For fifteen years we had been wandering in a desert of our own making, Garen and I. I kept trying to do the right thing. I kept searching for God in so many places. But my feet of clay kept crumbling. The smallest tide of life would come in, wet the clay, and I was down. Again.
What I needed was to be forged. Compressed under extreme pressure, made into something so strong, that I came out with a greater resistance to the stresses of life. I WANTED that. My heart longed for something deeper, something of substance in my life. Little did I know that our Adoption Journey would be the catalyst that would transform our lives into something so unrecognizable, but so familiar. That it would ultimately bring us home, to the Holy Catholic Church.
For three years I had been scouring adoption websites looking for my son. I knew he was black. I knew he was out there. But I would always close my browser in defeat. I hadn’t found the missing Miller.
He was hiding on the other side of the world. A tiny, shiny soul, born to two parents who both had Aids. This Tiny was only five months old when his mother discovered her illness and ran away, leaving her baby with a dying man.
Two months later, my son’s Aunt would find my son lying on a dirty floor, parasites literally oozing from his dying body. She took him to care for him. By the time my son was a year old his mother and father would both be dead from a disease that claims so many lives in Eastern and Southern Africa. In fact, over half of all the people living with HIV, in the world, are in the East and South of Africa. My baby bunny was the victim of a tragic statistic.
The Auntie was one of 10 siblings. One by one her brothers and sisters died of various causes, until she was the only one left. This remarkable woman took in the children of each of her siblings. And then came yet another blow to my missing Miller.
The government came in and took not only the Auntie’s land but also her store. Left with no way to bring in money her husband intervened and made her track down other family to care for all the children. One by one, each of the children was sent to live with other relatives. Only my Mini-est remained, no one alive found to care for him. Unmoved, the husband made the Auntie give the boy to someone she didn’t even know, in a big city, hours away. An insurmountable distance without a car.
It was about this time that we received a big box. Inside the box was a giant three-ring binder. Inside the three-ring binder was our adoption application. I took one look at the table of contents, yeah – our application had a table of contents, and I burst into tears. I was horrified that we had gotten our hopes up for NOTHING.
Garen didn’t see what I saw. I saw an unconquerable amount of information needed, documents we would have to search STATES for, too many steps to be done. I got mired in the details. I knew we were supposed to adopt, but my feet of clay crumbled immediately. Garen saw the big picture and then broke it down into the first step. Once we had done the first step, Garen saw the second step...
In fact, Garen had the application done in just a few weeks, and that was with needing documents from states we had lived in previously, background checks from our city police, state patrol, homeland security, obtaining financing, spending HUNDREDS of dollars on notarizing and copying documents. I remember getting a shocked call from our adoption agency telling me that usually people took six months to do everything we had done in a flash. The last bit of info we sent in was over a ream of paper and took a box. That was a good day. The feeling of relief was immense.
The feeling of relief was also short-lived. Now there was nothing left to do but wait. And waiting is not what Millers do best. I had this horrible feeling of urgency that I could not get people to understand. Unfortunately, time would prove me right.
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