Highest Duty

5. THE GIFT OF GIRLS

I HAVE SEEN breathtaking sunrises and sunsets from the highest altitudes. I have seen the brightest stars and planets from what feels like a front-row seat. But there are things I haven’t seen—things that happened down on the ground while I was up in the air, earning a living and appreciating the view.

Being away from home so much, I’ve missed milestones in my daughters’ lives. Many pilots can recite a litany of missed moments. Our children don’t wait for us before they take their first steps, say their first words, or need a visit from the tooth fairy. And it’s not just early-childhood rites of passage that we’re sorry to miss. We also miss nuanced changes in our children’s lives as they get older.

Just before Christmas last year, I was off for a few days, and Lorrie and I took our daughters, Kate and Kelly, on a skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe. It was so nice to have this extended time with the girls when they weren’t rushing off to school and I wasn’t hours away from returning to the airport. It was just a perfect, relaxed vacation.

Tahoe has always held a special place in our hearts. When we take Interstate 80 and cross over the Donner Summit, a part of us feels like we’ve come home. There’s the smell of pine in the air. The sky is clear and crisp. It’s just invigorating.

We always try to stay at Northstar, the resort where both Kate and Kelly learned to ski when they were three years old. The resort resembles a European village with cobblestone walkways, and the family programs there are great. We have many wonderful family memories of visits there.

On that particular trip, the first big snowstorm of the season had ended the day before, and the trees were still heavy with fresh snow. Decorated for the holidays, Northstar was covered with little twinkling white lights in the trees. It had a real magical, fairy-tale feel. The lights, the snow, the European village.

Late one afternoon, we had just parked the car, and we decided to do some window-shopping before heading to dinner. It was very cold out, and we were all dressed in heavy jackets, gloves, and hats. We were walking into this valley of buildings, on this cobblestone walkway, when I noticed that the girls, twenty feet ahead of us, were arm in arm and skipping along the sidewalk, Kelly’s head on Kate’s shoulder. I was so happy to see this, to realize that they had come to a place, here in their early teens, where they could publicly show physical affection for each other. Siblings, of course, are sometimes at odds, and here they were expressing so effortlessly what they meant to each other.

I pointed them out to Lorrie. “Take a look at that,” I said. I thought I was noticing something very special and new.

Lorrie took my arm and smiled. “They’ve been doing that for five or six months now,” she said. “It’s just that you’ve missed it.”

She said she had frequently seen them walking in the mall, holding hands. She said it was happening very easily and naturally, and she had loved watching it.

I had never fully noticed this. Not until that afternoon. And I felt sadness at the realization of how much of their daily lives I had missed—their activities, their interactions. How could I have missed witnessing these acts of love between my daughters for all these months? Lorrie looked at me sympathetically and saw a sense of loss and remorse in my eyes.

I put my hand over my heart. It’s a gesture I sometimes fall back on when the girls do something endearing, or that I feel grateful about. It’s a sign between me and Lorrie, a reminder of how lucky we feel about our girls.

I know why it hit me so hard. This was almost like a dream come true. When the girls were very young, one wish Lorrie and I had for them was that they’d be close when they were older. Seeing them together like this was a wonderful realization; I felt like maybe we had done something right. But it was also a painful reminder to me that I am so often not present in my children’s lives.

Lorrie says this was one of those “pilot moments”—a pilot comes home and notices a change in his home or family—and seeing my mixed emotions was emotional for her, too.

I took Lorrie’s hand, and a few seconds later we made a right-hand turn and came upon a large plaza in the village. Laid out in front of us were twinkling lights. Holiday music was playing and people were ice-skating and roasting marshmallows. There was a large outdoor fire pit. I held tight to Lorrie’s hand and enjoyed all of it.

