Happy ...
um ... day after your Birthday!
Five
Years Ago Today ... an Abby’s Road
anniversary
October
2, 2009. The baby was born the evening before and we were able to go see her
that evening.
Starting
at page 145:
“A
plastic baby bed was wheeled into the room. Abigail was lying on it with her
head poking out of a white blanket with sea-green, pink and white stripes. She
had a thin spread of hair on the top and sides of her head. She had acne on her
cheek.
To
me babies either look like Churchill or Gandhi. Abby was firmly in the
Churchill camp. She had full lips – puffy lips – and thick cheeks and jowls.
She had a round button nose and long eyelashes. Her ears were flat against her
head. Everything looked proportioned –
the ears, eyes (or at least her eyelids), mouth and nose were neither too small
nor too large for her head. She looked like a baby doll.
She
was so beautiful.
The
baby bed had clear plastic walls on each side. A pink slip of paper was taped
near the top of one wall. It read “Abigail (Valerie’s last name)”. Valerie
agreed to call her Abigail from the start. When Abby starts to rebel as a teen
and gives us the “You’re not my real parents! Curry isn’t my real last name”
treatment, we can at least say her name was always Abigail.
Esther
snuck a photo from her cell phone. I asked the nurse at the station if we could
take pictures. I had brought my camera hoping we could. The nurse said, “We
usually don’t allow it, but you can take a few. That will be okay.”
I
was a good boy and only took four pictures. The first photo looked like she had
snot all over her top lip, but there was a lot of grime and slime on the
glass/mesh walls of the nursery as well as the plastic walls of the baby bed.
What looked like copious boogers was just goo on the clear plastic wall – a
strange experiment in forced perspective. The entire time she slept on her
right side. She didn’t move or cry while we were there.
Esther
leaned in front of the window the entire time. She wore her blue cape and stood
as still as stone for twenty minutes watching her daughter. I took advantage of
the zoom lens to take photos around her. She smiled the entire time. Esther was
as beautiful as her baby. Still is.
It
was time to go. We smiled at Abigail one last time and went through the vault
door, into the elevator and out into the cold dark. We went home and posted our
photos on Facebook. Valerie’s attorney
called us - at 5:00 the next evening we could take her home...”
***
“Abby’s
Road, the Long and Winding Road to Adoption and how Facebook, Aquaman
and Theodore Roosevelt Helped” leads a couple through their days of infertility
treatments and adoption. It is told with gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle)
humor from the perspective of a nerdy father and his loving and understanding
wife.
Join
Mike and Esther as they go through IUIs and IFVs, as they search for an
adoption agency, are selected by a birth mother, prepare their house, prepare
their family, prepare themselves and wait for their daughter to be born a
thousand miles from home.
Abby’s Road is available at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Abbys-Road-Long-Winding-Adoption/product-reviews/0692221530/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_recent?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
at Barnes and Noble here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abbys-road-the-long-and-winding-road-to-adoption-and-how-facebook-aquaman-and-theodore-roosevelt-helped-michael-curry/1119971924?ean=9780692221532
Copyright
2014 Michael Curry
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