Everything is different for an 11-year-old boy after his stepfather asked, “How do you feel if I adopt you?”
“I haven’t stopped crying since,” Lisa Arana, a mother of four in San Jacinto, California, tells TODAY.com after the conversation between her new husband and her son, captured on video.
“I’m excited,” Lisa’s husband Raul Arana tells TODAY.com, adding, “The kids are a part of our journey as well.”
Last week, Raul Arana asked Lisa’s son Ezra if he could adopt him, less than six months after the couple married. Their conversation was recorded on a Ring camera inside Ezra’s bedroom, which his mom installed to monitor the boy’s heart condition.
“Ezra, can I ask you a question? You know I love you like my son, right?” Raul asked Ezra in the video, which Lisa posted on Instagram.
“Yeah,” answered Ezra.
“How do you feel if I adopt you?” asked Raul.
Ezra, frozen in surprise, asked, “For real? For real?” then stood to hug Raul.
“Yeah,” said Raul. “Would you like that?”
“Yeah,” said Ezra, crying.
“So, you’re going to have my last name,” said Raul. “You know I love you, right? And I got you.”
As Lisa captioned the video with half a million views: “My heart! I can’t stop crying! My son has been hurt, he’s been rejected, and my husband came into his life and filled the holes in my sons little broken heart, piece by piece!”
The mom tells TODAY.com that Raul’s gesture has given her son more permanency.
“You can see in his eyes — even through the video — that it’s all Ezra has ever wanted,” she says. “He was just waiting for that moment.”
A few years ago, Lisa and Raul met at the barbershop he owns, where she and her children were his clients. Lisa didn’t know that Raul was also a member at the gym where she worked — and that he was secretly building the courage to ask her out on a date.
“It took him eight months!” says Lisa.
The couple got married in October 2023 and Raul became an instant father figure to Lisa’s children, who have different dads.
According to Lisa, Raul raised the idea to adopt Ezra during a drive.
“Out of nowhere, he said, ‘Babe, what do you think if I adopted Ezra?’” says Lisa. “It made me very emotional.”
Lisa added, “It’s one thing for my husband to be a part of my life and love my children because he loves me — but this man wants to be a dad to my son.”
The couple needed to know how Ezra felt.
“He’s old enough to know what he wants,” says Lisa. “We wanted it to be his choice.” No matter Ezra’s answer, she says, Raul would have his back.
Last weekend, Raul knocked on Ezra’s bedroom door.
“I was winging it,” Raul tells TODAY.com. “I was nervous — it was hard to ask a child such a serious question. It caught me by surprise by how Ezra reacted.”
Lisa says her son is “a totally different kid” since learning about the adoption. She says Ezra has been calling Raul, “Dad.”
“Before, Ezra was so angry and you could tell that his sadness followed him,” says Lisa. “Now, he’s so happy.”
The pending adoption, says Lisa, has “repaired Ezra’s whole heart.”
