Before Cora came home, Cassie and Jonathan Eubank sat their kids down. Paisley was five. Jackson was three.
“We told them, this is a baby we’re going to welcome into our home, and we’re going to love on her as long as the Lord gives her to us,” Cassie says. “We don’t know if that will be a short amount of time, a long amount of time, or forever.”
It was a promise the whole family would have to keep without knowing how it would end.
Not on the same page at the same time
The idea went back further than their kids. On one of their first dates, Cassie and Jonathan had the kind of conversation most couples put off for months: ministry, kids, how many. Both of them said adoption might be part of their story someday.
Then life happened. Jonathan became the full-time pastor at their church. Paisley was born, and Cassie brought up fostering. Jonathan said one kid was all he could handle. Jackson came along, and she brought it up again.
“He was like, ‘Are you kidding? We aren’t even sleeping now,’” Cassie laughs. “We just weren’t on the same page at the same time.”
In 2020, everything slowed down. The kids were a little older. And because of COVID, NECCO moved its foster parent classes online, so they didn’t have to find a babysitter for four hours every week. For the first time, they were both ready. They started classes in October.
Hannah still reads to Eli most nights. The truck book has been retired. The dinosaur book has not.
The call came the next day
The Eubanks set one rule: they would only take a child younger than Jackson, to keep their kids’ birth order intact. Their worker warned them that babies almost never came through. They widened the range and waited for what they were told could be a long time.
Their home was opened for placements. The next day, the phone rang.
A baby girl had been in the NICU in Huntington for more than 100 days. She was born at 23 weeks, and she would need extra medical care at home. Cassie is a nurse.
“We were told for months that it could be a while,” Jonathan says. “And it was the next day.”
Cora had been born that October, the same month they started their classes.
Five pounds and an oxygen backpack
Cora came home at the end of January 2021, after 111 days in the hospital. She weighed five pounds and was still on oxygen.
The weeks that followed were full: cardiology and respiratory appointments, visits from caseworkers and her guardian ad litem, court hearings held online. Cassie kept a binder of everything, down to every dose of medication.
The family found its rhythm anyway. “Everybody fell into a routine,” Jonathan says. “You carry the oxygen backpack, you carry the pulse ox monitor. Like you do when any other member of your family joins.”
A keepsake from the NICU
Loving her all the way
Paisley and Jackson attached to Cora almost immediately. A few weeks in, the whole family knew what that meant.
“We were like, God forbid she ever has to leave us, because we’ll all be so brokenhearted,” Cassie says.
When people asked about the risk to their kids, Cassie had an answer.
“I want my kids to understand what real love is,” she says. “If what God is asking us to do is love a child for a while and then send that child back, I want them to understand that that’s what love does. It looks out for the best interests of that person.”
Holding both at once was the hardest part. “You have this baby that you want to love the way she deserves to be loved, completely,” Cassie says. “And at the same time, there’s a part of you that says, I have to make sure I’m still here for my other kids.”
Paisley and Jackson with Cora
Bigger than one house
The Eubanks didn’t carry it alone. Their DHHR worker became their constant, the person who kept them grounded through 16 months of hearings and uncertainty. Their church followed Cora’s story with them.
And Cassie’s dad, a six-foot-four man little kids have always loved, kept his distance at first. He told them he didn’t know if he could love her the same as the other two. About a month in, Cassie’s mom handed him the baby on the couch and said she had to go to the bathroom.
Today, Cora is his person. “He says, ‘I was wrong,’” Cassie says. “‘I was trying to protect myself.’”
Real love is sacrificial. Real love requires something from me.
Cassie Eubank
Adoption day
When the adoption date came, friends told them they must be so excited.
“You are, but you’re not,” Cassie says. “You’re waiting for something to go wrong.”
[Adoption day: where it was, who came, one specific moment. What Paisley and Jackson did.]
Even afterward, Jackson would come in and ask, “Is she going to stay forever now?” They kept telling him yes until he believed it.
Every day at home looks different for the Eubanks – yet that's what makes it feel the same.
Worth every minute
Cora is five now. [What she’s like: two or three concrete details.]
[What a normal day looks like at the Eubanks’ house.]
[What they’d tell a family that’s been thinking about fostering.]
“We know she will have questions as she grows,” the Eubanks say. “We hope she never questions whether she is loved.”
Our daughter is worth every minute, they say. They wouldn’t change a thing.
