50 Most Inspiring Adoption Stories with Beauty Revived: Part 21
Beauty Revived has joined with Adoption.com to bring you the 50 Most Inspiring Adoption Stories. We have found 50 amazing photographers with big hearts to donate a session to tell the story of an inspiring adoption story in their community. This is Beauty Revived: Part 21.
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Photography by Love is Love Photography Website
Jeremy and Beth enjoyed eight years kid free while trying to have children naturally, but pregnancy just didn’t happen for them. Adoption was always part of their family plan, but they thought it would happen second, not first.
In the spring of 2012, Beth happened to be chatting with a friend who nudged them in the “Hey, you might be running out of time to start a family” direction. That nudge was just enough of a push to turn their lowercase plan b into a bold uppercase capital A.
Everything clicked for the Dallas-Fort Worth area couple that it was the perfect time to pursue actively creating their forever family through the process of adoption.
Within one week of their monumental decision, they had placed several applications with various agencies and ended up matching with a mother in Atlanta, Georgia shortly after that.
After spending a ton of money and becoming emotionally connected with the expectant mom and her unborn son, Jeremy and Beth spent most of the summer and fall of 2012 recovering from a last-minute change of heart, when the expectant mom decided not to move forward with the adoption process after all. However, in December of 2012, Jeremy and Beth were emotionally ready to start the process again.
Each time the couple began their search they did not have any specifics in mind when it came to the age of the child they were looking to have placed in their home. Then one day the same friend who had nudged the couple into the process shared a link with Beth via Facebook about a five-year-old girl that an adoption agency was unable to place.
Beth’s friend explained this placement story had appeared in her newsfeed several times and asked if she and Jeremy would consider adopting this young girl.
The couple gave some serious thought to her story before moving forward with the adoption match. Unbeknownst to Beth, the first moment Jeremy laid eyes on Harper’s photo, his gut feeling was this little girl was supposed to be his daughter.
Little did they know that the Hallock family would grow from a two-person home into a four-person household in just under ten months.
At the beginning of 2013, they started the adoption process with an agency that worked with the Republic of Congo to bring Harper home when they received a call in February from their former caseworker in Georgia.
She explained the agency was unable to match one particular birth mom who was expecting a newborn in three months. The reason the mother was unable to match successfully with a family was due to the fact she was of 100% African descent from Sierra Leon.
Many of the families the caseworker spoke with had a major hang-up with specifically wanting an “African-American child.” The couples never connected the fact that even though the expectant mother was from Sierra Leon, the child would be born in America, thus making the baby 100% African American.
Those minor details did not matter to Jeremy and Beth. The expectant mother had a strong connection with the Hallock’s during their initial phone meeting, and they were quickly matched together.
The couple never imagined they would be adopting both Harper and Mya at the same time. Normally there are a few months of “breathing room” between a first and second adoption, but that was not the case for the Hallock’s, and that was the toughest part of starting their family.
Their timeline:
April 2013: Jeremy and Beth Travel to the Republic of Congo for two weeks, knowing that Mya will be born soon and want to make sure they spend as much one-on-one time with Harper as they possibly can before her sister’s birth.
May 2013: The couple travels to Atlanta, Georgia. Mya is born. The new family stays in Georgia for three months before they bring little Mya home to Texas.
August 2013: Jeremy and Beth travel back to the Republic of Congo to bring Harper home.
September 2013: the Hallock’s are now a forever family of four living in Texas. Both girls fell into their laps at the same time without any calculated planning.
Some people use Facebook to connect with old high school friends while others use it as a connection point for long-distance family members.
Harper and Mya will have a different conversation about how Facebook impacted their future when they get older. I suspect they will say, “If it were not for Facebook, we would have never found our forever family.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed this story for Beauty Revived: Part 21.
