How do we believe?

Well, I'd like to comment about the events over the past two days. To make a LONG story really short, Amanda (the birth mother from the last post) has turned out to be a fraud. And a really bad one at that! She tried twice to give "proof of pregnancy" to our agency - the first one was handwritten by her. The second one was typed with no doctor signature. It had an address on it, supposedly of the doctor, but it was actually the address of the library she faxed the document from. Also, the doctor she listed was a made up person. On Tuesday afternoon, she emailed me that things were getting really confusing with her family and she just didn't know if she could go through with this. Then later that night she started calling and emailing me saying her water broke and she was going into labor. Crazy! She even went as far as to call the agency and tell them that too. Well, naturally, she said she miscarried. I obtained the name of the hopsital she was at (after Rachel asked her repeatedly) and called to see if she was there. There wasn't even a maternity ward that hopsital! I called her on her bluff and sent her an email telling her how I was disgusted with her and that what she did is the cruelest thing you could possibly do to someone. It's very sad!

This whole experience leaves me to wonder how we will ever believe in or trust another birth mother. The adoption experience is a tremendous challenge of your patience and faith. We want to be parents so badly - and I do believe it will happen. It's really unfortunate that we're probably going to be very skeptical of all birth mothers from here on out. I know it is good to be cautious (and I believe we were this time), but at the same time it's good to get excited too. After all, this could be our baby. I'm going to continue to work on finding us other contacts and we'll post any more news that comes about. We don't want people to get their hopes up - hopefully this story shows the roller coaster ride that is involved in adoption and everyone is able to take it one step at a time. Until our next contact.... we wait.