Chapter nine- In which God says, "See?" and I exhale

"Does this look like an outfit that a mom would wear?" I asked Justin on Monday morning. "I know we're going to take a lot of pictures today, and I want to look like a mom in the pictures."

He laughed at me and said I looked fine.

We pulled up to Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point at around 2:00 on Monday afternoon. With the car seat all strapped in in the backseat and my diaper bag in tote, we braced ourselves for the windy March weather and walked inside of the automatic sliding doors. We sat which seemed like for hours in the foyer, waiting for the DYFS workers to meet us there. (In actuality it was probably ten minutes, but it seemed like FOREVER!) We checked into the front desk and received passes to go up to the maternity floor.

I couldn't stand still in the elevator. I was gushing and bubbly and talking about how excited we were. We rounded the corner into the nursery and saw about five plastic cribs filled with babies wrapped up like sausages.

"Which one is it?"

"He's right here," the nurse said proudly as if she was showing off her own baby.

Can we just talk about moments in your life that will forever be freeze-framed in your mind? This was definitely one of them. He had thick black hair and chubby cheeks and an adorable pudgy nose. He was sleeping peacefully. I had the feeling of wanting to scoop him up in my arms and tell him how much we loved him, how fervently we had prayed for him, how much pain we had to go through to get to this point, but how it all seemed worth it now. I felt dizzy.

For a few seconds everything tunneled. My husband told the nurse how I was four months pregnant and that this was our first foster baby. I had to sit down. I felt like I was going to pass out- half from exhaustion, half from elation. The nurse got me a cup of juice. I felt ridiculous, but I didn't care.

The nurse patiently went through the discharge routine with us. She showed us how to change his clothes and diaper, how to bathe him, feed him, burp him. I felt equipped for the task. All that reading and stressing the days prior, and all of it seemed so natural- it just took a little bit of common sense.

The DYFS workers met us again in the nursery. As we were walking out of the hospital, they gave us the bad news. The parents changed their mind. They found a great-aunt who lived in Georgia that was going to take the baby. They named him already. Talen Lee. Justin and I looked at eachother and scrunched our noses. I felt that same sick feeling I got in those cold, dark ultrasound rooms. Like God was giving us a child again and then going to take it away.

They said, however, that inter-state adoptions take a long time. With fost-adopt babies things change a lot, they said. That it happens all the time that they find a long-lost relative who is willing to take a baby and that most of the time it falls through.

"So what would you say are the chances of us getting to keep him?" I asked.

"Pretty good. I'd say 95%."

I breathed a sigh of relief. He was my son in my heart already. The one I had prayed for for so long.

I sat next to him in the car seat all the way home while Justin drove and asked, "What's he doing now?"

"Sleeping."

"What about now?"

"Sleeping."

I took a lot of pictures of him on my camera phone and sent it to my sisters. My cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

"What about the name?" Justin asked me. "I guess we have to call him Talen."

"You know," I said, "I feel so strongly that Josiah was the name that God gave you to give to him. I don't care what DYFS says. In our home, as long as he's with us, I think we should call him the name God gave you."

He was our Josiah. God saves.

But he would also be my Samuel, like Hannah's son in the Bible, that I would have to give over to God before He would bless us with other children.

"I just want to keep my baby," I said to God.

And God said, "I would rather you know who I am."