How A Photo Book Changed My Family Forever

By Teesta Bhola-Shah

When people hear the word adoption, they usually picture a happy ending. A baby comes home, a family is complete, everyone smiles in the courtroom photo, and that’s the story. But after sitting down and interviewing my mom about my younger brother Jay’s adoption, I realized how much people do not see behind the scenes. Adoption is paperwork and waiting and uncertainty, but it is also grief and hope and human connection in ways I honestly never understood before hearing the full story myself.

For my mom, Devi Bhola, adoption was not some quick decision. It came after years of trying to figure out how to rebuild the future she thought she was going to have. “When you were a year and three months old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” she told me. “The concern was that if I were to get pregnant again I would risk the cancer coming back. So it was recommended that I don’t have another child.” 

She dealt with the cancer on autopilot. When she was done with the treatments, my mother says she felt something was missing. “There was a hole in my heart,” she said. 

Even now, when she talks about it, you can tell how much that changed her life. She always imagined having two children. “I was very stupidly romantic my entire life,” she laughed while telling me the story. “That’s just how I envisioned my family.” But suddenly, the future she pictured for herself was no longer simple.

What surprised me most while interviewing her was learning just how many different options my parents explored before they eventually adopted my brother, Jay Bhola-Shah. They looked into international adoption programs with India, China, and Guatemala. They researched surrogacy. My mom even completed foster care parenting classes through New York’s foster-to-adopt system because at one point she genuinely thought that was the direction our family would go in. “I took a lot of effort to build this family,” she told me. “Years of effort. Surrogacy, foster care, international adoptions, then domestic adoption, then choosing an agency. It was an incredible amount of work.” It took her two full years of research and paperwork. Her first choice was foster-to-adopt, but it didn’t end up working out. 

There were fingerprints, home studies, background checks, social workers coming to inspect the house, lawyers, endless paperwork, and deeply personal questionnaires asking things most people probably never imagine having to answer. “You think you’re this open-minded, accepting person,” my mom said. “But then they ask you questions like, ‘Would you adopt a child with developmental challenges? Would you adopt a child whose birth mother struggled with alcohol and drug addiction during pregnancy?’ And suddenly you have to really soul-search and be brutally honest with yourself.”

Eventually, my parents worked with a domestic adoption agency in Utah. One of the biggest parts of the process was creating a profile book for birth parents to look through while deciding which family they wanted to place their unborn child with. Instead of just writing a letter, my mom made an entire photo book filled with pictures of our family, our values, our vacations, our home, and our lives together. There was text and content about each member of the family. My mother wrote about my father, my father wrote about my mother, they both wrote about me, and I wrote a letter to my soon-to-be sibling.

My mother had been making an annual photo book since I was born, and it chronicled my life until then, documenting our memories as a family. So she thought she would make one for the adoption process, as she’d done before. “The agency actually told me they had never seen anything like it before,” she said. “They asked if they could show other families so they could also do the same, because it felt so personal and visual.”

That photo book ended up completely changing our lives.

Jay’s birth parents were a young couple from a small town in Iowa who had moved to Portland, Oregon searching for opportunities and better income. They were struggling financially, living in a motel, and already raising two children who were 2 and 1 at the time. When my mom asked them later why they chose our family, their answers stayed with her forever. “Why us?” My mother had said. It would have been easier if Jay were adopted into another white family, but his birth parents chose us. Why? 

“Jay’s birth mother told me, ‘I always wanted to go to beauty school. That is my dream. And I saw your photo book and thought you were very stylish. I thought maybe this child would have a stylish life,’” my mom recalled.

Then Jay’s birth father explained his reason too. “He said, ‘I’ve always wanted to travel the world and experience different cultures and foods, but I know that’s never going to happen for me because of poverty. When I saw your family, I thought that this is the life I have always wanted. And if I can’t have it, then I want it for my child.’”

I think that part of the story affected me the most. My mom told me she was brought to tears by their perspective, philosophy, and mindset. “You think people from small towns maybe don’t have this huge worldview,” she said. “But they absolutely did. They wanted something bigger for their son than what they themselves had access to.”

Over the months before Jay was born, my mom and his birth mother began speaking occasionally over the phone at her request through conversations organized and supervised by social workers. At first they mostly talked about the adoption, but eventually the conversations became more personal. “Sometimes she just wanted someone to talk to,” my mom said. “Sometimes we’d be on the phone for an hour talking about life or how scared she was or what she wanted for her life.”

