After waiting for so long, they get their heart’s desire

THE PARENTS: Erin Vaughan, 33, and Ryan Vaughan, 33, of Point Breeze

THE CHILD: Taylor Amelia, 1, adopted Oct. 10, 2022

AN EARLY “AHA”: Before they were dating, during a trip with friends, Erin came down with swine flu, and Ryan cared for her attentively. “That’s when I started to realize: Maybe this has evolved past friendship,” Erin says.

For a while, they called it the “sad room.” It was the nursery they’d painted, with the crib they’d assembled, for the baby they expected to adopt in May 2020. The whole adoption experience had been illuminating and swift: an agency focused on the well-being of birth mothers; a plan for open adoption; a mere 40 days on the wait-list before a match.

The birth mother texted Erin and Ryan photos of her newborn. The next day, she changed her mind and decided she wanted to parent.

“From a selfish perspective, we were heartbroken,” Erin says. “But who is the central point of the adoption? The baby. The best-case scenario is that they’re born into a situation where their parent wants to raise them.”

The couple changed their out-of-office electronic messages and went back to work. They avoided the “sad room.” They returned to the wait-list at Adoptions from the Heart.

Erin and Ryan had talked about adoption early in their relationship, shortly after they began dating as undergrads at Villanova University. Erin has a congenital heart condition, and it wasn’t clear whether pregnancy would be too medically risky. “I said, ‘Just so you know, they’re not sure if I can have kids of my own.’ ” Ryan’s response: “It doesn’t have to be my biological kid to be my kid.”

By that point, they’d been friends for more than two years — since the first day of college, in fact, when Erin introduced herself to everyone in their small dorm and began referring to Ryan (there were three first-year students with that name) as “Red-Headed Ryan.”

It wasn’t until Erin spent fall term of junior year in Ireland that their relationship fused. “Sometimes when you’re not near people, you realize what you’re missing,” Ryan says.

After graduation, he persuaded her to move to Philadelphia with him; they hopscotched from Manayunk to Center City to the east side of Broad Street, all the while negotiating the differences in their living styles. “He’s OCD-level organized,” Erin says with a laugh, “while I don’t mind if a basket of laundry sits out for two weeks.”

They also acquired a dog, a goldendoodle they named Barley. “People talk about dogs being introductions to [having] children,” Erin says, and raising Barley did prompt important conversations: “How do you talk about who’s going to do what when it’s 4 in the morning and someone needs to take the dog outside?”

In 2015, Erin underwent open-heart surgery. Ryan already had an engagement ring, which he kept in his pocket during her five-day hospital stay. Even the nurses knew about it. But he waited until she was home to pop the question. “If I’d planned the perfect proposal,” he said, “we would have gone for a hike and we’d be at the top of a mountain. But this is a different type of mountain. Let’s spend the rest of our lives together.”

Erin, a data analyst, loves numbers — and she needed health insurance through Ryan’s job — so they married, with a self-uniting license, on 1/7/17, then celebrated with friends and family at Race Street Pier that August.

A bee flew up the skirt of Erin’s dress, and during a photo of the bridal party in a unison jump, Ryan’s ring arced out of his brother’s pocket and nearly rolled into a gutter. Aside from those bloopers, the wedding was validating. “It shows you the community you’ve built in your life and how much they support you,” Erin says.

In 2018, they began talking to friends who had worked with Adoptions from the Heart. The first match happened in March; that birth mom changed her mind in May. The next 18 months felt like 15 years, Erin says, especially as friends began to build their families. She couldn’t help trying to analyze their chances of being picked. “You’re thinking: Are there things I can do to make us more attractive to birth parents who are choosing families? I would create checklists. But ultimately, it’s out of your control.”

Ryan was walking home from the car mechanic on Dec. 16 when he got the call: They’d been matched. A baby born the day before at Phoenixville Hospital. Could they drive out the next day?”

“I had to call back,” he recalls. “I forgot to ask if it was a boy or a girl.”

They dusted the nursery, dragged baby items up from the basement, borrowed a car. At the hospital, a nurse handed Erin a 5-pound, 4-ounce infant. “Here, why don’t you feed her the bottle?” They’d landed on her name — they just liked the sound of “Taylor Amelia” — on the way to Phoenixville.

They brought her home that day, a white-knuckled drive with Erin sitting in back, worrying about whether they had enough bottles and where they would pull over if the baby needed a diaper change.

At home, while they struggled with sleep deprivation, they also felt a sense of gratitude: “We had been so deliberate and had waited so long; there was this sense of ‘this is what we were waiting for,’ ” Ryan says.

Theirs is an open adoption; for the first year, they shared photos and letters with the birth mother each month, and will continue to do so on each of Taylor’s birthdays. Meantime, they talk to Taylor frequently about her birth mom. “Adoption is just part of who she is,” Erin says.

While they felt “book prepared” for parenthood — they’d even taken a sleep-training class — they quickly found that babies don’t live by the book. “No matter how many diapers you pack, there’s going to be a blowout,” Erin says. “The second you get comfortable with a routine with a baby, they change. Every plan you had needs to evolve on the fly. The first year of Taylor’s life is teaching us that being present is the most important part.”