When I go over that day in my mind, I think of the girls, but I also think about Lorrie. I know what a loving mother she is. Yes, I’ve tried my best to instill values in the girls, to help them find more reasons to care about each other. But Lorrie is on the front line, nurturing them, setting an example, being there for them day and night when I am far away. I marvel at how she has created such a wonderful home life for our family.

I am fortunate to be her husband, and to have her as the mother of my children.

JULY 6, 1936, is a red-letter day for me, and not just because it’s the day federal air traffic control began operation under the Bureau of Air Commerce.

Yes, I’m taken with the history, but that day stands out for me on a more personal level. Fifty years later, on July 6, 1986, a fiftieth-anniversary celebration was held at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, California. Organizers invited the public to tour the facility, to see where controllers direct the flow of air traffic over Northern California. Pacific Southwest Airlines agreed to send over a pilot and a flight attendant to talk to the guests, and I was asked to be the pilot on hand.

I had flown a red-eye the night before, as a first officer, so I’d been up a lot of hours and was pretty beat. But I was more than happy to explain how pilots interact with air traffic control.

The flight attendant who had been selected to join me got sick and couldn’t come. So PSA sent over a vivacious twenty-seven-year-old from its marketing department, a young woman I had never met before. She told me her name was Lorrie Henry, and I introduced myself.

“Hi, I’m Sully Sullenberger.”

I have an uncommon name that she must not have heard clearly, and she never asked me to repeat myself. So that entire day, she didn’t know how to address me. She just knew I had a lot of Ss and Ls in my name.

Lorrie will tell you it wasn’t love at first sight. Despite my pilot’s uniform, I looked tired, and she noticed my eyes were bloodshot and I wasn’t freshly shaved. And she kept thinking: What’s this guy’s name again?

At the time, Lorrie had sworn off dating. She’d had a few relationships she considered unhealthy, and had told herself she was taking a break from men. I was thirty-five years old, had been in a short, childless marriage, and I wasn’t exactly looking for long-term love either. But I was taken with Lorrie. She was attractive—tall and elegant, with a great smile—and she seemed smart, too. She was very engaging with all the passersby. Pretty quickly after meeting her, I knew I wanted to ask her out.

For about four hours, we stood next to each other greeting the public beside a large model of a PSA aircraft, the BAe-146. A lot of people who came by wanted to share tales of their most memorable PSA flights.

Lorrie wasn’t at all flirtatious toward me, and I also remained professional toward her. But I was waiting for my moment. As the event wound down, I said to her, “Why don’t we go get a drink?”

“There’s a commissary down the hall,” she told me. “If you’re looking for a vending machine, you can find one there.”

She wasn’t getting it, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. “I meant a cocktail,” I said. “In a bar.”

She looked at me, this weary pilot with a lot of Ss and Ls in his name and a confusing opening line, and I suppose a part of her took pity on me. She agreed to accompany me to a nearby Bennigan’s. We had that drink, talked for a bit, and as she’d later admit, there wasn’t any wild attraction on her part. She assumed she’d never see me again. But I was interested. I asked for her phone number and she gave me her PSA business card, which had only the 800 number on it for the airline’s marketing department.

I tried to be clever. “You must be in great demand,” I said, “if you have your own eight-hundred number.”

She resisted rolling her eyes at me and just smiled, and then she gave me her local phone number. I gave her my card and she finally saw my name spelled out. We made a date for a couple of days later.

By the time Lorrie got home, however, she had decided she wasn’t ready to date anyone, and in any case, she wasn’t really up for dating me. She called me and left a message on my answering machine that she had to work the night of our date.

Listening to her message, I clearly sensed her lack of interest, and I figured that was that. But days later, Lorrie told a close friend that she had decided not to go out with me. Her friend told her, “No man is going to find you if you’re sitting home on the couch.”

Lorrie argued that the couch was just fine for her. She wasn’t looking for a man, anyway. Still, her friend’s words stayed with her, and a week later, she was surprised to find herself calling me.

