The phone call

The only thing that prepared me for making this call is years of experience as a hotline rape crisis counselor. Because of that, I'm pretty good at cold-calling total strangers and talking about very personal things. But aside from the initial chatty hi-how-are-you stuff, this was all unchartered waters for me. I think for Ariana as well.

Our phone call was surreal but very very good. We had lots of eerie little things in common, odd things like the waterfall on the Smith campus that we both used to sit beside when we lived out that way. We "clicked," just like our social workers hoped we would. But even better, we respected each other's decisions, families, and circumstances. It felt honest and right.

This was the first conversation in what I hope will be a lifetime of conversations.

I don't want to talk too much about what we said to each other. Tonight I will take some time to put all that in a letter for the baby; I want her to be able to read it later on if she does become our daughter. But there were a couple of things of great significance to me that I can share with you: Ariana wants us to be at the hospital when the baby is born. And she has been requesting doubles of her ultrasound photos all along, which she wants to give to us for our photo album.

We couldn't be more blessed.