Three Failed Adoption Matches. One Pandemic. One Perfect Match. Monica and Brandon’s Story.

Monica knew before she got married that parenthood might not look conventional for her. Diagnosed with PCOS, she’d been upfront with Brandon early in their relationship: kids were something they both wanted, but biology might not be the path. He said yes to adoption without hesitation.

Fast forward through a wedding, fertility treatment, a ruptured appendix that ended a cycle mid-attempt, and a lot of honest conversations about what really mattered. They turned to adoption. They found Adoption & Beyond.

Then they waited.

“It’s the weight,” Monica said. “Those two words in the adoption process. And when you’re in it, people say you’ll know it was worth it – but it’s hard telling somebody who’s currently in the wait that it’s going to happen.”

“The first failed adoption, I think, was the hardest.
We weren’t ready for that.”

Their first match moved fast. They met the family. They held the baby. They were going to pick her up the next day. Then the birth family decided to parent. The next day never came.

“It’s devastating,” Brandon said carefully. “But it’s hard because it’s a human life.”

Two more failed matches followed. Monica found her own way through: she documented every month of the wait – books read, things crafted, small evidence that life was still moving. Not for her future child. For herself.

“You can see where you came from and how far you’ve come,” she said. “It helps.”

Then came Layla. A last-minute match. A birth mother who was in labor the day they were supposed to meet her. The very beginning of COVID. None of it went by the book.

All of it was exactly right.

Layla is three now. Her birth mother, Candice, comes four times a year. She came to the birthday party. Monica and Brandon have met her family. When they sat down with Candice last year, they discovered something unexpected: her biggest fear for Layla – that she might someday reject one side of her family – was the exact same fear they carried.

“We realized some of our fears were kind of the same,” Monica said. “Neither one of us wants that.”

When asked what they’d tell families just starting out, Brandon’s answer was simple: “If that’s what you truly want, go for it. I can’t imagine anything without Layla in it.”

Monica added one more thing: “You guys are on our side. But you also care about the birth families. That was important to me. You can’t only care about us.”