When we spoke she admitted that she had been less than truthful when she canceled on me, and that she was nervous making the call. She said she’d like to accept a date with me if I was still interested. Of course, I was.

We lived fifty-five miles apart, but we ended up seeing each other for dinner three Friday nights in a row. After the second dinner, I walked her to her car, leaned toward her, and kissed her. Lorrie thought I was being forward. The way she tells the story now, she was “taken aback a little bit.” But I kissed her for a reason. I wanted her to know that I wanted to kiss her, and that I found her attractive. I’m glad I kissed her. I’d do it again. (In fact, I have.)

That kiss was a turning point, and she began warming up to me, too. For more than a year, we went back and forth between her home in Pleasant Hill and mine in Belmont. Eventually it just felt right to move in together. In early 1988, we settled into my place.

I’ll never forget coming home to Lorrie for the first time after being away on a four-day trip. The house was glowing. She had music on, the food on the stove smelled wonderful, and the house was warm and inviting. “If I had known it would be like this,” I told her, “I’d have insisted we move in together sooner.”

Marriage was the obvious next step, and on the morning of our wedding, June 17, 1989, I wrote Lorrie a letter: “I can’t wait to marry you. I want you and need you and love you with all my heart.”

I meant every word of that, but it’s hard for a groom on his wedding day to fully understand all the challenges of marriage. Lorrie and I would have to learn to face a lot of obstacles together. There were adventures ahead that we never could have predicted.

LORRIE PROVIDES a lot of the color in our lives. She’s intuitive, emotional, creative, more at ease with people, and more outgoing. In certain ways, she’s more innately optimistic than I am. It can take a lot to get me to smile, but you’ll often find Lorrie walking around with a smile on her face for no particular reason. Before Flight 1549 made me recognizable, we’d go to parties and everyone would remember Lorrie. As for me, couples would drive home saying to each other, “I think he said he was an airline pilot.”

I’m analytical, methodical, more of a scientist. I am able to fix things. I’m optimistic if I’ve reviewed the information and decided that I can make something work. Otherwise, I’m pretty much a realist. Together, Lorrie and I like to say, we become one whole person. So in a lot of respects, we’re a good fit.

Of course, our differences also get in the way. “When you’re the emotional one, you want your spouse to emote more,” Lorrie says. I do try, but I’m not always good at it. She wants to have detailed discussions about our relationship and our family dynamics. I’m more specific. What are the issues? What steps can I take to correct a problem?

I’ve asked Lorrie: “If things are going OK, why do we need to talk about them so much?”

I can feel close to Lorrie by touching her hand or giving her a hug. I’m nonverbal. She says it takes more effort than that to have a real relationship—and that means conversation.

I try. But sometimes, by the end of the day, you can feel you’ve said everything you’ve wanted to say. I’ve had to learn that it’s important to save something for Lorrie—an anecdote, something I’ve read, something funny that happened on a trip. Lorrie has discovered that I become a better talker when she gets me out of the house and into the fresh air. When we take a hike or walk together, she says, it’s easier to engage me in conversation.

We also try to have regular date nights, and we make a point of dressing up, rather than wearing casual clothes all the time. It’s a way of showing respect; we’re not taking each other for granted.

Lorrie likes me to make the reservations once in a while so I’m not always leaving it to her to be the social secretary. And when we go out, she wants to have a real dinner conversation.

“Sully is a man of few words,” Lorrie tells her friends. “So I tell him to save up his words for date night.”

LORRIE SAYS that part of what makes me a good pilot is my attention to detail. She has told me: “Sully, you expect a lot from yourself and those around you. You’re in control. That helps you as a pilot. But those aren’t always good husband qualities. Sometimes I need a companion who is more forgiving and less of a perfectionist.”

I know I can be exasperating to Lorrie. “Sully,” she has said more than once, “life is not a checklist!”

I understand her frustration, but I don’t see myself that way. I’m organized. I’m not a robot.

