In case you missed it, read Part 1 of the Rearview Mirror series to get caught up!

Was this really happening?! I was going to become a mom to not just one but TWO kiddos! I was equal parts terrified and thrilled. And things were going so well with both adoptions! We met Bella and her birth mother in the beginning of June and instantly fell in love. The hardest part was when we had to leave her knowing that we wouldn’t be able to see her again for over a month. But we stared at her pictures and videos dreaming of when she would be ours forever on July 18th, 2013.

Meanwhile back in Oregon:

Since Julie was only four weeks out from her due date, we decided not to do a face-to-face meeting until right before the birth. I had just gone from a vacation in Wisconsin to a trip to Nevada to meet Bella and we needed that time at home to prepare for our kiddos. But, despite the distance, our relationship with Julie seemed to be flourishing. We communicated on the phone or text almost everyday and I was so happy to have such wonderful birth mothers in my life. Things were going well, but then, things started to get complicated.

Each day that went by, there seemed to be a new complication that would arise either with the pregnancy or the adoption process. We had a lot of questions and a lot of things didn’t make sense, but we were committed nonetheless. Still, I couldn’t shake my intuition that something just felt off. I wasn’t sure what, just off. We would get frantic calls in the middle of the night saying she needed to go to the emergency room followed by acting like everything was fine the next morning. I was always at the ready to take her calls, listening about the traumatic complications that kept coming up, yet when I would ask to talk to the doctors about it, she would avoid it like the plague. Seeds of doubt began to creep in more and more each day. We couldn’t put on finger on it, but we knew we were being lied to in some way or another. But we were committed to this little baby boy, so we pressed on…