I adopted a baby at 47 when my first 2 children went to university

When I adopted my youngest child as an infant in 2001, I was in the forties and my older children headed for university. I was looking forward to talking to everyone in our expanding family. But the reaction was not what I had planned.

The first time I expected a baby, I was 29 years old and I had married. My parents were ecstatic and mom gave my phone to my usually stoic father. He laughed and dotted me with questions like: “Did you choose names?” Mom told the story of her long work and hoped to have more easier.

My best friend Christine had just discovered that she was pregnant, and we joked by saying that our newborns would be raised like twins. Buy maternity clothes, the saleswoman tapped my belly. “What is your due date?” she whispered.

So, when I announced the news almost two decades later that a adoption agency had twinned with a newborn girl, I waited “Congratulations!” Instead, I had: “Haven’t you ever gone through all of this?”

Adoption at my age seemed to be a taboo

Pressing the maternity reset button, it seems, was taboo. Especially for a single mother of 47 years of two teenagers.

During a party, a guest that I barely knew moved me away. Gayle, in sixties, had a worried look. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “What made you do this?”

Do This? You might think that I had been arrested. Did I even have an explanation?

I had always wanted another baby

I had always sucked in a third child, but when my youngest had gone to kindergarten, my wedding was bothering. The idea of ​​being alone was quite frightening with two children.

But the years of divorce and carpooling did not reprimand my desire to tighten another small hand, to cuddle with a book of images, and to go to swimming and the zoo. “Is this just a phase?” I asked an older colleague.

“Listen to your heart,” she confided. “I wanted a third child, but my husband did not do it. I still regret it.”

Shortly after, my friend Kevin and his wife showed photos of the little girl waiting for them in Guatemala. My heart has melted.

“I would love to adopt,” I sighed. “But I wouldn’t be eligible.”

“Why not?” He said, giving me the number of his agency.

Kevin’s social worker, a mother with a soft voice of two of two people adopted in Korea, set up options: domestic vs international and age requirements for religion.

It was finally the right time for me to adopt

To date, I had changed fields and went to a mortgage bank. I had a higher income, which facilitated the management of additional expenses that came with a child without a partner, and my older ones were delighted to welcome a brother or a sister; The chance to hold another baby in my arms seemed to be at hand.

Shortly after, on the grocery box line, I saw a magazine commemorating 25 years that the war had ended in Vietnam, one of the countries recommended by the agency. I saw this as a sign of hope. When all the documents were finished and a nurse put Isabella in my arms in Hanoi in 2001, I knew that I had made the right choice to “start again” with this pack of love.

Today, Isabella is a happy 23 -year -old student. She plays university tennis and studies for the admission test for law faculties. She shares her apartment outside campus with a cat and a labradoodle. We love hikes in state parks, and she asks for my advice on work, clothes and meetings. Besides his birthday, we celebrate his date of adoption with a cake and candles.

When friends and foreigners notice how lucky she was to be adopted, I answer: “No, you mean what lucky mom I am. I am lucky to have had a second chance of maternity.”