Then finally came the day Jay was born. My mother, my father, and I all flew to Portland and waited at the hospital while Jay’s birth mother prepared for her C-section. But right before the surgery, fear completely overwhelmed her. 

“She said, ‘I don’t want to have the baby,’” my mother remembered. Eventually, after social workers and nurses reassured her, she agreed to go through with the birth. Then she made a request that completely surprised my mom: she wanted my mom inside the operating room during the birth.

Inside the OR, my mom stood quietly in a corner with the anaesthetist behind the curtain while the doctors delivered Jay. Moments later, after he cried for the first time and the nurses cleaned him up, they handed him to his birth mother and asked if she wanted to hold him.

“And she said, ‘No, give him to her, she’s his mother,’” my mom told me.

At that point, everyone in the room started crying.

“The anesthesiologist had tears in his eyes. The nurse anesthetist was crying. I was crying. Everybody got emotional,” my mom said. Then, in the middle of all of it, the doctor apparently looked around the room and finally said, “Can everybody please stop crying? I have to close up here.” 

In the surprise of being in the OR, my mom had forgotten her phone and couldn’t take any pictures. The anaesthesiologist realized and offered to take some pictures of Jay and send them to my mom. That is the only reason we have a few pictures of the moment of Jay’s birth. My mom is still grateful to this day for his thoughtfulness and kindness. She loves taking pictures and videos of us, and was devastated when she couldn’t take any at such an important moment!

Three days later, when it came time to officially terminate parental rights, Jay’s birth mother initially refused to sign the papers. “The lawyer came back and said, ‘She wants you to adopt her too.’”

My mother was stunned. “She wanted to be part of our family,” she explained. “She felt like we were the stable family structure she had always wanted.” The lawyer explained to her that she had a family, was an adult, and legally could not be adopted as well. 

Although legally impossible, the request revealed just how emotionally attached she had become over months of conversations and trust.

When told that adult adoption was not possible, Jay’s birth mother made another request instead. “She said, ‘I want her to call me every day for the rest of her life.’”

My mother refused to promise something she knew she could not realistically sustain forever. “I told the lawyer, ‘I don’t even call my own mother every day, and I love her a lot,’” she said. “I wasn’t going to lie to get somebody to sign papers.”

Instead, she made a different promise. Because interstate adoption laws required our family to remain in Oregon for three weeks before returning home to New Jersey, my mother agreed to call her every single day during those 21 days. “And I did,” she said. “Every day. Sometimes we spoke for an hour.”

Those conversations became about far more than adoption paperwork. “I think somewhere along the way she started seeing me almost like a mother figure,” my mom reflected. “And, I felt sad for her. She’d never really had stability or support.”

What makes this story feel even more emotional to me now is realizing how many people loved my brother before he even came home. That love continues to show itself in small rituals that have become part of our family. Every night before bed, my mother and brother recite the same poem together, one that has become a reminder of the bond they share. 

My mother repeats the poem to him, and he says it back:

“Not flesh of my flesh,
nor bone of my bone,
but still miraculously my own.
Never forget for a single minute,
you didn’t grow under my heart but in it.” 

He knows he’s loved and that even though his birth may have been ‘different’ from other kids’, he’s loved just the same.

Growing up, though, Jay was never “my adopted brother.” He was just my brother. We were very close as kids. We spent hours together playing games, biking around our cul-de-sac, annoying each other, and then defending each other five minutes later. Whenever school got hard for him, I tried helping him however I could, and whenever I was stressed or upset, he somehow always knew how to make me laugh. No matter how much we fought sometimes, we always had each other’s backs.

Now that I’m older, I think that’s part of why I started MyAdoptionStories.com in the first place. I wanted to tell stories like my brother’s not as perfect fairy tales, but as deeply human experiences filled with complicated emotions and incredible people trying their best for each other.

A young woman from Iowa dreamed of beauty school and saw possibility in a photo book. A father who never expected to leave the United States wanted his son to experience cultures and places he himself would never see. And my mother, after surviving cancer and years of uncertainty, found herself building relationships she never anticipated while creating the family she had always imagined.

And somehow, in the middle of all of that, a single photo book connected people from completely different worlds and changed my family forever.