I understand my son’s adoptive parents were desperate for a baby. Any baby.

As a soon-to-be mommy, I have a thing for redheads. And so I quickly identified a hopeful adoptive father, with red hair.

He had a wife attached to him. Okay. Good.

It was the father’s 5-yeat-old, natural son caught and held my attention. What a radiant little boy he was, smiling, with brown eyes that peeked out at me from amid a big pile of autumn leaves.

Pleased, I next applied the question of Ideals. Very important: Did both parents have their post secondary degree? Check. Can both parents raise a happy and healthy boy? Clearly, as I am looking at one. As a bonus, the redheaded father had relevant experience with Adoption, and could therefore raise my son with specially attuned empathy.

So I reached out. And the family and I got together, all pins and needles, for a meal at Chili’s.

For our second date, they brought their son, which bothered me. For you see, I was very pregnant and uncertain about our adult business affair.

This child’s presence added pressure, prematurely.

Yet I reasoned that I could not expose the boy to my big belly, nor expose him to my tender, budding trust, if only to later reject the family.

Under undue pressure, I proceeded forward.

The adoptive parents should have respectfully enlisted my emotions, and respectfully built my trust.

Too late, I learnt they had waved a red flag.