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" Marla&amp;#039;s friend request popped up on my computer screen. It had been a while since I&amp;#039;d awoken in a cold sweat thinking about her and her son, wondering about them, worrying. That pain was long gone, I thought, tucked down into a place so deep inside of me that I didn&amp;#039;t even remember it was there. Hearing from Marla* brought it back again. I clicked over to her Facebook page to see him, what he looked like, and who, at 3, he was starting to become. Oh, there he is, I thought: riding a toy fire truck, swinging on a swing, playing in the sand. There he is: hers. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine his skin against mine, his hair, his breath. He was to be the son my husband always wanted, his bug-catching buddy and fishing partner. For me, he was the child cuddled close to me on my chest, the one I couldn&amp;#039;t carry in my belly, the one that neither nature nor science could help us create. I breathed deeply, ushering into me every dream I once held for this boy, for the life we would have given to him, for the joy he would have given to us. We&amp;#039;d been trying to conceive for five years when the adoption lawyer we finally decided to hire gave us a phone number for Marla, seven months pregnant in a faraway state. When we spoke, Marla was clear: She had many hopeful parents to choose from. Still, she told us, we possessed &amp;quot;the cool factor.&amp;quot; We seemed like &amp;quot;a lot of fun.&amp;quot; Indeed, we looked exactly as we had intended to look when we crafted our family album months before\u2014a portfolio of our lives for potential birth mothers to look through. We&amp;#039;d carefully chosen the photographs: Steve&amp;#039;s daughters from his first marriage riding camels in Egypt, Steve and I atop elephants in Thailand, and the whole family cruising in Alaska. Friends wondered why we didn&amp;#039;t paint a homier portrait of ourselves. But we are travelers and adventurers; for us, offering a child a great home was a given. We wanted to show these women that their child would also have an interesting life. Over the next few weeks, Marla and I spoke often, answering questions about each other, trying to bond. I learned that she wasn&amp;#039;t new to motherhood\u2014she had another boy, nearly grown, from a previous relationship. She loved him very much, and her unborn son, too, but told me that her boyfriend didn&amp;#039;t feel that fatherhood suited his lifestyle. I assured her that, yes, we would start a college fund. Yes, we would store his cord blood. And, yes, we would mind the baby gates when he got big enough to figure out how to unlatch them. Eventually, after speaking to me a dozen times, and to Steve, and even to his girls, Marla decided we would make the best parents for her unborn baby. &amp;quot;I know you will love him like your own,&amp;quot; she said again and again. Probably we should have waited for our attorney to send Marla&amp;#039;s pictures and medical reports before making our decision. But we didn&amp;#039;t think of ourselves as having any say. We&amp;#039;d failed seven IVFs and lost one pregnancy; choice, or any sense of control whatsoever, were luxuries no longer available to us. We booked a flight out to meet her. Then the photos arrived. We were amazed. Marla and her boyfriend looked like they&amp;#039;d fit right in with Steve&amp;#039;s family or mine. We looked not like each other, but of each other. Then we took in the images of Marla&amp;#039;s teenage son. He didn&amp;#039;t appear well. In a posed high school photo, his face was pasty, his eyes encircled with black rings, his neck glistening with sweat. Marla had mentioned that he&amp;#039;d had some health issues when he was younger, among them a bone disorder that meant that even a minor playground tumble could leave him with broken bones. He also had a condition that made him sweat even when sitting down, which she blamed on his father, long gone. But after reading her self-disclosed medical forms that had arrived with the photos, I started to wonder. Marla had used amphetamines daily until she learned she was pregnant, early in her second trimester. She also smoked pot. Every day. Still. Could her son&amp;#039;s health problems be traced to drug use? Could the new baby carry the same toxic burden? Our flight was in three days. I scoured the Internet for anything I could learn about heavy drug use during pregnancy. The possibilities were vast: premature delivery, birth defects, stunted fetal growth, respiratory problems, failure to thrive. And later on: developmental delays, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems, learning disabilities\u2014things that could strike any kid, but were more likely for this boy because his mother used drugs. Or: He could be just fine. Medical research is part of my business as a reporter, so I called every doctor I knew and many I didn&amp;#039;t\u2014pediatric endocrinologists, developmental pediatricians, forensic psychiatrists. I wanted someone to assure me that this child had a greater likelihood than not of being okay. No one could.  None of what I learned was life-threatening; all of it was life-altering. Maybe not for every family, but certainly for ours. &amp;quot;What does your life look like?&amp;quot; one pediatrician asked. &amp;quot;Does it have room for a child with special needs?