To our son, the boy who was born with no name.
No child deserves to live the first year of life without a name. And yet, that is how your story began. With nothing to identify you. We are not sure why your birth mother did not name you. Perhaps she was trying to distance her heart, not wanting to become too attached to the baby she knew she would not keep. Or maybe she understood what a great honor it is to name a child, and was saving that as a gift for us, the ones who would adopt you.
Whatever her reasons, she could not have possibly foreseen that the adoption process would take so long. That for nearly a year, “Baby Boy” was officially recorded on your birth certificate, social security card, and medical insurance card. Every time I took you to the pediatrician, the nurse would open the door to the lobby, look around at the parents and children waiting there, and call out, loud enough for everyone to hear: Baby Boy? Sure, those two little words were benign, seemingly harmless by themselves. But the message they communicated? You do not belong to a family. You are not significant enough to have a name. You are indistinguishable from every other orphaned child in the world. Unnamed. Unwanted. Unimportant.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have been further from the truth! When that happened, I wanted to hold you close and protect you from those words and everything they meant. I wanted to announce to everyone in that waiting room that you do have a name. That you are wanted. Chosen. Loved. It’s just that we were waiting for the legal system to catch up to what we already knew with certainty: that you were our son.