She says that when we go on vacation, I choreograph things with military precision, from loading the trunk to the time of departure. “That makes sense if you’re flying a hundred fifty passengers to some vacation destination,” she tells me. “But if you’re just packing our suitcases into the car for a family getaway, it’s not necessary.”

My response to her: “That’s confirmation bias. You find things that confirm your point of view, and you ignore evidence to the contrary.”

In my heart, of course, I know she has a valid point.

In some important ways, my profession as a pilot is easier for me than relationships are. I can control an airplane and make it do what I want it to do. I can learn all of its component systems and understand how they work in every circumstance. Piloting is well defined, with a process that is predictable and understandable to me. Relationships, on the other hand, are more ambiguous. There’s a good deal of nuance, and it’s not always obvious what the right answer is.

In the twenty years of our marriage, we’ve had our share of bumps in the road. At certain points, one of us would be working harder at the relationship than the other, and then it would flip-flop. We weren’t always equally committed to addressing issues. That has been an impediment at times.

Lorrie describes herself as “the voice raiser, the emotional one.” I’m easily frustrated, often tired from traveling. And the fact that I’m always packing up to leave doesn’t help. Marriage counselors advise couples not to go to bed angry. It’s also not a good idea to fly across the country angry, leaving an unhappy spouse at home.

“For me, absence does not make the heart grow fonder,” Lorrie says. She stopped working at PSA a long time ago, and has spent most of her energy since then as an at-home mom. She would love to have a husband who comes home every evening. “We could have a glass of wine, eat dinner together, chat about our day,” she says. “And I don’t even need the wine or the meal. I just want the husband in the room with me.” She and I have nice phone conversations when I’m on the road. “It’s not the same as having you here,” she tells me.

In some ways, it was worse when the kids were younger, because back then Lorrie wanted my hands-on help. For a while we had two in diapers and in car seats, and she felt overwhelmed when I left on a long trip. Sometimes, she’d be in tears as we said our good-byes. In her PSA days, she had once gotten to sit in a flight simulator. “I know the flap settings,” she’d tell me. “I’ll get the plane off the ground. You stay home with two crying babies for four days.” She was joking, but…

Now that the kids are older, she says that when I return home after a four- or five-day absence, my reentry to family life isn’t always smooth. I’m jet-lagged, I’m out of the loop of family activities. I’ve missed a lot. Lorrie says it sometimes takes me a day and a half before I can give something back to the relationship. I’m in the house, but I’m not able to jump back into our normal routine with the same vigor. Sometimes I’m just feeling spent, and not eager to attend to household chores.

I do see myself at times as somewhat of an outsider in my own family. But I love that the girls connect so well with Lorrie, and I understand why my bonds with them are not as effortless. I get it: I’m more formal, I’m male, I’m older, I’m gone a lot.

Parents build up a bank account of interactions and memories with their children. Lorrie has had a lot more moments with the kids than I have, so her bank balance with the girls is higher than mine. Certainly, there’s a lot of love between me and the girls, but I know I have handicaps that I have to work to overcome.

My time away is a challenge. But Lorrie and I have been through great challenges together, and we have spent twenty years working through them. We work hard to find the right balance. We have both learned a lot about ourselves and each other and about what it takes to make a relationship work and to make it rewarding. We have both grown. By working on this together for each other and for our girls, we have become better people. We have invested in ourselves.

HOW DID my personal life, apart from my aviation experiences, prepare me for that journey to the Hudson? I think that these challenges Lorrie and I faced together made me better able to accept the cards I’ve been dealt—and to play them with all the resources at my disposal. Early in our marriage, Lorrie and I were dealt the challenge of infertility.

A year or so after we got married, Lorrie and I began planning to have a family. We spent a year trying to conceive, without success, and then went to a fertility specialist. For six months, Lorrie took Clomid to induce ovulation. Like many women on that drug, she gained weight, and that was troubling for her. She’d been in good shape before starting on the medication, and here, for reasons beyond her control, she just kept getting heavier. She put on thirty-five pounds.

