“You have to listen to your heart and soul and trust God,” Cherrie said. “That child you cried about was meant to be with a different family. You have to find your patience.”
Cherrie and Brad had needed patience.
Consider this couple’s journey to grow their family—
- Several rounds of fertility treatments
- Multiple miscarriages
- Challenging home study because of Covid
- Struggled to find an agency taking parents during Covid.
- Connected with Heart to Heart
- Birth mother choose them, then decides to parent, but if it doesn’t work out, “We’ll call you later.”
- Had an interview with a birth mother who said. “Come quickly.” So the couple did, then the birth mother decided not to place with the Utah Adoption Agency.
- Chosen to parent a little boy who passed away.
- Asked Darla about “50 million questions” every time a situation occurred
- Agreed to have their file presented three more times. Wasn’t chosen
- Birth mother of a little newborn child leaning heavily toward adoption contacted Cherrie and Brad and then changed her mind.
- A week later, the first birth mother to have selected them decided it was time to place the child, who was now almost a year old. Were Cherrie and her husband interested? Open adoption
The family who said they’d call later did call. “We said yes,” Cherrie explained. “We said yes to a child we’d said yes to a year earlier. We were excited, then Darla called and said the birth mother went with another family. We thanked Darla for informing us and being supportive, but it felt so sad. Darla told us to hang in there. An hour later, she called and said, ‘We have another situation.’”
Darla had a situation. A birthmother had called. “She’s not due for a couple of months. You want to be considered?”
“It was the craziest feeling. Brad and I looked at each other,” Cherrie said. “Our MO is to ask so many questions, but this time we didn’t. I can’t explain it to anyone. But something embraced our whole body. ‘This is it’ We didn’t ask questions. We didn’t know if it was a boy or girl.
Within hours, the potential adoptive parents and the birth mother were on the phone.
“We were all crying,” Cherrie said. “It was a precious moment. We talked every day after that. We got to listen to the ultrasound.”
There were concerns, however. The mother had admitted to some drug use, and there was the potential for Hepatitis B. Her prenatal care was minimum.
Within a week, the baby, not due for two more months, showed signs of entering the world.
“We were in Fred Meyer’s jewelry department when they called and said her water had broke,” Cherrie said. “We started crying. We are ecstatic. The jewelry people hear our story, and they are crying.”
While the hopeful parents hurried to the hospital several hundred miles away, the tiny baby moved to the birth canal in a breech position.
“He was stuck,” Cherrie said. “Literally, had to rip him out. He was bruised from head to toe.”
