Chapters: A True Story of Life, Loss and Love.

By Dianna Hubbard Stein

Dianna and Steve were roaring through life, in love, happy, and intent on having a family along the way. The story that unfolds and changes their lives forever, seemingly by chance, is a reminder to us all that amazing things can happen if you listen to your heart. The joy of finally finding their son, the complex emotions of adoptive parents and birth families, and the deep sorrow of the blows that stole their happiness can be understood by each and every person who has loved and lost, as can the belief that happiness is cyclical, as is life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504955355

Dianna Hubbard Stein

The author, Dianna Hubbard Stein, is enjoying a break from her decades-long career as a court reporter and business owner. Her unique life experiences about believing in results if you take the first steps, no matter how difficult, are reflected in her book about adoption, parenthood, and death, a raw and brutally honest account of the joys and sorrows of life. She has spent the last two decades raising her son, Zachary Joseph Hubbard. She is now “babysitting” his German shepherd dog while he explores the world. In her spare time she also enjoys road cycling and golfing. She and her husband Jim live in Northern California.

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Dianna Hubbard Stein. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/21/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5536-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5535-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Chapter 1

~ 1 ~

We jokingly called it The first baby born wins! It had been a long journey, but my husband, Steve, and I, after having tried just about everything to get pregnant, including fertility drugs, in vitro fertilization, and artificial insemination, had decided to see an attorney about private adoption.

Our path to the decision had been a little hit and miss. I am a court reporter, and one day I was setting up my equipment to take a deposition of a local contractor in a land litigation case. The witness came in about fifteen minutes late and was animatedly explaining that he and his wife had just adopted a beautiful baby boy. In his jubilant explanation of his new happiness, he shared with us that they had suffered a fetal death during pregnancy and made numerous attempts to get pregnant. He described their decision to adopt, including the name of their attorneys and the city where the attorneys were located. I didn’t participate in the conversation but was overwhelmed by the joy and relief he felt that morning.

That night, as Steve and I sat at our bar in our old ranch-style house with a beautiful view of the Sierras, I was just done with trying to get pregnant. All I really wanted was a family! I told Steve the story of the local contractor. We looked up the attorney’s name, and the next day I called and made an appointment.

In January 1993, we met with the Gradsteins in Burlingame, California. They were a husband-and-wife team who specialized in private adoption. They had adopted their son and were absolutely positive that we would have a child within a year. Our job was to send out letters with our bio to as many leads as we could to increase that possibility.

Steve and I went home and dutifully wrote our letter introducing ourselves. We bought a tripod to take the perfect picture of us, since we had not shared our decision to go the adoption route with anyone. We sent the package off to the Gradsteins and then sat back and waited for the expected phone call saying that we were going to be parents in no time.

After a couple of months with no magical phone call, we decided we should do our homework. This was the pre-Internet era, so we called a mailing list company who sold us a list of two thousand doctors, abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood facilities, and counseling centers located in the forty-eight contiguous United States. Steve diligently set up shop at our dining room table and stuffed two hundred letters every afternoon after he got home from a day of teaching high school PE. Then he would stamp them and take them to our local post office, where he would slip them in the out box every evening. After twelve hundred were completed and sent out, we felt that we had done our duty and wondered what the massive mailing would produce.

It seems odd, thinking back from the cell phone/Internet age, but in 1993 we relied on the home phone and an answering machine for communication. We were instructed to add to our voice message that we accepted all collect calls. This was so if a potential birth mother wanted to contact us, she could call the operator with our number, and the operator, after hearing our recording, would allow her to leave a message. We were diligently doing our part in the adoption process while assuming that our attorneys would be calling us any day with exciting news of a baby on the way.

The first time I checked our messages and actually heard the voice of a birth mother leaving her name and number and describing a bit of her circumstances, I was stunned beyond words. I took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and returned the call to a town I had never heard of in Arizona. When she answered, I plunged into a new world. She shared with me her situation, I told her more about Steve and me, and she agreed to send pictures of herself and to call me back.

