I’m Andy Miller and I’m from South Houston, Texas. My partner and I decided that we wanted to be parents. So after a lot of planning, a lot of research, and frankly just a lot of blind faith, we started on an adoption journey. We started working with an agency in Austin, Texas, where we live. It actually happened really fast for us. We matched to our son’s birth mother within probably a month of being with the agency. It was a bit of a whirlwind. We got a call on a Monday and said that someone wanted to speak with us and she was going to call us on Tuesday, she happened to just live in San Antonio, just down the street from where we lived, and we talked to her on Tuesday. On Wednesday we made a plan to drive down to San Antonio to meet her for dinner, meet her and her family. It went very well. By the time we got back to Austin we were told that she had picked us and then on Thursday we were invited to come back down because she was having a sonogram to figure out the sex of the child. So we said, “Yes, sure, of course we’ll come down.” And we drove down to San Antonio again and we found out we were having a little boy. We also found out she was very pregnant and in fact her doctor was saying they were going to perform a c-section on the following Thursday. So we had all of one week after finding out the sex of the child that we were going to be bringing a baby home. The following Thursday, we drove down to San Antonio, checked into a hotel, went to the hospital, our birth mother was wheeled into surgery, c-section was performed, our beautiful son was born. We went into our birth mother’s room after she was wheeled out of surgery, she was recovering. When they brought our son in, it was amazing to hold him for the first time to get to see her interact with him the first time. We went out to eat, went to grab something out of the hospital, and went over to a local mall that was near the hospital. And the strange thing was, there was just no cell service there so we were completely isolated. We ate, we talked, just decompressed a little bit. When we got back in range of cell service when we were walking back to the hotel, there were all these messages that popped up on our phone, and it was our son’s birth mother. And she was crying, and she said, “Where are you? I need to talk to you.” And we rushed back to the hospital and she starts telling us that one of the nurses that was assigned to her to come in and check all of her sutures started asking her a lot of questions, starting with, “Aren’t you the girl that’s giving your baby up for adoption?” which is a huge red flag for us. We went through adoption class and anyone who uses that term like “giving up a baby” is already coming to that conversation with some judgment. And she said, “Yeah, I’m having a baby and he’s going to be adopted.” “And you’re giving him to those two boys?” She said, “Yes.” And she said, “I don’t know how you’re going to do that. Aren’t you afraid he’s going to hate you for doing that?” And she said, “Well, that’s not really any of your business.” And the nurse just kept going on and on asking questions about, “Aren’t you afraid those boys are going to hurt that baby, aren’t you afraid that he’s not going to grow up and be normal?” And she got really upset so she just kind of shut down. We were very scared that we were going to fail to place, which is a common adoption term when the birth mother chooses not to place a child for adoption. Fortunately, everything else seemed to go okay. We did have a fairly smooth experience where our social worker came in, talked to our birth mother, and she asked her many times, “Are you sure you want to do this? You can back out at any time” giving her plenty of opportunities to evaluate her situation to make sure she was of a clear mind. We were not allowed to be in the room during that process. We were downstairs in the lobby talking about our hopes of what was going to happen, but trying to be very practical and steel ourselves for our social worker coming off the elevator and telling us she changed her mind. So we were sitting down there with my mother and being very calm, trying our best, and when our social worker came off the elevator and just kind of flashed us a thumbs up, all three of us just kind of broke down in tears at that point. We left the hospital completely freaked out because they just gave these two boys a baby, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. But one of the best pieces of advice my mother gave me before she left was, “Just pay attention. Listen to the baby. He will tell you what he needs. If he’s hungry, he’ll tell you. If he needs to be changed, he’ll tell you. Not in words, but if you’re paying attention you’ll figure it out.” No one’s given an easy ride when a child enters the world. There’s always two things that happen: Money exchanges hands and there is pain. It’s just a question of how those two things happen. And for the LGBT community, a lot of times the way it happens for us is, money exchanges hands between the adoption agency and prospective parents. And the pain is oftentimes emotional. It’s not physical pain that comes with the birth. But we’re all kind of more alike than different in that regard.