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I have no specific memory of December 1, 2006. None. Which means that, like the parade that is most of our days here on earth, it was spent doing those small but necessary things that so rarely leave a mark.
I can assume, based solely on the date, that it was like most of the days sandwiched between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe we put up our tree that day. Maybe I hung five stockings that afternoon — because in 2006, there were still two dedicated to Christopher and I. Maybe it was a baking day. Maybe I had a raging cold and felt terrible and had my husband bring home pizza so that I could stay on the couch, reading our tattered copy of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” aloud while three kids sprawled on the floor with Lincoln Logs and Legos.
Most likely, it rained. And most likely, early that morning, I got up in the darkness, settled into my now gone favorite blue chair with my coffee and Bible, opened the curtain looking out over the still-black hill out back, and prayed.
Most likely, that prayer was for the child or children that we were waiting for God to bring to our family.
What I did not know — had no way of knowing — was that an hour away, my son was being born.
The amazing, heartbreaking truth that most adoptive parents live with is that our children are born and we are not given the gift of celebrating those first breaths. We find out later, after the fact. Small details trickle into our hands like precious gold, if we are fortunate. He weighed a little over five pounds. He was a month and a half early. The birth was via c-section.
Some of us meet our children well before their first birthday, and we can fill our hearts with some of that babyhood, some of those fleeting moments before walking and talking. But many of us miss those milestones, too. We absorb that loss along with the many other elements of brokenness that are inherent in building your family through the beautiful messy of legal decrees over biology.
I saw a movie once where the main character confides to his son that it was the death of his wife, miles away, that led him away from God. He should have felt something, he says, should have sensed the loss because their lives, so tangled together, were being ripped apart. For me, it is the exact opposite. The fact that a child I love fiercely, whose life I share in deeper ways than I could have imagined was born and I was unaware, reminds me that it is God who knit us together, who wrapped the threads of our hearts in ways mere coincidence could not.
Phineas was born on December 1, 2006. We would not meet him for another 14 months. The intervening days were part of the broken road that led him to us, and us to him.
It was a day that I can neither remember nor forget. Happy birthday, Phineas!