Read Online Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos - Free Book Online Page A

the Certain Fee, I’d be moved to the top of the list.
    Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That someone else who had been waiting would then be moved down a rung as I walked away with their baby because I threw a bunch of money down? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I said his method sounded like human trafficking to me. That didn’t go over well. He leaned forward, offering me a bowl of dusty mints from his desk, which can only mean one of two things: I had bad breath or he was stalling. Probably both. Anyway, I said, “How can you guarantee a birth mother who’s been working with another couple would then switch—” He cut me off quickly, saying, “There’s no guarantee. I never said there’s a guarantee; I said you’d go to the top of the list.” I thanked him for his time and left. And later found out a famous actress I knew had been on his Certain Fee list . . . for six years.
    But there’s something I felt about all these situations that intrigued me: I didn’t feel right about any of them. I cannot explain this. None of them sat right with me. I felt like I was on the wrong path.
    Another thing I know about myself is I need to talk things out. But at the time, I kept this all in, confiding in very few people. It’s because it’s a seemingly endless path of sadness without good news. I’m used to a more carefree and fun environment of laughing and good times. Inside, I felt like a drag. So I just didn’t talk about it with Core or many people. Because nothing was working.
    We quietly approached our super-hot friend Kathy Najimy (humble-brag alert: people think we’re sisters) and her equally tremendous husband, Dan Finnerty, of the Dan Band, because they know Rosie O’Donnell, who I’d heard might be able to help. Plus Dan is adopted. Dan is a remarkably well-adjusted person and has a healthy relationship with his mom and his birth mother. I had watched Dan be in the same room with them both and it didn’t seem exceedingly painful for anyone. That evening at their home, I didn’t want to reveal much, but Kathy and Dan were excited to hear we were considering adoption. Kathy said, “There is something fantastic coming we could never imagine” and kept feeding us hummus and pita bread in her kitchen, knowing the way to get anyone ethnic to talk is through a full stomach. Dan kept jumping up and down, saying, “Do it, do it!” He pointed to himself. “You could get this!” I then asked Kathy to connect me with Rosie O’Donnell, who discreetly led me to an adoption counselor: a facilitator.
     
    Ian and I sat on the couch in her small office and the facilitator started by gently asking what had brought us to consider adoption. I started to explain everything that had happened. Or hadn’t happened. The miscarriages, the fertility treatments, then not one, but two surrogates, then not being matched through means that had worked for other people. I realized two things. First, I now knew why I was keeping it quiet: I couldn’t talk about my experience without loudly snot-bawling. And second, I discovered that, interestingly, while I could see myself very clearly as a mother, I didn’t necessarily see myself with an infant. The facilitator seemed intrigued by that vision and told me there were other options. This was the first time Ian and I discovered we don’t have orphanages in North America. In the United States alone, we have over 500,000 children living in foster homes. Of these, 129,000 kids are legally emancipated. This means the parental rights have been terminated. And these children can be adopted.
    The facilitator looked me right in the eyes and asked if I would be open to adopting an older child from the American foster care system. I didn’t blink. That actually made a lot of sense to me. It felt like the right fit.
    But I’ll be honest—emotionally, I was a mess. Except in this office this one time, I had never taken the time to just face what I’d been through because I was