Our white crossover wound down, lower and lower into the dark parking garage, under the courthouse. Cutting time, we were supposed to park below, then get a parking pass so we wouldn’t have to walk much.
And the cost of parking would be free.
But with each twist, turn of each corner, it got darker and darker. My husband and son, drove our white truck in front of me, slowly disappearing out of sight.
I was alone now. Three girls in tutus, and our teenage daughter who also remembers this judge, the same lawyer, legalized her adoption also here, eleven years ago.
Just then, our twenty-three year old daughter called, “There isn’t any parking in the garages. We’ve checked all of them. Grandma and Grampa couldn’t find any parking either.”
Just seconds prior to her warning, I get a text from our six-year-old’s ex-preschool teacher. “The court people are not finding your adoption case.”
I try not to panick. Yet, it’s any adoptive families worst nightmare.
A family spends years getting to this day and then at the last minute, something falls through. I had been uncharacteristically worried all morning…
“I just can’t believe this is real.” I told my husband. It’s like subconsciously I was waiting for a social worker to intervene, something to hinder this day we had been waiting for, for so long.
As foster parents of forteen years, we have learned, often when a road seems to be going on way, it can twist and turn and shift quickly in another.
When the steep roads come, often it’s like the rollercoaster we went on a few days ago at Disneyland. You are going along smooth, then all of the sudden your world drops beneath you.
You circle, pass upside-down and your insides are juggled out of you.
Sometimes foster care can be like Space Mountain. You don’t notice when the path your on is about to shift, flip you, or suddenly purge you into a free fall downward.
I stopped my downward turning in the parking garage immediately, aching desperately for the light.
After five years and eight months of a little girl being in and out of our home and the system, coud it be the day we had hoped for was just a facade….
Is a new chapter not beginning? Could the tug of people and places and identities go on indefinitely?
Of course the courts can’t find the papers. My faith in systems and structures where people’s faces fade in light of case numbers and rules had disillusioned me.
Was this day really going to happen? Were our hopes for the three tutu’ed girls in my backseat, finally going to come true?
I immediately juggled my car back and forth, changing directions….out of that dark tunnel and towards the light of the straight street I had come from.
There were new beginnings and I needed to find them, look for them, train my mind to believe…Have hope and trust the God who has never failed us.
I find my way to another parking lot. One where the sky was above and my heart slowed it’s racing.
One of my dearest friends, the one who had called to pray with us before meeeting our birth mother, the one who had modeled love on her own journey towards adoption was standing there with her three chidren.
Our six-year-old almost jumped out of the back seat, to go see her friend. I instructed her to keep her seatbelt on. Time was ticking, and there was only ten more minutes until the courtroom was to be ours.
Would we make it?
Would our lawyer find the papers that ensured we would be new parents to a little girl who spend 1737 days in foster care? That’s right, 1737 days….And those are just the ones we could count with us.
My friend with her three kids warns us as she walks in the freezing cold, “The parking meter is broken. We have to walk across the street to get a ticket.”
There wasn’t time. I wouldn’t make it. Not alone with a one and two year old, a six-year-old desperate to play with her friend, and my teenage daughter who was also once adopted from foster care.
Of course I should expect slow, anticipate delays, not be suprised when our ex-Preschool teacher is asked for our case number so the courts can “find” our papers.
That’s when I find a parking spot, one where ceilings don’t keep us, paying spaces don’t take from us, and the hill to the courthouse reminds us of our own foster journey….the slow, steady climb in the direction of a new tomorrow.
I see my husband and our oldest son come to meet us. They help me carry our two toddlers, bags and the
weight of this moment, one I wondered if it was going to happen.
“You have wide shoulders”, God had told my husband many years ago.
This God-man has carried a ton of our own hopes and dreams, of work and responsibility, of caring for other people’s children, year after year after year.
And yet, here we were, together, hand-in-hand, climbing a hill that would promise us three girls; the older two and the one we took home from the hospital if all went well.
But would we be in time? Would the courts find our papers? Would the day we had anticipated for more than half a decade finally come to fruition?
