Thousands of infants are separated from their parents every year for any number of reasons.
Some of the little ones get reunited with family, some get put into foster care, and some get the most favorable outcome of being placed into a loving, permanent home.
Little Gisele didn’t have the best of beginnings, but soon stole the heart of a nurse who saw something amazing in those big blue eyes.
The Washington Post reports:
“Two years ago, Liz Smith, director of nursing at Franciscan Children’s hospital in Brighton, Mass., was headed toward the elevator at work when she saw her: a tiny girl with bright blue eyes and a single soft brown curl swept across her forehead.”
Not wanting to wait another second to find out who this captivating little girl was, Smith asked the nurse pushing the infant, “Who’s this beautiful angel?”
The nurses responded that the little girl’s name was “Gisele”, and that she had been a patient for five months, because she was a “ward of the state.”
Little Gisele was born weighing in at under 2 pounds but was a fighter.
Sadly, Gisele suffered from neonatal abstinence syndrome, because her biological mother abused heroin, cocaine, and methadone while pregnant, leading to a premature birth.
When Smith laid eyes on the strong little girl, she was already 8 months old, but appeared much younger.
In a twist of fate, Gisele was transferred to Franciscan Children’s Hospital by the state of Massachusetts, because her lungs needed specialized treatment that the previous hospital couldn’t give her.
Looking at the infant so helpless and feeble with her feeding tube in must have been so tough, but not as hard as it was to endure all the treatments.
Sadly, no one visited to see how Gisele was doing in five months of being at the hospital.
Social workers on Gisele’s case were trying to get the infant in foster care, but to no avail.
Smith could not get that sweet little girl out of her mind, knowing in one pivotal moment on a drive home from work that she was going to be Gisele’s mom.
Washington Post reports:
“”Gisele,” Smith told herself all the way home that evening. “Gisele.” It was at that moment, said Smith, that she knew: “I’m going to foster this baby. I’m going to be her mother.””
Smith had always wanted to be a mother, but life events had gotten in the way of her perusing that dream.
Losing her mother at 19, Smith knew she was going to follow in her selfless mother’s footsteps and go into nursing.
Looking back on how her career got started, Smith said, “My mom was a pediatric nurse who always put others first.” Adding, “So I grew up wanting to be a nurse, too.”
Once the goal of becoming a nurse was accomplished, Smith thought that she would settle down and raise a family of her own like her 4 brothers and sisters, but it didn’t work out like that for her.
“I never imagined becoming a mom would be a challenge,” the 45-year-old nurse said. “It’s a desire you can try to push away and fill with other distractions, but it never goes away.”
After life took a different route than the one she had imagined, Smith looked into using in vitro fertilization to conceive, but her health insurance shot it down.
Just when the prospect of beginning a family seemed bleak, there came Gisele, giving Smith a renewed hope.
Smith put in a request to foster Gisele shortly after meeting her, immediately making daily visits to her crib side.
Three weeks after the request, Smith was able to take little Gisele home, with the understanding that the state was trying to reunite her with her birth mother.
How hard that must have been to pour your heart into a baby you know may leave one day, but Smith couldn’t help herself.
All her coworkers threw her a baby shower, where she got many essential baby items that she took home with her the day Gisele was to see her new home.
“Leaving the parking lot of the hospital with Gisele and a car full of baby stuff, I was in shock that it was happening,” said Smith.
In a bittersweet sequence of events, Gisele’s birth parents had their rights terminated and no other family members were found to care for the her.
Of course, Smith was happy to be able to apply for adoption, but she also felt tremendous sadness towards the situation at hand, reports the Washington Post.
“The day I got the call that their parental rights were terminated was very sad,” Smith reminisces.
Smith adds, “My gain was another’s loss. It’s a feeling difficult to describe when you are experiencing this life-changing moment that someone else is as well, in the opposite way.”
With love and care from Smith, Gisele made developmental leaps and bounds, blowing past her milestones.
Then, in October of last year, Smith became a mother, officially adopting Gisele in a courtroom full of her friends and family.
Neither Gisele or Smith had things go the way they would had hoped from the start, but their stories aligned perfectly at just the right moment.
Please let us know in the comments section what you think of Smith taking Gisele home.