The Call-daddy's version

(warning..may be longer than mommy's version)
I woke up to a pounding headache at about 5:30 Thursday morning due in part because I had been forced to sleep on the floor at the suite I was sharing with some other coaches. I stood in the shower for what seemed like only minutes, but from all the other coaches’ chidings must have been closer to an hour. I grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen, some breakfast from the dining hall downstairs and a couple of Advils from the lady at the front desk, which she fished out of her personal stash in her purse.
A few hours later we headed to the state basketball games we planned to watch in Austin. Right before we entered our junior varsity coach got a call from his wife. The baby was coming, and he needed to get back home as soon as possible. So, as soon as we had gotten out of the car on Red River, we were hopping right back in to get him back to the hotel. It was chaotic, and we all seemed excited for him.
I pause here to focus on the word seemed. My choice here is simple. I smiled and acted excited, but in my heart I was so emotionally low from my difficulties that I was probably not as excited as I should have been for my friend and colleague. My difficulties came from a complicated adoption process. My wife and I had been trying to adopt a child from Ethiopia for longer than I cared to remember. I was tired. I was frustrated, and I was on the verge of being completely broken after hearing that the government was trying to change the laws in a way that would make our adoption timeframe grow exponentially. Just the night before I had told the guys about this situation and informed them that I did not want to really talk about it for the rest of the weekend. Of course, when a person feels like s/he is about to break that is the precise moment that God does something awesome. And that is exactly what he did.
After our junior varsity coach left in his vehicle, which had been at the hotel, we drove back in Coach S’s car and settled in for the first game of the tournament. We arrived just in time for the start of the second half game. By the fourth quarter the game was dragging along with fouls coming on every possession. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was my wife, Amory. I did not really hear the words she said, but I could tell from the excitement in her voice that something big had happened. We had been matched. We did not know if it was a boy or a girl. We did not know anything other than I needed to get to a computer, so we could have a conference call in order to find out just what it meant to be matched.
I would love to say that I jumped up and screamed, but in truth I sat there like the jumping frog from calaveras county. I could have sworn that I was filled with lead up to the neck. Finally, I simply asked Coach S. for his keys and when pressed whispered we just got matched. He promptly gave me his keys, and a huge smile shot across his face. He stuck out a hand and I shook it. I am quite certain he was about to ask a lot of questions, but I was so distracted that I walked off with his keys without a word of where I was going or when I might return.
After taking the conference call from the hotel in front of a computer at the back of the dining hall, I looked down at my phone to see the first of what would be a staggering number of text messages. Coach S. had just one question: “Whats going on?” The answer was simple enough: we had been matched with a 9-week-old little girl. I promptly started calling my closest friends and family. Then, I sent out a text to let everyone else know what had happened. That is when the texts really started coming in.
The first was from the junior varsity coach, who had just made it back home and was headed to the hospital. Wow!!!!!!! Congrats man. What do you do now???? It was a good question, and I had no answer, so I didn’t.
As one might imagine, there were many more texts. There were tons of comments like “Awesome!” and “Congratulations” although some got more creative like my friend from Bible study who simply typed “Suuuweeeeet!” or the guy from the college class I teach who wrote “Woooooohoooooo.” He promptly followed that text with another: “I mean Ew a girl?”
Though he was joking, it was a question many people had since we had been so much closer on the boy list than the girl list when we had started. Other people wanted to know what the plan was now, and many people thought the process was finished. One of the trainers from the school asked “ When do yall leave?” I typed back, “No clue,” which was the truth. A few days before, I would have given him a timeframe, but with the changes in the process, I now really did not even want to think about how long it could be until I held my daughter for the first time.
Possibly my favorite text was from an old high school buddy who works out with me at 24 Hour Fitness and loves to talk Rangers. Referencing Juan Gonzalez and his difficulty with the English language he typed, “In the words of the great juando, I’m very happy cited for you !” And it seemed as though everyone was joyous as they heard the news we had waited on for so long. The texts kept coming throughout the night and into Friday morning.
That morning I woke up in an actual bed, due to the fact that the junior varsity coach had gone home. I woke up without a headache. And I woke up with a smile on my face. There was one text in particular that I kept reading over and over again. It simply said, “Congratulations Daddy” and was from my friend who had just recently moved into the technology age. In fact it was the first text message that he had ever sent me. As I lay there looking at those two words, I realized, for the first time in my life, I was finally Daddy.