh huh,” and “OK” a lot. It didn’t sound good.

The social worker told Christian that the birth mom seemed to be OK with her decision to make an adoption plan for the baby, but that her family was not. The social worker said that the family was being very combative, and that she was not sure that she wouldn’t have to have security escort us out that night. They wanted to get us in a room as soon as we got to the hospital and advised that we should stay there, as the birth grandma had been out walking the halls. Let me just say that we were FREAKED OUT. We talked about just turning around and going home, but decided that we should at least go to the hospital and get a feel for things.

When we got to the maternity floor, we were taken into a hospital room where the social worker sat down with us. She told us she had never seen anything like this. She said that the family was treating this more like a Child Protective Services case than a voluntary placement. She said that the birth mom seemed OK, but that the grandma and the sister were very upset.

I started crying. I asked her if the grandma or sister wanted to take custody of the child. She said it didn’t matter what the grandma or sister wanted, because we already had legal custody of him. We explained to her that we didn’t care who had legal custody. If there was someone from his birth family who was willing and able to care for him, we thought maybe that was the best thing for him. We wanted to know if we should just walk away now, before we met him and fell in love with him.

To be continued…