It's A Roller Coaster

Clark and I are learning that the adoption journey is much like

a roller coaster ride.

Sometimes we're up and sometimes (mostly) we're down. We hear about a potential birth mother or a birth mother tentatively chooses us and we're climbing

up, up, up

with happy and hopeful feelings. And then when it all falls apart

the ride takes us back down to the bottom.

It isn't fun at the bottom. It's a sad place to be. But we hold onto each other a little tighter, keep hold of our faith, pray and trust that sooner or later everything will be okay.

This week we've been on the

adoption roller coaster again.
On Monday we received an email from a potential birth mother expressing interest in placing her baby girl with us. She found us on the LDS Family Services website and her e-mail came via that system. Upon discovering her e-mail, my first reaction was excitement and gratitude that someone found our profile and liked us.

I was starting back up the roller coaster.

But very quickly came the feeling that something wasn't quite right about this letter. As I reread it and studied it, I began to realize what it was about it that wasn't "right". In fact, there were several things that were odd. I will not say what those specific things were on this blog because our blog is open to anyone on the internet. There are adoption scammers out there who may read this, including the person who tried to defraud us. I don't want to say anything that would help an adoption scam artist perfect their craft. So I'll just simply say that there were some specific little things my "motherly instincts" found to be not quite right.

With what little information I had, I did some googling and other investigating. What I discovered was most disturbing! When Clark came home I showed him the e-mail and shared with him my findings and suspicions. He even found a couple more things I had missed.

But there was still the possibility that we were being overly skeptical and that the information we had found was completely unrelated to this birth mother. So we decided to give the benefit of the doubt and send a carefully worded reply. But apparently LDS Family Services was also doing some investigating. The next day we were notified that this person was indeed a fraudulent business person operating overseas. (I keep saying "person" because I am not convinced this person is even a woman.) As you can imagine, we are grateful to be working with a reputable and thorough adoption agency.

Yes, adoption fraud does happen. We have heard of couples who have been cheated out of thousands of dollars. Thankfully for us we were not victimized. But it is still hard.

Although we may be on

the downward slope of the roller coaster again,

we're not all together down.

We are so grateful for daily family prayer and scripture study...even though our family is

just the two of us for now.

Family prayer and scripture study is what binds us together, fortifies us against the evils of this world, and strengthens us as we pick ourselves up and move forward with faith. There are blessings even in the midst of trials.