In honor of National Adoption Month, Holt adoptive mom Mandie Hickenbottom-Conner shares about her journey to Korea and back to adopt her son, Desmond. A boy with special needs, Desmond is like many of the children who wait too long to find the loving adoptive families they need and deserve.

I never imagined my road to motherhood would be so riddled with loss…

Babies and children are surrounded with ideals of hope and joy. So, when I was dating my husband and we got engaged, we never talked about dreams deferred, fertility difficulties or death. And yet, before parenthood could be realized in our life together, all of these things would come to pass.

Our decision to adopt felt more like a long, arduous, emotional preparation than the beautiful “calling” so many of our friends seemed to experience. And although we always felt we wanted to adopt “one day” to “complete our family,” it soon became obvious that if we wanted to have a family, we would have to embrace adoption.

I know it may sound as though I think of adoption as a consolation prize.  Please know, this couldn’t be farther from the truth...

On a cold but unseasonably sunny winter day in February of 1960, a young, Irish immigrant gave birth to a premature baby girl in the rural Iowa bedroom of her older sister and guardian — herself an immigrant-bride during the Second World War.

Mom and baby were very ill. And because mom was caught pregnant with no husband to claim her or her infant daughter, she was also facing deportation. Her only option was relinquishment.  So when the ambulance arrived, the baby was immediately handed over to the medics with the instruction that mom did not want to hold or see the baby and that her infant daughter was to be placed in the care of a representative from the nearby children’s home.

Although she never touched her newborn child’s soft skin, mom took the time to gift her with a name. Following Irish tradition, it included her own mother’s name in the middle position.  A name…  the second and last gift she would ever give her daughter this side of Heaven.  The first being life itself, no matter how harsh the circumstances may have been.

In the far reaches of time and space, close as a breath yet expansive as the universe, God was watching this very mother and child. And He knew He already had a plan in place for the life of this small, sick baby girl — one part of which was to become an adopted daughter in a family of her own.  Another was to become my mother.

Fast forward to October 18, 2011. My now 51-year-old mother was on the phone in her living room while I was on the phone in her basement.  She, with an oncologist.  Myself with our adoption agency, Holt International.  It was our third wedding anniversary, but the atmosphere was far from joyful.  My mom was being told she had cancer for the second time; and my husband, Sean, and I were being told we must change country programs – from Thailand to South Korea.  Thailand’s adoption program was in upheaval due to the recent monsoons, and many foster families and orphanages had been displaced. In the wake of the natural disaster, timelines in Thailand had stretched into the unforeseen future and all new families without a current referral were advised to switch to a more stable program.

I got off the phone and wept. Wept for my mother, and wept for this unsure future facing my husband and me.  Holt was our second agency and South Korea our fourth country program.  Our previous agency had lead us through dead-ends in China and Ethiopia; so, hearing the news about Thailand that day, coupled with my mother’s returned cancer, was a blow my heart was not prepared to handle.

As my husband and I became caregivers to my mother while she began the extensive and physically exhausting road to stem cell transplant, we hoped and prayed daily for news of a child referral to restore our joy. We were called once in the summer of 2012 with a possible referral of a boy with some very specific special needs — the most daunting (in our eyes) being frequent seizure activity. Everything in my being wanted desperately to grab hold of the thought of having this child in our lives and press it tightly to my heart. But after much prayer, we both knew that we were not emotionally ready to give this sweet boy the kind of care he deserved.