Tax Attorney Columbus Ohio

I did not want them to be the parents of my son. I wanted my boyfriend and I to be his parents. We WERE his parents. The boyfriend and I left dinner that night, walking ahead of the lovely couple and my parents.
“We can call your lawyer and work out the rest of the details this week,” my mom cooed to the lovely wife.
“I guess we made our decision,” my boyfriend whispered. I was trapped.
I did call the lawyer, we did work out details. I cried myself to sleep every night for the next four months, staining my navy blue pillowcases. I wanted desperately to be a mother, not simply a baby machine for such a lovely couple. The lovely wife, I learned one night after Lamaze class, was pregnant. Relief flooded my swelling body. ‘I can keep my baby!’ I silently rejoiced. ‘I have diapers to buy, clothes to wash, car seats to find, nursing bras and slings to sew!’
“We still want to adopt though. You know our history of miscarriage.”
‘Oh well. I guess I can’t keep my baby after all.’ I was deflated.
Sure enough, the lovely wife miscarried at 12 weeks. She called me nightly, crying and thanking me for giving her my son. I was, she told me, the only thing that kept her from giving up on life. My son and me. “OUR baby” became his name while she talked to me on the phone. She gave me weekly reports of how the nursery was coming along (complete with a 2,000 dollar classic Pooh mural, which I am sure would make a world of difference to a newborn), the hundreds of dollars they were spending on clothes, how excited their family was, and how much they loved “our baby” already. The hole got deeper. I couldn’t crawl, scratch or shovel my way out. By law in California, birth mothers must meet with an ‘adoption facilitator.’ This mediator ‘counsels’ you and explains the process of adoption too you. I repeatedly told her,over the course of two months “Lisa, I don’t want to do this! I want my baby!”
“Well, I want to take a cruise to the Bahamas. But if I took a cruise to the Bahamas, I wouldn’t have money left for rent or food. Sometimes what we want isn’t what is best.”
Oh, yes, babies and cruises are so similar! How could I have been so blind? I later learned that adoption facilitators, while required by the state, are not employed by the state. Prospective adoptive parents employ adoption facilitators. At the time, I wasn’t aware of this. I believed this woman. I was selfish to want to raise my son. How could I be so selfish? (She did use the word “selfish”). Pregnant teens are garbage. Once the baby is born, the mother becomes even smellier garbage, dependent on her parents and society’s tax dollars to support her children. I had to do something to hoist my son above the metaphorical garbage bin. I had to give him to this lovely couple; they were not garbage, like I was.
I grew during those weeks, not only physically (60 pounds!) but emotionally and spiritually. I meditated, prayed, screamed, cried, slept, wrote, read and thought. I realized I was more capable than I was being led to believe. I made my decision, 38 weeks into my pregnancy. I informed my boyfriend of this decision. “I am keeping the baby. I don’t care what anyone says or feels. I WILL NOT lose my son. They want any baby, and I only want mine!” My boyfriend and I were going to tell my parents the next evening at dinner. I fell asleep quickly, not sobbing into my pillow like I had grown used to doing during those pain and growth-filled three months. I was keeping my baby.
I woke up to go to the bathroom that night at around 2 a.m. As I waddled to the bathroom, I looked down the hallway and saw my boyfriend typing away at the computer, talking to some stranger on the internet, like he usually did while staying the night. Then came the gush. “JOHN! MY WATER BROKE!” I panted, attempting to jog down the hallway. Then came the pain. “JOHN! I AM HAVING CONTRACTIONS ALREADY! It wasn’t like this in the Lamaze videos! The women in those never got contractions so fast- there must be something wrong with me! I gripped the edge of my kitchen counter, and watched the clock on the microwave. Six minutes apart, the orange numbers informed me. I stayed calm, just like I had planned. I packed my bag, brushed my teeth, wrote e-mails to all of my pregnant friends online, wrote in my journal and cried. I forced my mom to drive me to the hospital at 5:15 am. She didn’t believe I was really in labor, but still told me “OK, I will call the lovely couple and let them know to start driving down.” She said this in the middle of a contraction.
“NO! DON’T YOU PICK UP THAT #%@!ING PHONE! THIS IS MY BABY. GOT IT?”
She told me we would “Talk about it after the baby came.”
The baby came at 8:02 a.m., November 20, 1998. My labor was natural, painful, and beautiful. I held my tiny infant son in my shaking arms, tears running off of my face and on to his still purple hands. He was so much more than I could have dreamed, so much more than a fuzzy little worm ultrasound baby. He spent three