When you lose someone, they take a small piece of your heart with them. But in my families case Mila took most of my parents heart with her.

My family has been doing foster care and adoption since 2011, and since then we have adopted 4 kids. Cami was our first, Keigan ( Cami’s brother ) was our second, Gavin was third and, Kye was our fourth. But between Gavin and Kye was Mila. My mom and dad went and picked Mila up from the hospital 3 days after she was born, so it was basically like my mom had her. There was no difference between her and my other siblings that my mom gave birth to. She was there everyday, everynight, and every meal.

I feed her, I held her when she cried, and I rocked her to sleep. Mila lived with us for almost 1 year. We were told that there is about a 80% chance that we were going to adopt her before christmas of that year.( It was march at that time.) About a week before her 1st birthday we got a call from the agency, we expected it to say that permanent custody was approved and a court case was being set up for the adoption. But instead it said that she was going to live with her aunt in 3 days.

I remember coming home that night after school and my mom and dad telling me that she was going home. For the rest of that night my mom and dad just cried. I had never seen my dad cry before so seeing him cry just added another level of emotion. The last few days with her we couldn’t even enjoy because all we could do was cry. We would all sit around her on the carpet and cry. Nobody knew what to do, there was nothing we could do to stop it from happening. That was it she was going home and they didn’t even have a good reason why. The morning that she left was the worst morning of my life. My mom and dad both stayed up all night just holding her and rocking her, they wouldn’t put her down in her bed. The agency showed up to our house at 9:00 a.m and was gone before 9:10 a.m. That was it, she was gone. And if I thought that, that morning was the worst ever the following days just got worse.

My mom would just sit in her room and cry and my dad tried to avoid everyone because he didn’t want anyone to see him cry. I was left to take care of the rest of my 6 siblings while I was crying. There was nothing I could do to help my mom or dad and there was nothing anyone else could do. But the worse part of the whole situation was the fact that Mila was still out there. She was going to grow up not even knowing any of my family. Her aunt wanted no contact with us at all. So she is going to live her life not having any clue that she has this whole family that took care of her for the first year of her life, the most important year of her life. She means so much to me and my family but she doesn’t even know we exist.

She is probably going to have to go through some things in life that if she stayed with us she wouldn’t have had to go through. We aren’t able to give her the life that she deserves instead she has to go through all these hardships and things because she now lives with her aunt. She is out there somewhere living her life, while me and my family is here not completely living ours because we miss her so much. But as the years go on here aunt may decide to let us see her or tell her about us. Maybe when she is old enough she will want to know us , but until then all we can do is wait for her.