Time to settle in with your cozy cup of tea, a bag of popcorn, whatever you turn to when you're about to subject yourself to the onslaught of a scary movie, or the twisty-turny plot of a soap opera. (My snack of choice when I was young and was about to watch a TV drama unfold was a bag of Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies and a Coke. Sometimes I would forget the Coke on the kitchen counter and not realize it until I parked my lazy butt back on the sofa. Doh! I would actually stare at it for a while, trying to conjure up the powers of Samantha on "Bewitched" and will the soda to me so that I didn't have to get back up. I did say this soap opera craze was in summertime of Junior High, right?)
Anyways, for those of you waiting for a detailed update, we thought we could write it all out for you by now. It turns out, we're going to take you only so far on this journey with us and stop just short of the ending, mostly because we don't know what the end is yet, but also to protect the guilty until, hopefully, they're nailed.
After weeks of turmoil over missed appointments and multiple rejections of offers to meet, this is the unbelievable story we got from our agency in an email last week (it is more entertaining, and slightly less sickening, if you read it in dramatic soap opera character voice):
“So it seems that [birth father] has
asked T to take care of him as he dies with this lung cancer. It is a job
offer. His parents have money and will pay her to move her other four kids in and take
care of him. They also would like her to place the baby with them.
However, T does
not want to place the baby with his parents. She told the agency clearly that
she wants to place the baby with [us]. But she needs to clarify if the job
offer requires her to place her baby with his parents.”
And later in the week, "his parents are trying to get a replacement child out of this because the birth father's brother is in prison forever and now the birth father is going to die with lung cancer. They are telling her that she can have his life insurance when he dies if she places the baby with them".
Okay, if you're still here, reading this garbage, you're probably asking yourself a couple of questions by now:
1. If a 58 and 65 year old are in good enough shape to take care of an infant, why don't they take care of their own dying 42-year-old son?
2. If they have so much money and are so willing to help, why don't they pay the child support for his other 7 children as well since his wages are being garnished?
3. A job offer in exchange for a baby, really?
...and enough other questions to keep you awake and focused on this 24/7 for weeks and weeks straight.
We know what you're thinking. This all seemed pretty far fetched to us, too. We've asked a lot of questions throughout this process and we were told we were just anxious, first-time parents. We've felt for a while now like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed manure.
However, the lifestyle we heard being lived on the other end of the phone for the past three months was so incredibly different than anything anyone we know could imagine. Even those of you who watch those sorts of "reality" shows couldn't come up with this trash. I'm not even willing to write some of the quotes we've heard from T in our conversations. So, when something this random comes out of her mouth after months of other sickening stories, who am I to judge?
Well, I'll tell you who I am. I'm the prospective adoptive parent. I'm the one sitting on the edge of sanity, living out of a suitcase for nearly six weeks, screaming at walls and hugging my spouse like I'll fall off of a cliff if my grip slips. But, I'm also the one who has already acknowledged on this blog that we're good people. So, the internal conflict between calling the b.s. on this latest story and feeling sick to my stomach with guilt for doubting anyone who would claim that someone has cancer was unbearable. It's been a week of hell trying to determine which way I should go on this.
Finally on Wednesday night, she started to really waiver. She said she just wasn't sure if she could turn down such an offer from his parents and that she was no longer sure she wanted to place the baby with us. Later that night, we bought our tickets home.
Thursday, we packed. Friday, we drove back to Sacramento to stay with our generous hosts one last time.
But wait, there's more! On the way back to their house, we got another bit of breaking news from the agency. It seems our "T" was actually an "S". She doesn't live at the address she gave them initially. She had a baby two weeks ago and there was another couple taking her to and from her doctor's appointments all along. The agency received a phone number for "S" and it was the same one we'd all been using to converse with "T". She answered when they called. Busted.
Or is she? Armed with a new name, we hit the Internet again. Surprise! She has a federal record a mile long and has already served time for fraud. Who knows how many other couples were crying themselves to sleep over this "failed match"? She's not too clever, though, because she gave the agency the address of a different apartment in the very same building where she was living and used the same phone number for all of her contacts in this charade. This is turning into a federal investigation and charges are being discussed. Hopefully, she gets a free ride back to prison.
And, breathe...
This latest blog post is being written in the emotional comfort of our own home. A home filled with all of the love and hope and goodness of expectant parents who adore each other. A home that doesn't appreciate learning first-hand that scum like that are out there. And tonight, a home of broken hearts and loosely-tied-together dreams.
We're genuinely sorry for dragging you all along on this vomit-inducing journey and for asking you to send love to "S" and her family. A love story, this was not. We can't tell you how much we appreciate all of the support sent our way, though. It's the only thing that kept us sane, really. We know there are more good people out there than bad ones. We also know that Meadow is still out there waiting to find us, or at least her brother is - and he better like pink!
