Consent to proceed towards adoption procedure

A few days ago I received our official referral document from Bulgaria. It is the official yes. And it is impossible to explain the feeling. I have found out I was pregnant twice and gave birth to two babies. This doesn’t feel like any of those moments. It feels very different. Yet, I cannot quite explain it. My heart feels fuller and heavier at the exact same time. I feel sad that he does not get to grow up with his birth family. Yet joyous that we were chosen by the MOJ to get to be his forever family. I am sad that still, we are 13 days away from meeting him and then 4-ish months away from bringing him home. Yet I feel we have some planning and prepping for him to come home.

It's difficult to explain because well, I feel that we are in a position to bring home another child, specifically one who happens to have down syndrome. Yet, his birth family felt they couldn’t keep him because of his diagnosis of down syndrome. And we just have no way of knowing how they felt, why they felt it and how deep their pain/guilt/sadness runs because of this. We cannot even predict how they felt then and how they feel now or even how they will feel years from now. It’s just impossible to know. What I do know is that we will never take for granted that we are in a position to easily say yes. Can you just imagine if everyone felt supported by family, supported by the community, was financially stable and emotionally available to say yes without hesitation?