I’m trying my hardest to get through this pain. I wish it would all just go away. All the hurt. All the anxiety. All the heartbreak I feel about the absence of my niece.

I think the only thing worse than my pain is having to see the people I love the most, hurt so deeply, so often, so much that getting through each day is still a struggle almost 9 years later.

No matter how long it’s been, I still cannot accept that this has happened to us. How can such a devastating thing be true? How could someone we trusted do such a thing to us?

I know that God will bring my niece home, that she will long for us as much as we long for her.

No amount of paperwork changes the fact that my niece is our blood, the stories of our family are the stories of her life.  The people we’re related to, she’s related to. We look alike, we sound alike. Every child wants to know where they come from, where they belong…who they belong to.

She was given to us and our family by God, snatched away and sold by Letty to a desperate, infertile couple that stopped at nothing to get “their baby.” They went as far as to take advantage of a young and vulnerable girl, knowing that it was not the fact she didn’t want her child, it was the fact that she was terrified to tell her family, like most teenage girls are. She couldn’t even bear to tell me, her sister, the closest person to her. She didn’t know how, so fragile, so emotional, so alone during her pregnancy.

The weight of the secret she carried and the distress she was under = extreme duress = a fast, immoral adoption with a million red flags attached.

Had this been my sister’s choice, our family could do nothing but accept it. Even if we hated it, we would have had to respect her decision.

But when the answer to every question is “LETTY”, you would have to be taking crazy pills to not see that SHE was clearly the one in the driver’s seat of this adoption.

This was ALL Letty’s doing. Her “help”, that no one asked her for has ruined our lives.

It has forever broken my sister, ruined the chance of my niece being with her real and natural mother which I’m sure has broken her little heart as well, it has torn me apart and has changed me and my life completely, it has ended two marriages because of the enormous strain of going through a crisis of such magnitude, it has broken the hearts of my children who long for their first cousin, it has ripped our family apart. Letty has disrupted God’s plan for Julia Grace to be given to Serena.

All so Letty’s friend’s could play house. I have nothing against adoptions done the right way. I believe that adoption is for children without homes, not homes without children. Letty did such a sneaky and conniving thing, all the while smiling, and the couple knowing full well what type of situation this was. A young girl who didn’t know how to tell her family, who felt she had no one to turn to. Promised the world, took her baby, and left her in emotional turmoil and debt.

Thinking about my baby sister having to go through such a scary thing, and what these people did to her, is too much for me to bear.

Someday I will be able to tell my niece face to face, everything that happened, someday she will read this journal, someday she will know the truth behind her adoption. That it wasn’t meant to be. It isn’t what my sister wanted. It isn’t what any of us wanted, and we never gave up or forgot her….