It would be two months before we received a referral for the little boy who had been born to be my son. But those months felt like a slow-moving monster that ate time and vomited it back out to be lived again and again. Every day the same regurgitated pain lived over and over.
And one night I had a dream. Garen and I were walking across a yard of baked clay. The sun was beating down into our eyes, making everything ahead of us indistinct. I could feel the warmth rising off the packed dirt as we made our way slowly to a house with fancy filigree bars on the windows. People were murmuring words I couldn’t quite make out over the rusty scrape of the front door opening. My eyes were fixed on the black rectangle left by the open door and a woman in a long skirt, with a gentle voice came into the light. I couldn’t see her face because she was looking back into the room and HER voice reached my ears. “Come on. Don’t be afraid. Come and meet your new mommy.”
An impossibly tiny boy, both hands hooked together under his chin, eyes shut so tight, saying over and over, “Please be my mommy! Please be my mommy! Please be my mommy!” I ran the remaining distance, scooped him up and hugged him so tight.
The scene changed and Garen and I, with the boy on my lap and the lady in the long skirt on the other side of a desk, talking to us. “You will want to please choose a different child. This one is sick.” My arms wrap tighter around the boy, and I tell her NO. That we will take the child back to America and heal him. He was my son, and I would not, could not, abandon him.
I woke up the next morning and told Garen our son was sick. He didn’t doubt me for a moment. And my feeling of urgency increased a thousand times over.
Later that same day I’m sitting in traffic just lost in my grief, not knowing what more I can DO to get my son home and I suddenly reach my arm out and turn on the radio. “I will wait, I will wait for you. And I will wait, I will wait for you…I’ll kneel down, wait for now...” I knew beyond any confusion - that Mumford & Sons song I had heard a hundred times - was a direct message for me, straight from Heaven.
And for the first time in so many, many months my heart rested. My soul sighed. I was able to breathe. I saw that little boy with his hands clasped in prayer beneath his chin, chanting “please be my mommy” and I answered him with “I will wait for you”.
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