One day she and I were in the car and she turned to me and said, “You never make a comment about how I look or about my weight.” My reply came naturally to me—I just said what I felt—but it meant a lot to Lorrie. I told her: “You don’t get it, do you? I love you for what’s on the inside.”

“That’s what every woman wants to hear,” she said, and she meant it.

Sometimes I get things right.

We kept trying to conceive, but I was off on trips a lot, which made it hard for Lorrie and me to connect at the appropriate moment. A couple of times, she flew to the city where I was staying on a layover so we wouldn’t “waste” a thirty-day cycle. It wasn’t exactly romantic. We were focused and a bit tense. We were on a mission.

The Clomid didn’t work, so eventually we turned to in vitro fertilization. The cost was $15,000—not covered by insurance—and we were told the success rate was about 15 percent. Lorrie needed to endure shots at 2 A.M. and 2 P.M., and when I was home, I’d give them to her. When I wasn’t home, she gave them to herself.

These were not easy times for Lorrie. “I feel like my body has betrayed me,” she’d say. “My body won’t do the one thing it was designed to do, the one thing that separates one gender from the other.” We’d been raising guide dogs for the blind, and a couple of the dogs were pregnant at the time. “It seems like everyone and every animal I meet is pregnant,” Lorrie would tell me. “Everyone except me.” I knew she felt deeply wounded, but I didn’t fully know how to help her.

I was the one who had to tell Lorrie that the in vitro effort hadn’t worked. She took one look at me and she knew. I had what she later described as a completely flat expression on my face.

I felt devastated for myself, but even more so for Lorrie. All I could say to her was: “Honey, I’m so sorry.” We hugged each other and she cried for a while. I tried to be stoic for her, but I was hurting, too.

We went back to the doctor, who told us we were both still relatively young—I was thirty-nine and Lorrie was thirty-one—and we should consider trying again.

Lorrie had gotten to know another woman who was a patient at the clinic, and on the day Lorrie learned she wasn’t pregnant, that woman was thrilled to learn she was. But then, a few days later, the woman was told that actually her pregnancy hadn’t taken. It was possibly more devastating to have such high hopes dashed. When Lorrie heard this news, she decided she’d had enough.

“What’s our main goal?” she asked me, and then she answered. “Our goal isn’t for me to be pregnant. Our goal is to have a family. And there are other ways we can do that.”

Before she met me, Lorrie had been a longtime Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteer. She saw that as both a duty and a labor of love. She began mentoring her “little sister” when she was twenty-six and the girl was five. Now Lorrie is fifty and her little sister, Sara Diskin, is twenty-nine, and they’re still close. And so when Lorrie was unable to get pregnant, she was able to frame our predicament very clearly. “I’ve known for a long time,” she told me, “that the beauty of a relationship is not biology. I’m ready to move on.”

And so we decided we’d adopt.

Trying to adopt a baby was also an arduous journey—a long, difficult, emotional, expensive roller coaster—and we learned a lot about ourselves in the process.

Lorrie vowed to approach the adoption search as a full-time job. It took effort to educate ourselves about a process that was not well defined. There were many avenues. Which ones would pay off? Lorrie tried to have a business plan, but adoptions don’t always proceed logically.

The fortunes of adoptive parents vary according to the wishes of birth parents. Their names are buried deep on waiting lists, while their files get dissected at agencies by people who don’t really know them. There’s no clear order to the process.

Lorrie was very emotional through all of it, and my attempts at a workmanlike approach didn’t always help. “You don’t know how to console me,” she told me at one point. “It’s outside your parameters. You’re unable to feel things the way I feel them.”

Lorrie struggled with all the paperwork we had to file, and the fact that we had to “qualify” to be adoptive parents. It was hard for her. Throughout her infertility treatments, she was poked and prodded. She had surrendered her body in an effort to find her way to parenthood. She had shown her commitment. Now she was being asked to find friends who’d vouch for whether or not she could handle being a parent. It felt almost like an insult.

