It Matters to This One: Failure-An Open Hearted and Broken Hearted Post from a Momma Who Met Nanette

Failure-An Open Hearted and Broken Hearted Post from a Momma Who Met Nanette
It is difficult to imagine being a parent who goes into these orphanages to adopt one child who stole their hearts and comes out loving so many. I can only imagine because it only takes their photos and stories for my heart to love them. PLEASE consider sharing Nanette's story. Please consider sharing her photo, her Reece's Rainbow profile, http://reecesrainbow.org/19203/nanette-15h . Her mom and dad are out there! Someone is this beauty's momma and just doesn't know it yet!

Here is her post from her blog http://inmamasheart.com/2012/11/13/failure/

For the last two weeks, it has slapped me in the face every time I have opened the browser window. It is a constant, painful reminder.

There is a blog entry entitled “Failure” in my draft folder.

For the last two weeks, it has been just a title followed by an empty box. The emotions have always been there, but the words were missing. I just couldn’t find them, so the cursor sat there blinking away and mocking me.

Failure.

Nanette.

Nanette wasn’t in Charlotte’s groupa at the baby house. She was in the smaller groupa for children who needed more one on one support. The director and therapists told us (and other families who came after us) that she had a “hard” form of Down Syndrome. She was developing at a slower rate than the other children with the same diagnosis. To them, though, it did not matter. Nanette was who she was. She was loved and valued—weak heart, cognition challenges, and all.
Nanette was transferred at the end of September, and sent nearly 50 miles across the region to an institution. Everything and everyone that she knows is gone.

And I feel like a failure.

Before we met Charlotte, I had no idea that the staff and children who worked and lived inside those four pumpkin orange walls would latch themselves so firmly to my heart. I just wanted to get my child out as quickly as I could. Standing in the middle of Charlotte’s lesson on our second trip to the baby house made me realize that it wasn’t going to be as simple as “in and out”. Love does strange things in adoption. You come to love the children that are not yours just as fiercely as your own child. Every time you walk through those doors, your heart ends up happy and broken all at the same time. And you promise yourself that you can’t and don’t want to forget how that felt after the rusty gate clanks shut behind you and your child for the last time.
In March, I held Nanette close to my heart. I kissed her and told her that she was beautiful. I promised her that a Mama would come for her and that she would steal her Mama’s heart just like Charlotte had stolen mine.

September and the transfer committee came.

The rational part of me understands that adoption is complicated and heartbreaking. Even fierce love and desire can’t slow the passage of time or change the rules as they currently exist.
But the not-so-rational part of me that feels like a failure is grappling with the notion that the only home that she had ever known—one filled with a staff that didn’t view children with special needs as broken or defective or wrong—is gone. She is never going to find that place of total, unconditional acceptance again.

I cannot go back and erase what I’ve seen. I cannot forget the laughter and contented smiles of the children I danced with, tickled, played with, and snuggled.
And I don’t want to. For them, I risk failure…