Two very different nurseries
I had less than a day’s notice prior to the adoption of both of my kids. Given this experience, one might think that I would recommend waiting families be immaculately prepared - even have a nursery fully ready to go at a moments notice. Yet, during the wait I had to find a balance between being prepared and the emotional toll of looking at an empty nursery. Our daughter was born after we were in the pool for less than three months; we literally did not own a diaper. While waiting nearly three years for our son’s arrival, we had carefully packed up and cleaned our daughter’s hand-me-downs, and put them in the room that would be his nursery.
The room that ended up becoming my daughter’s nursery was full of family meaning for us. Its door sat a few feet from the opening of our bedroom and it didn’t sit empty prior to her arrival - quite the opposite, in fact. It was my grandmother’s room. She was my only grandparent who survived to my adulthood. She told people she was five feet tall - by which she meant somewhere between 4’6” and 4’8”. She was deeply strong, having survived multiple massive back surgeries starting in her forties, and had her spine replaced twice. She cared deeply about community - and worked in south central LA at the community hospital as a social worker during her career. Above all, she loved family and her role as grandmother was her favorite. I spent at least a month each summer at her house as a child.
She lived in LA by herself until nearly the end of her life, but I saw her often. She’d come visit ever month or two, usually staying a week or more. The room was set up for her - it had a day bed that wasn’t too high for her to get into, and about three different places to sit and read (despite the room measuring only 8 feet by 10 feet) - including her favorite, a rocking chair. The closet was filled with her things - so many “housecoats” and literally more slippers than I have owned in my life. She told me often that the room was no big deal for her - that she would happily sleep on the couch, or in the family room downstairs when the baby came - she planned to come and help me for at least the first two months.
Once we had formally started the process of growing our family through adoption, she was the first person I told. Her heart was failing - and I had picked her up at home, then traveled across the country with her so she could have surgery in New York, where my parents were living at the time. Before her surgery, I wanted her to know that our family would continue. She told me that Josh and I would be great parents, and that was that.
She passed away in the hospital a few weeks later. We entered the pool a few months after that, and used it as a way to enter her room again, if only to donate the housecoats and slippers. We gave the bed to a friend who was also hoping to adopt an older child who would need a bed, not a crib. We chose paint colors, bought paint, and noticed the baseboards of the room were in bad shape.
Then, we took a break for a couple weeks, with the paint cans sitting in the room unopened. It had been an emotional roller coaster cleaning out the room and preparing to begin anew. We knew it was what my grandmother would have wanted, but it took its toll. We didn’t bother to paint the room - after all, we’d have years to prepare, right?
We got “the call” the next week. We were at the hospital within 30 minutes. After spending a few hours with our daughter’s now birthmom, we headed home to prepare for her arrival the next morning. Josh asked our adoption counselor on the way out, “what am I supposed to do now? should we paint the baseboards???”. We never did.
The room that would become our son’s nursery was a very different story. We had moved to a new home, and our top criteria as we house hunted was to find a home that had three bedrooms on the same floor. This meant we had an empty room. More aware that a last minute call was a real possibility, we opted to keep the room semi-prepared. After all, we had bins and bins of baby clothes and other materials that I had saved from our daughter’s baby years, and carefully labeled with contents. The closet in our mostly-empty nursery was stuffed. In the room was a rocking chair (the same one my grandmother used for reading, and we used to rock my daughter to sleep) and my daughters old crib. No artwork. It was a painful reminder of the wait, but I was too much of a pragmatist to get rid of everything.
I tried to keep the door to the room closed, but soon enough my daughter would want to play in the room and would ask when her sibling was coming. This was one of the hardest pieces of the wait for me - to tell her that I did not know, but that it would happen some day. In particularly dark moments, the idea that maybe this wasn’t true, and maybe I was lying to my daughter floored me more times than one.
But, the day to grow our family did come. We got “the call” again, and with it, came the mad dash to become available, emotionally and physically, for our new son and his birth family. He’s still early in his life, but has already gone through many sizes of clothes. For me, his arrival lifted much of the weight I felt during our adoption wait, but I still feel lighter still every time I clean something out of his closet that he doesn’t need anymore, and pass it along to another family, whose day will also come.