Lorrie and I handled all the paperwork very differently. One day we exchanged our answers to a set of questions. I had to tell Lorrie: “You’re overthinking this. Just answer the simple question with a direct answer.” She was grateful when I told her that. It allowed her to temper some of her anxiety about the process. She didn’t owe them her life story. She owed them basic answers to their questions.

We met with several sets of birth parents over the months that followed, hoping they’d select us. That was a hard process, too. Lorrie would often be excited after a meeting, certain that we’d get the nod. I tried to be logical and analytical. “Yes, that birth mother said a lot of nice things about us,” I’d tell Lorrie, “but think about what she didn’t say.” Lorrie said I was raining on her parade, but I felt we had to look at everything realistically or we’d set ourselves up for wave upon wave of disappointments.

We met with a variety of birth parents during our search. And then, on December 1, 1992, we flew down to San Diego to meet a woman who was seven months pregnant. The birth father was there, too.

The couple asked us about our lives, our dreams for the child we hoped to someday raise, my schedule as a pilot, everything. They were honest and clear-eyed as we spoke, and so were we. Not long after that, we got word: They had selected us to be the adoptive parents.

At 2 A.M. on January 19, 1993, we got a call that the birth mother was in the delivery room, and we should prepare to fly down to San Diego to pick up our new baby. Lorrie was too excited to sleep. As for me, the realist, I knew that I’d be a better father in the morning if I got some sleep. So I went back to bed. Lorrie couldn’t believe how I could sleep at a time like this. She stayed up, sitting by the phone, waiting.

Kate was born at 4 A.M., and we flew to San Diego just after sunrise. We brought a car seat with us because we’d need it in the rental car once we picked up the baby. Lorrie and I felt a little self-conscious walking through the airport with that empty car seat. Were people looking at us, wondering where our baby was?

When we arrived at the hospital, we went straight to the nursery and saw Kate for the first time; it was an overwhelming moment. I fell in love with her the second I saw her.

Later, a nurse was holding Kate. “Would the mother like to hold the baby?” the nurse asked. The birth mother pointed to Lorrie and said, “She’s the mother.” Lorrie was handed Kate.

Eventually, Lorrie had to use the bathroom, and while she was gone, Kate needed to have her diaper changed. I was proud to be the first of us to get to do that.

Early that afternoon, hospital staffers told us we were free to take Kate and go. Lorrie wanted to say good-bye to the birth mother. “What can you say to a woman who has given you this kind of gift?” she wondered. “I don’t think there are any words.”

Both of us considered the birth parents to be incredibly courageous people. They knew that for whatever reason—their age, circumstances, finances—they couldn’t raise their child. And so they had made a very hard yet loving choice. They had turned their wrenching dilemma into a gift.

Lorrie left the baby with me in the nursery—she thought it would be too hard for the birth mother to see Kate one last time—and she went into the birth mother’s hospital room. As she offered a simple thank-you, she saw a single tear running down the birth mother’s face.

“Just be good to her,” the birth mother said.

It was an overwhelming moment for both of them.

Hospital protocol requires new mothers to leave the hospital in a wheelchair. Lorrie tried to explain that she hadn’t given birth and didn’t need a wheelchair, but the aide with the wheelchair insisted on accompanying us out the front door. And so we walked, holding Kate, as the empty wheelchair was pushed beside us. It was ridiculous and surreal, but it was an amazingly happy moment, too.

In the parking lot, it almost felt as if we had stolen Kate. We looked over our shoulders, wondering if someone would be coming back to get her. We ended up putting her in our car seat, driving a mile from the hospital, and pulling over to the curb.

We looked at each other. We looked at Kate, who looked up at us. I wasn’t crying, but it was as emotional a moment as I’ve ever had in my life. I was a father.

