After the phone call (post #4 of 6)

This is part of a series of posts about our most recent failed adoption.  I'm trying to power through these and get them all up because I don't want to prolong this, but I feel like I need to tell the story.  The first post is here and the second post is here, and the third post is here, in case you want to start from the beginning.

The phone call went fine.  Not amazing, but at least we got to talk to a real person.  And she sounded genuine and down to earth and the kind of person we would like to have as our child's birthmom.  She finally told us over the phone that she was having a little boy.  At one point in the conversation I brought up the birthfather, "M", and asked if they had been in contact since she had only mentioned him in one previous email and said they weren't together but maintained an amicable relationship.  She said that he had recently come back into the picture - they weren't dating but she was forwarding many of our emails on to him and they would discuss what they liked and didn't like.

After the call our caseworker encouraged us to start reaching out to M through B as best we could.  We sent pictures of us for both of them (on our caseworker's advice) and links to past blog posts or videos that we thought they would like and would help them get to know us better.  They started asking us to think of a name.  It felt like they were getting close to telling us they had made up their minds about us.  B asked for Kayli's phone number and they had some communication for a while (I don't know the entire extent because I didn't want to ask Kayli what all B wanted to know about us or about adoption and make her feel like she was breaching a confidence between birthmoms or anything). 

Mother's Day came and went.  She was around 29 weeks and I thought maybe, just maybe, she would be saving an "announcement" for Mother's Day.  But it didn't come, and I didn't worry about it.  We would rather her take her time and be sure about her decision to place with us than to decide too early, tell us, and then back out later. 

She started asking about another phone call.  Ugh.  We said, "sure! of course! we can talk anytime!"  But unsurprisingly, a call never happened. 

She set up a Skype call for 7:00 a.m. her time.  By this point she had moved to Florida for the summer to stay with her family and wasn't working so we figured it actually might happen.  We texted her around 7:15 to see why she hadn't called yet.  She texted back about being stuck in traffic.  We waited.  We texted again a while later and she said she was home but had to use the bathroom.  (Seriously?)  We waited.  Ten minutes later she texted that she was excited to talk but also kind of nervous.  At this point I was like, "why are you still texting us?  why don't you just call?"  So I texted something to lighten the mood and finally she texted saying she was just too nervous and the call wasn't happening.  So Paul went into work a couple hours late for nothing and we wondered what we were doing letting her do this to us over and over. 

I'm going to skip ahead because there was just more of the same over the month of May.  More phone calls arranged and cancelled.  Daily emails being exchanged to the point where I actually bought a book about with conversation prompts because I seriously was running out of questions to ask B about herself!  (It is an awesome book, btw, and I should do a blog post in the future of questions we have been asked by the multiple birthmoms we have interacted with and questions we have asked trying to get to know them better.  I would love to read some other adoptive couple's take on that subject.)

B started finally sending us photos of herself in response to our many photos of ourselves (we never asked or pressured her for any of herself though).  Always group shots with other people where she was in the back and never any that would give even the slightest glimpse of a possible baby bump.  But at least she was feeling comfortable with us seeing what she looked like. 

In late May, B told us that she had narrowed her choices down to two couples - us and one other couple.  We eventually learned that the other couple had two kids - one biological and one adopted - and they were from Tennessee.  My heart sank a little because B had expressed concerns about us being on the West Coast and her being on the East Coast and I realized this other couple had an advantage being so close.  TN is just hours from FL or NC, the two places where B went to school and had her family.  But we soldiered on, figuring if she liked us enough to email for more than three months, there might still be a chance that she would choose us anyway.

Then on June 5 she emailed us two huge questions: 

"Would you guys be willing to meet me in person?" and "Would you want to be in the delivery room for the birth?"...