&amp;quot; Every other weekend we drove two hours to another state to see Steve&amp;#039;s daughters, barely teenagers. It had taken\u2014it was still taking\u2014a long time to bond, to create a family with them. We connected through bicycle riding, hiking, tennis, moving. It was our way of being when talking felt forced and awkward. How would we introduce a sick child into this delicate mix? Already Steve was a reluctant second-round dad; he didn&amp;#039;t want a child with me if it took away from the children he already had. I knew Marla&amp;#039;s child could do that. But the possibility of having a son had gotten to Steve. &amp;quot;Is there some way we can see ourselves around this?&amp;quot; he asked, his blue eyes wet. We dizzied ourselves playing the &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; game: if the girls lived closer, if my parents weren&amp;#039;t elderly and his didn&amp;#039;t live so far away, and, especially, if only Marla had not used drugs during pregnancy. Had we naturally borne a child with special needs, we would have devoted ourselves to helping him manage in this world. But there&amp;#039;s a difference between accepting the troubles life hands you and openly courting them. For the first time, I was the one saying no. Of all the possibilities for failure I had imagined, this was never one of them. Our attorney offered to deliver the news to Marla, but we felt we owed it to her to tell her ourselves. &amp;quot;Heavy drug use during pregnancy can cause problems in children that our family can&amp;#039;t knowingly afford to take on right now,&amp;quot; Steve told her over the phone, slowly, measuring small spaces between each word; it&amp;#039;s how he speaks when he&amp;#039;s trying not to completely lose it. &amp;quot;Fine,&amp;quot; Marla said to Steve, curtly. &amp;quot;I thought you were cooler than that. I was wrong.&amp;quot; She hung up. Steve held the phone in his hand until the recording came on, instructing him that if he wanted to make another call, he should hang up. When he did, he lay down on the rug next to me. Both of us had tried to remain unattached to Marla, to this child. We had failed. Fingers intertwined, we stared at the ceiling. For one hour. Two. We didn&amp;#039;t speak. We couldn&amp;#039;t. Several years earlier, we&amp;#039;d lost a child early in the only pregnancy we&amp;#039;d had. I&amp;#039;d never felt pain like that. Chronic. Impaling. Ambiguous, because it was nothing, a child neither held nor kissed. But it was a child we loved, however unformed it was. Turning down Marla&amp;#039;s baby felt like that. It felt like a miscarriage. For days I thought about Marla and how she must feel. I couldn&amp;#039;t imagine anything more cruel than what Steve and I had done, rejecting her child before he was even born. A week later our lawyer introduced us to another birth mother, the one whose baby would eventually be ours. I still thought about Marla a lot. I worried about what would become of her, and of her son. Our daughter was 3 months old when I next heard from Marla. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry,&amp;quot; she wrote, nearly a year after Steve&amp;#039;s final phone call. &amp;quot;It was wrong of me not to be up-front with you from the get-go.&amp;quot; Marla was now in Narcotics Anonymous. She was clean, and had reached the step where you try to make amends. Marla had decided to keep her son. She had given birth five weeks early. He weighed 4 pounds. I shuddered when I thought of what that birth could have done to my family. Steve and I would have gotten to the hospital after he was born\u2014unlike with our daughter, for whom we were present the very moment she entered the world. Steve would have stayed a few days, but then he would have had to leave\u2014to go to work, to see his children\u2014and I would have been alone in the NICU for weeks, caring for our preemie far from anyone I knew. Marla&amp;#039;s boyfriend had changed his mind and stepped up for fatherhood. She was thankful they were all together, and that she hadn&amp;#039;t given her child to strangers. Otherwise, she wrote, &amp;quot;I probably would have become very depressed, and probably started doing more drugs than I ever did before.&amp;quot; For a while, Marla and I were two moms emailing back and forth about their kids. She bent sideways over backward to assure me that despite her drug use, her son was just fine\u2014even though I never asked her to explain or defend herself. She mentioned that her pediatrician had said her son was slow in reaching milestones, adding that she was looking for a new doctor. I prayed that Marla would listen to him and not leave, and I thought about saying something, but she had been so insistent that everything was fine, that drugs didn&amp;#039;t make a difference. Maybe she was right. I didn&amp;#039;t know where my responsibility began or ended, and hearing from her reminded me of so many things I wanted to leave behind: the failed IVF cycles, the miscarriage, and the hollow, haunting feeling I will always carry for the baby I turned away. Keeping up with her became unbearable. A year or so later, her Facebook request came in. On her pages, there were older pictures of her pregnant, her eyes glassy, her skin mottled and shiny. Below, a caption bluntly acknowledged that she was on drugs then. There were also more recent ones celebrating her new clean and sober life: Posing with her sons, her eyes were clear, her smile wide. I felt relieved and grateful. She was okay, I decided. I could leave. I clicked &amp;quot;Ignore.&amp;quot; *Name has been changed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/advice/a16170/cancelled-adoption/>