He Called Me Dad

[Rico]

Gang, I have some very exciting news to share with you. As some of you may already know, my wife and I made a baby boy who was born in 1988. Due to the circumstances at the time, he was adopted out to a couple who had tried for 10 years to conceive and were unsuccessful. Over the years, I have tracked the family down, but never attempted to make contact with them. I promised the family I would not interfere and they promised me he would grow up knowing the circumstances around his adoption.

Well, this child of ours is now 19 years old and I thought I would try tracking the family down again. I searched public records, court records, and finally paid a service to give me whatever contact information they had on them. I got the courage up to try the phone numbers I had been given, and I made contact with the family today! In fact, I just got off the phone with them!

His adoptive mother and I spoke on the phone for about an hour. It turns out our son is very borderline retarded. I was shocked to hear this because none of our other children are retarded. They don't know what caused him to be retarded, but we think it may be because he got stuck in the birth canal during delivery and this may have caused him to go without oxygen. He didn't start showing any real symptoms until around the 5th grade, however. His mom says you would not guess he has any issues by looking at him and his handicap is very borderline.

We originally decided she would talk with him about speaking with us, even though she was confident that he would want to talk with us. Within five minutes of us ending our call, she called right back with him on the phone!

Y'all have no idea how nervous I was. It takes a lot to get my nerves rattled, but I was literally shaking. We got the whole family around our phone, put it on speaker, and proceeded to introduce ourselves to him. He does have a slight speech impediment, but he was very excited to talk with his sisters (our son is at a friend's house right now), and he especially wanted to talk with me and my wife.

I couldn't help but tell him that I loved him and missed him and have thought about him so much over the years. He told me he loves me too and called me Dad. We all started crying at that point. Isn't God good? For the first time since I left, I wish I still lived in California.

Anyway, our house is unusually quiet right now. Everyone is off somewhere thinking about the missing member of our family. I don't know what God has planned through all of this, but I want to publicly thank Him for answering a long standing prayer I've had on His desk. I found my son, and he called me Dad.