I?m standing in Old Navy, trying to buy clothes for my sons. I met them for the first time last week. My husband and I arranged to see them at a park with their foster mother and three Children?s Aid workers, who instructed us not to approach the boys or talk to them. That didn?t stop me, though, from getting down on my knees right there in the wood chips and crying their names the moment I saw their faces.
In the few weeks since we?d been told about them, I hadn?t let myself imagine what the boys might look like. I was terrified that even picturing them was too real and would result in too much disappointment should another adoptive family be chosen. Seeing my hope crystallize as two very real children, playing together on a metal car structure, was emotional and awkward?I was torn between wanting to scoop them up and worrying about doing the wrong thing. By the end of our one-hour visit, however, my husband and I were chasing the boys and taking them down the slide, because they were very busy toddlers and we were going to be their parents. Eventually. Just not yet. Not that day. On that day, we were just ?a nice man and a nice woman? who happened to be at the park. Of course, nothing about that hour together just happened; it was the result of many years of pain, many rounds of failed fertility treatments, many visits with social workers, many home inspections, many police checks, many hours of adoption training and many piles of tedious, repetitive and intrusive paperwo...