I miss my niece all year, but around her birthday the cut gets a little deeper. This year was no exception.

Our hands have been so tied for six years, there’s nothing we can do.

Lawyers don’t call us back because they don’t want to hear that this awful thing still exists. I’m sure they want us to just go away. Who wants to answer our questions about HOW my niece was sold away, who wants to try to justify what they all know is wrong?

That is what lawyers get paid top dollar to do: make money, whether the case should be won or lost doesn’t matter. I wonder how many families are ripped to shreds by judges and lawyers in family court. They make a call on where a child should be, and then their job is done. What do they care if the long-term is tragic? They break up siblings and extended families with the bang of a gavel.

Someone you see just once decides your whole life, knowing hardly anything about you personally. I’m really so tired of dealing with high and mighty lawyers and judges. I’m over them thinking they’re better than us and they don’t have time for our complaints. They act like how dare we ask questions, how dare we have these allegations. Meanwhile we’re saying ‘how dare a county clerk do such a thing, how dare this couple do such a thing?’

While we were going through court, we sat outside waiting because the couple wouldn’t allow us, her family, in the courtroom. They wanted my sister alone and scared, right where they had her from day one, making sure she was by herself with no support. They had the choice to let us in, but once again, they did the wrong thing.

We sat there all day and observed people coming out; mothers crying, fathers crying, grandparents crying, everyone came out on edge, group after group. Just sitting there in that family courthouse made me sick, from the look to the feel, it was beyond disturbing.

Well, the lawyers got their checks to pay for their fancy cars and material possessions, the ‘baby buyers’ got their baby by despicable actions, Lupita is still smiling her phony smile at the courthouse, haughty as can be and always was, and our family is left like insignificant trash to dispose of. It really is hard to walk when there are knives stuck in your back.

I still wonder how any of the people involved in all this can even sleep at night. But then again, evil never sleeps, does it?

These past ten years have barely been survivable, it has taken every ounce of strength and faith to make it through each day.

I have felt so incredibly anxious and helpless. Thank God everything else in my life is perfectly in place because one more grain of sand on top of me and I would surely suffocate.

On my niece’s birthday, this one being her tenth and a milestone, I couldn’t just sit back and take it for one more second.

I did the unthinkable.

Being the monster I am, I sent flowers and balloons to my niece’s door.

The card simply read ‘ To our baby girl: we have never forgotten you and you are always with us, one day you’ll know …. Love, Your Awaiting Family…. ‘

Not 24 hours later, this heartless man who calls himself a “father” because he has my niece whom he paid for, had the audacity to call my sister and say my niece was scared that ‘someone was going to come and take her away.’

First of all, I don’t believe they even gave her the balloons or flowers because of what the card said.

Ten years later, they STILL have not told her she is adopted and that she has a family still fighting for her and loving her, wanting her in our lives to stay. So why would she think someone would come take her away if they haven’t even told her?

Someone coming to take her away is THEIR greatest fear. They know that no matter what they do, she will NEVER belong to them and one day very soon, they won’t be able to say one word about our relationship with her. The paperwork they keep flashing will be obsolete. They will not have a place at our table and they will be excluded absolutely from our lives. My niece doesn’t come as a package deal. Everyone that had no place to butt into our family in the first place will finally be shut up and shut out.

I wonder how she is going to feel if they tell her now, that they’ve been lying to her, pretending she’s theirs, for a decade.

I wonder how she’ll feel if they wait until she’s eighteen to tell her, that they’ve been lying to her for her entire life.

Either way, I imagine the very sticky situation they are going to have to try to slither their way through. How do you explain that you purposely would not allow her to be with her family, or even see them? How do you explain that they played with her like a doll, dressing her up and making her what they wanted her to be. They deliberately bury her heritage and refuse to even let us call her by terms of endearment, common in most families. They continuously keep the jabs coming. The little digs, as if we’re not suffering enough. They want us to suffer to maximum capacity.  

How do you explain why you put your happiness above hers by taking away and altering her very identity?

There’s no way they told her about those balloons and flowers, because then they would have to explain that she has a family out there that is anxiously awaiting her return.

Once again, they get to lie and manipulate the situation.

But when she turns eighteen,  what are they going to say then? Call the police, her family is here and there’s no more strings and stipulations?

Call the judge to get an extension on making her an adult? It will be then that they are backed into a corner. What are they going to say when we’re all there, and she wants to know us and know what happened?

I cannot wait for the day when that couple doesn’t have the right to even be in the equation. I wonder how much love and respect my niece will have for them when she finds out what’s what.

So we’ll pray without worry, and the moment she turns eighteen, we’ll be there. We’re her family, not this ‘poor couple’ that unfortunately had everything but the ability to conceive.

Family is everything, and we are here for her with open, loving arms. We’re waiting, we’re hoping, we’re praying that God will bring us back together. One day we’ll be at the door, literally saying ‘knock, knock, we’re your family’ ….