The Gradsteins’ strict instructions were to always return a phone call. Finding birth mothers was hard. Any lead was a possibility of answering a prayer for a future family. Even if it didn’t work out for Steve and me, a phone call could possibly end up in adoption for another couple. When I came home from work each day, I would quickly head back to my office to see if the light was blinking on the answering machine. Apparently, sending twelve hundred letters to forty-eight different states was working. I’d listen to the voice mail and then yell out to Steve, Texas! or Florida! or Michigan! or North Dakota!

Our attorneys were amazed. We returned each call and then passed the information on to them to follow up on the leads and to help these women try to make a decision.

One day, we got a call from Mark Gradstein. He had received a call from a couple in Minnesota who had gotten our letter from their doctor during a consultation about her pregnancy. This was a unique situation, Mark told us. The couple was married, but they both were young. When she found out she was pregnant, the wife was adamant that they should give the baby up for adoption. Her parents had been young when they had children; things did not work out with them, and she had no intention of making the same mistake. Her husband was supportive but not sure he would be able to give up their baby after it was born.

After many phone calls and an exchange of letters and pictures, we all felt like it was going to happen. We started the legal process of adopting a child from another state.

The Gradsteins had worked with another adoptive family who lived near our town and had recently adopted their child from Minnesota. They gave me the wife’s information so I could contact her. When I called Diana, there was a screaming child in the background. I yearned for that situation so much! She calmed my nerves and told me her story, and again my world changed forever. She would become a lifelong friend, along with a few other adoptive moms, once our journey began its second chapter.

Our first contact with the Gradsteins had been in late January. It was now June, and we were coming closer and closer to the arrival date of our potential new child in July. We spoke often to the parents, and we got to know one another while we waited for the birth. We still had not shared our journey with anyone—family or friends—except my sister, Mindy. She would sit at the kitchen table, help stuff envelopes, and listen to our latest updates. We were not ready to share our journey with anyone else at the time. Our life was full. We had great friends and plenty of activities, and we did not want our adoption experience, whatever might happen along the way, to become someone else’s casual conversation. Honestly, I think we just felt very vulnerable and did not want anyone’s sympathy or judgment thrown into our world.

We got a phone call when the birth mother from Minnesota went into labor. The next phone call we received would either be to confirm the adoption or say that they could not go through with the decision.

Neither Steve nor I was surprised the next morning when we got a call from the father saying that he just could not hand over his newborn son. Our first feeling was disappointment. We were pretty weathered by now after numerous failed attempts at getting pregnant and all of the different procedures we had tried, so we took the news in stride and continued to live our lives. The parents from Minnesota were so happy that they had kept their son that they sent us pictures of him for years afterward, along with the second child they had conceived. This was not meant to be our adoption story, but it gave us an idea of the emotional ups and downs we would experience in the upcoming months.

Steve and I lived on three acres in a rambling sixties-style ranch house perched on a bluff with a million-dollar view, as our friends often said. Indeed, that was the reason we had bought the house five years earlier. We had walked in, fallen in love, and made it our home. Over the years, it was a popular gathering spot for family and friends. We were constantly painting, repairing, improving, planting, and planning new projects. We always seemed to have plenty of free labor, and impromptu fishing trips to the river nearby or evening barbeques were the reward after a busy home-improvement day. We were a lucky couple. We just knew there was one little piece missing from our lives.

In August, we received another phone call from Mark Gradstein. He had just spoken to a family in South Dakota who had received a copy of our adoption letter. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant. She was a star basketball player, and her boyfriend was the high-school quarterback. They both had bright futures ahead of them, and adoption was the decision the families had come to. It was a done deal.

Steve was a golf, football, and track coach as well as a PE teacher, and I was very athletic. It was a perfect match. We spoke to the family,