Dear Chosen Child,

This is the first of what may be many letters. The beginning of what will very likely be a long and excruciating and completely unconventional kind of pregnancy. We have been thinking and dreaming about adopting since before we had your brother and sister but only in the past few months have we begun actively proceeding towards that end. As we begin to discuss details and paperwork and plans I spend more and more time dreaming about you. And then it hit me…

You are very likely not even born yet. We expect to wait several years for a referral and with the age limit we have set, it is most likely you will be born in the next 6 to 18 months. We are planning for a child who has not yet been born to a mother who will eventually decide to give you up. Somewhere a woman is pregnant, or will be very soon. Somewhere she is, or will be, feeling and thinking…I don’t know what. I can’t pretend to know. But she is, or will be, carrying you. So I can’t help think about her and be grateful for her and hope that you will keep enough of her inside you to help answer the questions you will no doubt have some day.

Somewhere, you will be born this year. On a day I won’t know and a time I won’t realize. My heart hurts, knowing your dad and I won’t be there right from the start but that’s going to be a fact of our relationship. Your beginning will be special. You will touch other people’s lives before you touch ours. But you will be in our hearts from the beginning, before we know you.

Right now I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the paperwork involved in getting permission to wait for you. But the fact that this road will eventually lead to bringing you into our arms is giving me the motivation I need.

Meanwhile, I think of you and I think of the mother who will carry you in her body while I carry you in my heart. She and I are connected, and always will be. It is heartbreaking that for you to come into our family she will have to let you go. But it is beautiful, too. I promise you this, we won’t forget her.

Maybe it sounds like I have a romanticized view of this process. Believe me, I am doing my best to understand the realities of adopting. I know there will obstacles while we wait, challenges when we meet, hurdles as we bond. But I am choosing to believe that even though we are sacrificing witnessing the first few years of your life by taking this path, it will be worth it in the end to know you. I believe it will be worth it for you to be a part of our family.

Holding you in my heart until then,
Mommy