On Sept. 11, 2001 Carla Breeding watched the World Trade Center towers in New York crumble with one thought continuously running through her mind, “I am going to die before I get to be a mom.”
That morning, before the news from New York burned across television screens, Carla had excitedly put the first part of an international adoption application in the mail. She knew that the tragedy would make the already long and grueling process of adopting a child from abroad that much longer and more difficult. And so it was. That year China restricted the number of single parents who could adopt to five percent for each agency. Carla was chosen, and was all set to go to China to pick up her daughter, when SARS broke out, delaying air traffic to Asia indefinitely.
“I kept imagining horrible things happening that would prevent this from happening,” Carla said.
All of these fears were washed away in 2002 when Carla first held her daughter, Carissa, in a hotel room in Changsha, where she and other adoptive parents went in a group to pick up their children.
“I knew immediately which one Carissa was,” Carla said. Back in their hotel room, the new mother, “just laid there and watched her sleep for hours,” she remembers.
Soon after she brought Carissa home to Elizabethtown, Carla knew she wanted another daughter. She applied again for adoption, and in 2005 made her way to China again — with Carissa in tow this time — to meet her second daughter, Caroline.
“Getting Carissa was about me becoming a mom and fulfilling my dream,” Carla said. ”Getting Caroline was about completing our family. There was just something telling me we weren’t done yet.”
