Mae Selin's family

We’d done it before, we figured. Not our first rodeo. Old hat. But here’s the thing: the second time

someone walks into a room and hands you their biological child forever is no less head spinningly

profound than the first.

Our daughters’ situations were similar in many ways. Both were around a month old; both had Down

syndrome; both had been living with their birth parents, whom we met at the time of placement. But

the settings of the meetings couldn’t have been more distinct. One took place in a mobile home in a

rural part of the pacific northwest, the home of our older daughter’s birthparents who were scraping

together a living as migrant workers. The other was in the offices of the adoption agency, housed in a

gleaming high rise in midtown Manhattan, not far from where our younger daughter’s birth parents

worked in white collar jobs.  

Three weeks before, as I was waiting to pick up our older daughter from school, I received a message

from my wife. “Just got a gasp-worthy opportunity from Stephanie.” We had been on the NDSAN list for

less than a month at that point. There was a picture attached to the message—g​asp-worthy, indeed.

There she was: a scrawny little thing with round cheeks and one of her eyes narrowed as if sizing you up.

It was a no brainer. We responded that evening, doing our best to reign in our excitement. “Yes, please,”

we said in our totally normal email voice. “We would like to be considered.”

One agonizing week later, I heard my wife pick up a call in the bedroom. Her voice was trembling as she

told me it was NDSAN. Now on speaker phone, we heard Stephanie say those wonderful words for the

second time. “Congratulations, Mom and Dad.” Just like that, we were a family of four.

Well, not “just like that,” exactly. There were two more weeks of waiting; there was a mountain of

paperwork; there was travel. And then we found ourselves once again sitting face with two people who

were making an unimaginable sacrifice. They handed us this baby we’d only seen in that gasp-worthy

picture. She was bundled up against that winter’s only snowstorm in New York. We all cried, and talked,

mostly about small things like bottles and sleeping patterns. And then it was time for us–the three of

us–to go. More waiting; more travel; more paperwork. But mostly gratitude and love.

That was over a year ago. The adoption was finalized last week. All worth it. How could it not be?