On September 10, 2001, I was obsessed with the contents of a thick brown envelop. The stack of papers inside had taken more than six months to amass – birth certificates, marriage certificate, letters of recommendation, home study report, photos. Every scrap was notarized, and the notaries had been verified by the State of Texas and the whole packet bore the stamp of the Guatemalan Embassy in Houston.

That morning we were to take that envelop, along with a chubby brown baby, to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City as the last step in the adoption of our son. It had been the longest six and half months of my life, with the last three months the slowest and most painful leg of the journey.

In June 2001, we traveled to Guatemala City for the first time to meet our son, who was then three months old. His foster mother, our attorney and her sister, who served as an interpreter, brought him to our room at the Princess Hotel. Although it was 80 degrees outside, he was wrapped in a blanket and wore a Winnie the Pooh stocking cap, along with a heavy sweater and three layers of clothing. We stripped him down to his onesy the minute they left.

The Princess was one of three major hotels in the area serving adoptive families. You could spot us on the streets right away – white man and woman pushing a brown baby in an umbrella stroller. The Princess lent us the stroller and the pack-n-play our baby slept in. The waitresses at the hotel restaurant would smile and automatically take the baby from our tired arms so we could rest during meals. We got little sleep. We made bottles with powdered Similac and tap water from the hotel sink. To bathe, we held him like a slippery football in the green marble shower. By the end of our short visit, I felt as if I had become an expert at taking care of a strange baby in a foreign hotel room. And I was just starting to feel like his mama. But I had to give him back to his foster mom, crying all the way home and for months afterward.

On our second and final visit, Boy was six and a half months old. He had changed so much that I resented even more the time we’d spent apart, waiting for our paperwork to grind its way through two legal systems. On September 10, 2001, he would be ours.

Our interpreter and a driver collected us at the hotel and took us to the U.S. Embassy. But first, a quick stop to a van parked outside the government building. We ducked inside the van, sat the baby on a bench seat and snap, had his Passport photo taken.

The Embassy itself was much like a Social Security office or a DMV, only it was filled with white couples and brown babies. And the atmosphere was much happier. Everyone was smiling, relieved, joyful. Except for one woman – her attorney had just dropped off her new baby girl, and the baby was freaking out. The woman was just as distraught as the baby.
“That’s why we don’t do it that way,” our interpreter told us, pointing to our Boy, who was peacefully sleeping in the umbrella stroller.

When it was our turn, the Embassy representative asked us a few questions, shook our hands, gave us our baby’s Guatemalan Passport and a much thinner brown envelop to give to U.S. Customs, and that was that. We celebrated that night with two other adoptive families at the Princess. We called our babies the Three Amigos.

The next day, a Tuesday, we were packing to fly home when the phone rang. It was Dad. I only heard Bob’s end of the conversation: “Hey, how you… What? What? Christi, turn on CNN!”

We stood there and watched as the World Trade Center burned. Then a second plane hit.

We went to the airport anyway. No flights that day. Or the next day, or the next, or the next. The Embassy had also shut down. “Thank God we got our paperwork through,” became the mantra of the three families stuck at the Princess, waiting to fly home. We shared diapers, Similac and medicine – by then, all the babies had taken sick.

By Sunday we got a flight out, arriving at the ghostly Bush Intercontinental Airport. No one came to meet us because only passengers (those few souls brave enough to fly) were allowed inside the airport. We were greeted by men with machine guns – the same sight we gawked at in Guatemala City.