Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia. I'm Leah Tau. And today we're revisiting Patrick and Steve from the episode Two Men and a Baby, who had had a recent change in their lives when I first met them.

They delivered her like a pizza. There was a caravan that pulled up and the social worker came. So I said, can I take your code?

And she said, no, no, I won't be staying long. And they handed her to me with a bag of formula and said, feed her every four hours. And she left.

And there I was in this room with a baby.

If you haven't heard the original story, perhaps you want to go check it out. It's from last June, exactly a year ago. But let me catch you up a bit. Patrick and Steve had decided to become dads, but as a gay couple, you know,

they couldn't just make a baby, and they couldn't afford straight up adoption. So they decided

to do foster to adopt, which means that you foster a child in the hopes that it'll be freed for adoption.

So they got certified as foster parents, and they were told it would take months, if not years, before they got a baby.

Six hours later, the agency called to say they had a newborn for them, and baby Violet arrived

on their doorstep, like a pizza, and just like that, their lives changed.

Overnight, our life went from, like, theater and happy hour to, like, feeding and learning how to make a bottle,

trying to figure out what all those sounds mean and changing diapers and being up all night.

But they loved it and they loved the baby.

I tried to be in the mindset of like, it's okay to love her.

Just no, like try not to get overly attached, you know. But like, yeah, there's

nothing I could have done about it. The reason, of course, to try not to get overly attached was

that Violet wasn't legally theirs. But they'd been straight up about their desire for permanent

adoption, and they had requested a baby who was likely to be freed for adoption,

meaning a baby whose birth parents weren't actively trying to get her back.

But then came the news that Violet's birth parents were, in fact, actively trying to get her back,

which was the beginning of an emotional and legal rollercoaster ride for Patrick and Steve.

I mean, I can't not go to that place where I see that day that we have to give her back to them,

...