Adoption can be filled with the stuff of great adventures--fear, hope, pinnacles of excitement and valleys of despair. A level of perseverance is required unmatched, perhaps, by any other sort of endeavor.
Just before dawn on October 21, 1995, the phone jarred me from sleep. The voice on the other end of the line was the mother of a young woman due to give birth, a young woman who planned to place her newborn with my husband and me.
The voice on the line was calling to say the baby, destined, we hoped, to be our child, was making his or her way into the world, and advising us to come to Texas, pronto.
I called my husband in a state far away where he was attending a business meeting. We hurriedly began to piece a plan together that would involve our getting to the nearest major airport as quickly as possible that offered flights that same day to Dallas.
My husband and I discovered the best place to meet-up and hop a non-stop flight to Dallas, where we would rent a car and drive to the city of the baby's birth, was Las Vegas. He found a non-stop from where he was and I was within four hours by car.
The plan was made.
In driving hastily to Las Vegas, I took back roads that led through California and Nevada ghost towns with railroad tracks that run through them. At one such town a train sat motionless on the track, blocking the only road through.
I had to sit. I had to cool my jets and think, which was not good under the circumstances. I could only imagine missing the one and only flight I was able to find for my husband and me to Texas. I could only think of being stranded in this godforsaken place. I could only imagine the young woman giving birth to the child we hoped would be ours changing her mind. I could only worry.
Forty-seven minutes I waited in the California desert for a train to inch its way off the crossing. When I finally accelerated across the tracks, I gripped the wheel with damp palms and broke the speed limit.
Finally in the airport terminal in Las Vegas with a handful of minutes to spare, I searched the crowd near the gate for my husband. Miraculously, our plan worked. We proceeded to board the plane to Dallas together.
During flight, we sat in the sort of tense silence that turns minutes into small eternities, held hands and fretted.
Upon arrival in Dallas we learned my husband's luggage was misplaced. We had no choice but to proceed to the car rental counter without it. My husband was doomed to business attire the next twenty-four hours--a white dress shirt, dress shoes and a suit. I laugh now at photos of him during this twenty-four hour period sporting banker apparel and showing the strain.
The drive from Dallas to the hospital in the small Texas town was the longest three hours of my life. We had been up all night. Dawn of October 22 was breaking by the time we saw our son, swaddled and sleeping peacefully in the hospital nursery.
Though countless unforgettable moments played out during that first day with our son and his birth family, the adventures between news he was about to be born and our crossing the threshold of the hospital to meet him are forever etched deeply on my heart.