Mom At Last – by Sharon Simons (an excerpt)

Mom at Last: How I Never Gave Up On Becoming a Mother

Motherhood is not for the faint of heart. No one knows this better than author, website founder and entrepreneur Sharon Simons. After meeting the love of her life, they struggled to become parents. But three failed IVF procedures, a tubal pregnancy, and a heartbreaking miscarriage of twins only made Sharon more determined than ever to become a mother. Turning to adoption, the Simons’ began the long, often confusing, frustrating, bureaucratic process. Working with an agency, Sharon and her husband opted for a foreign adoption, requiring them to travel to Siberia.

An excerpt from the book:

Mom at Last: How I Never Gave Up On Becoming a Mother Written by Sharon Simons, The Founder of Mom at Last

The baby house hasn’t seen new paint in decades. That’s what they call it, the baby house…is concrete block covered in dirty stucco and the facade has a slightly depressing rhythm to it: stucco and window and patches of exposed concrete repeated in long horizontal bands across the front of the building. It doesn’t look anything like a house for babies, wanted or otherwise.

The air inside our car is heavy and smells of cigarettes, sausage, and mayonnaise. We sit there at the edge of a dirt parking lot for a long moment and stare out the window. By “we” I mean my husband, Rick,and me in the back seat, and in the front, our interpreter in her punkish ballcap and a bulky Russian driver. Outside, the sky is not entirely gray blue, but strangely the same gray-blue of the baby house. As I sit here staring out the window, what strikes me, other than the bleakness of the place, is that there isn’t a baby, a child, or a wayward teen in sight.

…
But it’s time to enter the baby house and see our real flesh and blood boys for the first time.
“This is it,” Rick says. “Here we go.”
I look at him and smile because that’s what I do, a woman who hankers for the bright side of things, the good and the positive. If I have to, I’m perfectly willing to put on blinders and blot out all the ugliness in the world, if it helps me get what I want. And right now I want inside the baby house.
I reach for the door handle and this little gesture sets everyone in motion. We crawl out of the minivan and I take a deep breath and grip the two little brown teddy bears we brought with us. Rick holds a bag of baby clothing and a few other items and hustles us inside. The lobby of the baby house is a spiritless dump, describing it as “cozy” or even “welcoming,” would be a blatant lie. Again, no babies. I learn later that we are not allowed to see any of the other orphans and thus they are hidden conveniently out of sight. I want nothing so much as to hold my baby boys, precious little Siberian tikes I have only glimpsed in photos thirty-five days ago. In one photo Dmitry is dressed in a pink jumpsuit and he stares up at the camera, frowning, his mouth slightly open, ready to say something quirky or maybe angry. Sergey is dressed in a black and yellow bumblebee outfit, arms in the air, and he has this loving, needy look in his eye.

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