“Honey, could you get the phone?” Every adoptive parent talks about the day when they got “the call.” It’s the proverbial equivalent of two pink lines on the pee stick. “You’re pregnant!” In a sense you are pregnant, with information. Pictures, video, and medical statistics arrive one by one in your in-box. Sometimes you receive pages worth, but most times very little.

I know adoptive parents who have screamed, cried or passed out when they got the call. Years later, they will retell the story of this moment in vivid detail. It reads like a remembrance of the day the Apollo 11 landed on the moon. You recount where you were, what you were wearing, who you were with, how you felt and what it all meant in the spectrum of your life. Adoptive parents recall the time of day, whether the sun was shining, and what was blooming in the backyard.

When my sister got the call, some eleven years ago, she was ecstatic. Later, a single picture arrived of Chun Yuan, now my niece April. She was all of a couple months old and bundled tightly in a blanket. The photo was a head shot surrounded by a deep red background. Her dark shock of hair was cropped short and stood enthusiastically on end like she’d just rubbed a balloon and touched it to her head to make her locks defy gravity. She was sticking just the tip of her tongue out through the side of her mouth as if to say, “Puleeze. Can we just move on to the talent portion of this program?”

A brief medical record accompanied the photo, which my sister took to have translated. “Healthy baby girl” is how the report read. The details didn’t matter much because my sister and her husband had already fallen in love with her: this little baby half the world away.

For adoptive parents who choose a special needs or waiting child, however, the circumstances are quite different. In effect, those parents make the call themselves by expressing interest in a child they see on a website or via an adoption agency posting.

Since we are considering a child with special needs, it occurred to me that I won’t get the call. A small part of me feels disappointed to miss out on this universal experience (universal, at least, for adoptive parents). A larger part of me feels relief that, by intercepting the referral process, we won’t have to endure months of waiting and wondering about when “it” will happen.

I also think I would feel some pride in being able to tell my child that I chose him. I saw his eyes and something spoke to my heart. I watched him move and saw a stalwart trooper. It felt right, so I reached out and made the call.