Just fourteen hours after being born, Kate was on her first airplane ride, heading back with us to Northern California. As an aviator, I was certainly happy to get her into the air that quickly.

Two years later, another birth mother looked through thirty-six bios in a book of potential adoptive parents, and after meeting Lorrie and me, agreed to make us parents for the second time. On January 6, 1995, when the call came that the birth mother had gone into labor with Kelly, I was in Pittsburgh, receiving simulator training on the MD-80. I cut short my training and made plans to return home as soon as possible, which was the following morning.

Lorrie, meanwhile, headed to the hospital. For the birth mother, it was a very long labor, and Lorrie stayed up for twenty-four hours straight, just waiting. Unlike when Kate was born, this time Lorrie was in the delivery room, and the whole day had a cinematic feel to it. There was a huge storm outside, with rain coming down in buckets and a howling wind. Then, when Kelly was finally crowning, a nurse gasped and said, “Oh my gosh!”

Lorrie was taken aback. “What, what, what?” she said, her heart pounding.

The nurse answered, “We’ve got a redhead!”

As soon as Kelly arrived, just after 10 A.M., the doctor handed her to Lorrie, which was an overwhelming moment for her. The rain. The thunder. This new beautiful baby. And I missed it all. While Lorrie was cuddling Kelly in the first seconds of her life, I was above the clouds somewhere over Denver.

I made it to the hospital that afternoon, and seeing Kelly for the first time was another moment of instant love and gratitude. And the most amazing thing was how much Kelly looked like me when I was a baby: the shape of our heads, our eyes, our Irish coloring. I was strawberry blond as a boy. We’d later mount baby photos of me and Kelly side by side in a frame, and it was hard to tell us apart. It’s interesting how that goes in an adoption sometimes. Lorrie likes to say that we are blessed to have children who resemble us. It’s not that we need the girls to look like us, but it’s nice that they do. And over the years, it meant that if we opted not to voluntarily tell various people about the adoptions right away, we didn’t have to.

Kelly’s adoption was more complicated than Kate’s. There are a lot of factors that can slow down the paperwork—or even make it fall through. It’s hard for birth mothers to make their decisions final. They often have family pressures to consider.

Lorrie and I had to deal with some of these issues, and we struggled with the uncertainty. We passed the hours at a restaurant called Taxi’s, which was near the hospital. We ate lunch and dinner there while we anxiously waited for the paperwork to come through. We were deathly afraid, with time passing, that some bureaucratic snafu could lead other issues to unravel, and keep the adoption from being finalized. At one point, I had a very forceful conversation with the hospital administrator, telling him that the hospital had to get its act together. I was pretty worked up and assertive, but it was necessary to break the logjam.

On the day we brought Kelly home, we had her in a car seat in the back of our car. Two-year-old Kate came out of the house and stared quizzically at this baby. She thought Kelly was a new doll she was getting as a present. She’d soon know better.

Out there at the car, Lorrie and I looked at each other and I said what I was thinking: “We’re a real family now.”

As we get deeper into our marriage, Lorrie and I have become big believers in the idea that we should focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have. We have weathered some serious storms in our relationship, but on a lot of fronts, we feel closer than ever now. And we really try to live in a way that allows for the word gratitude. In fact, Lorrie has since made a career as an outdoors fitness expert, helping other women stay in shape physically and emotionally. As part of her work, she teaches women about the power of accepting life as it presents itself, and enjoying that life.

Lorrie and I have vowed to appreciate each other, appreciate our two daughters, appreciate every day. We don’t always maintain that positive attitude. We still have our arguments. But that’s our goal.

And so, yes, I choked up seeing our two teenage daughters arm in arm, skipping down that street at Lake Tahoe. It reminded me of what I’ve missed, and that was hard for me. But it also reminded me of how lucky we all are to have one another, and why we have a duty to try to live happily together, from a place of gratitude.