Parenting a child with ones heart, soul, and spirit is the most beautiful life journey a person can ever undertake. When little girls and prospective mothers fantasize about motherhood, many envelope themselves in thoughts of cradling an infant, delighting in the innocent sounds, scents, and images of tender breathing, soft skin, and the oneness of the infants dependence. Beginning when I was nine years old, my fantasy was quite different.

I envisioned myself as an adult with two beloved nine-year-old children who had not been born to me, but whom I had adopted. When the Cabbage Patch Kid craze hit in the early 1980s, with its emphasis on adoption certificates and older-looking dolls, my fantasy was given hope and validation. At 12, I devoured the TV sitcom, Diffrent Strokes, the story of a Caucasian Park Avenue tycoon who adopted two African American boys from Harlem.

In my teens I was fascinated by a magazine article about an exceptional family who had adopted more than ten severely disabled children, one of which was born without a cerebrum, arms, or legs. Although I lit up when I held infants, my mothering fantasies throughout my adolescence and my 20s reveled in the wonder of parenting older children who were in need of a loving mother.

As a young adult, I embarked on a journey of working with traumatized children and adolescents in various child care and professional capacities, also researching and studying the effects of child trauma on physical, emotional, and cognitive development; and researching and studying attachment parenting, unschooling, child development, and the severe psychological and attachment difficulties of adoptive children. During that time, my life was blessed with a precious nephew I took care of regularly. When I turned 30, my desire to adopt a child was all-consuming. I was ready to allow my heart to seek the child whose heart was also searching for mine; the child who would become my son.

I knew from my professional work in the foster care and mental health system that children aged 7 to 18 are the ones who languish in foster care and group homes waiting for what are called forever families. As these wards of the state grow older with each passing year, they also grow more depressed, rageful, attachment-deprived, and despairing, and the less likely it is that adoptive families will choose or commit to these older, more damaged children. Boys, teenagers, and African Americans are the children who are least likely to find loving, permanent adoptive homes.

In some cases, state agencies will brand teenage boys "unadoptable" and push them onto what is called the Independent Living track as early as 15 years old. Keeping in mind that I wanted there to be an adequate generational difference between me and a child I would adopt, I knew I had the skill and the spiritual desire to adopt a child deemed "difficult to adopt" and my heart sought a boy between the ages of 10 and 13. Within two months of serious networking, unexpected turns, and uncanny synchronicity, I found him! Little did I know that this exceptional, creative, resilient ten-year-old boy had decided that year to give up hope if Santa Claus failed to grant his wish upon a star for a forever family that winter.