The Dress

Several weeks ago I took my wedding dress out of the laundry room in order to move it to the attic above our garage. Well, actually I wanted to donate it to Brides Against Breast Cancer because several weeks ago we had very solid plans to have Two Boys. When we went through our first adoption process we had a referral for two children…a boy and a girl.

When I saw both their pictures I fell in love with AJ. He had this quirky little smile and he was drumming his fingers on the table. Our representative told us that she loved his character and he looked so similar to my brother.

I did not connect with the girl. And, apparently fate stepped in because she was not meant to be our daughter. Fate played us a good hand because with all of the troubles we had with AJ we could never have handled another child.

Now that we have just been diverted down another path in our journey it seems that fate has stepped in again. We chose to adopt a boy from Guatemala because we thought a boy would do better with AJ…would give him more companionship, would push him developmentally a little more than a girl would. But now I feel like we are really meant to have a daughter. I constantly come back to the quote I wrote some weeks ago when a reader came across my other site. “Sometimes its not the child we carry that belongs to us but the child we have in our hearts.”

And I think of that dress. Why did my husband stop me from donating it when I was so set on doing something with it…something other than save it for two boys who would never have any use for it? Why did I save it in the first place…cleaning it and sealing it when I knew that any daughter of mine would probably never fit into a size 4 wedding gown that actually had to be taken in days before the wedding. Why do I, every once in a while, open the box and look through the window at the tiny pearl beads?

I’m not sure but I do know this.

I know that now that I have the opportunity for a girl my heart secretly aches to hold a little girl in my arms and even if she never wears that dress I can’t wait to see her walk down that aisle with the same man I did.