People come in and out of our lives for a reason. Sometimes it’s only for a season, but other times it’s for life.
Liz Smith, a nurse at the Franciscan Children’s Hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts, was walking to the elevator at work one day when she noticed an 8 month old brunette girl with blue eyes that had her smitten.
“Who’s this beautiful angel?” Liz asked the nurse wheeling baby girl down the hall, who then replied, “Her name is Gisele.”
Five months earlier, Gisele had been brought to the hospital as a ward of the state after being born premature in a different hospital, and was suffering from neonatal abstinence syndrome — a condition when infants must withdraw from drugs like heroin or prescription drugs they were exposed to while in the womb.
Little Gisele has been removed from the care of her biological mom when she was three months old and moved to the NICU at Franciscan Children’s hospital for special treatment for a lung issue, among other problems.
In the five months Gisele had been in hospital, she never had a visitor, and social service workers were struggling to place her in foster care.
That day as Liz was driving home from work, she said to herself, “I’m going to foster this baby. I’m going to be her mother.”
Liz shared, “Since the moment I met her, there was something behind her striking blue eyes capturing my attention . . . I felt that I needed to love this child and keep her safe.”
She put in the request to foster the little girl, and while waiting for the paperwork to be processed, Liz would visit Gisele every day.
After a few weeks, Liz received the news she’d been waiting for — Gisele was hers to foster, although the state did alert Liz that every effort would be made on their end to safely reunite Gisele with her birth parents.
Gisele’s biological parents were granted weekly supervised visits that went on for awhile, but when the courts ultimately determined them to be incapable of caring for their infant, their parental rights were terminated.
Just recent;y, a judge signed off on Gisele’s adoption papers and granted Liz full parental rights with legal documents proving that she is now the girl’s mother.
(Cafe Mom)
