Blessings

My husband and I began dating when we were only sixteen. I think I fell in love with him within a few weeks, and I remember sometimes when we would say goodbye I would almost slip and say it. But I was pretty traditional in that sense and had to wait for him to say it first, which was a few months later. We were high school sweethearts, and we had so many plans and ideas. We wanted exactly two children. Many things ebbed and flowed, but that plan never did. It’s funny how God changes plans and ideas. I will share our story of infertility in another post, but it took us a year to get pregnant with our oldest daughter. It was pretty stressful, and we came very close to making an appointment with an infertility doctor. But then I got pregnant, and we had a beautiful, healthy daughter. A couple of years later when we began trying to have another baby we had a lot more difficulty. For years friends of ours told us we should do foster care. They pushed and prodded, and we said no…every time. We did not feel called to it at all. Plus, we had a six-year-old who desperately wanted a sibling, and the thought of her getting one and them being taken away from her was unbearable. So, we kept saying no.

But it’s funny how God chooses to grow families, in His time, in His way. When we are young, and many times even into adulthood, we have this hilarious notion that we are in control. In my experience at least, God shows us pretty quickly that we are actually in control of nothing. We can’t control when we get pregnant or what gender baby we have or whether or not we carry a baby full term. We control none of it. So somehow, miraculously, God began shifting our hearts toward foster care. For us, I do not believe foster care and adoption was a last resort or a backup plan. God very clearly and distinctly shifted our hearts simultaneously with a desire to care for orphans. We were acutely aware of that fact when our friends called and gave one more push toward it, and we both felt compelled to say yes. From that point forward it was a whirlwind of home studies and inspections and absolutely ridiculous questions that you cannot even imagine having to answer. I remember exactly where I was when our resource worker called to tell me that our approval had come through. I had to pull over while I cried. They were happy tears.

We picked our daughter up from the hospital ten days later. I can honestly say I loved her the moment I saw her, sitting in a baby seat being rocked by the nurse’s foot. This little girl stole my heart in seconds. It’s crazy because when you’re pregnant you have almost ten whole months to get used to the idea and to fall in love with your baby, with every kick, roll, and hiccup. But with foster care you get a phone call, and sometimes an hour later you have a baby in your arms. It’s craziness. So, we picked up this six-week-old, ten-pound, baby girl and instantly loved her. It’s the strangest thing when you hold a child in your arms and know unequivocally that this is your daughter or son but also know in the back of your mind that they aren’t yours yet. It’s sobering, and yet our family went from three to four just like that. For a year we loved and cared for this beautiful curly haired girl. We loved and nurtured her. I rocked her to sleep every night and bathed and comforted her when she came home from visits smelling like urine and cigarettes. I wiped every tear and documented every milestone. After a year the random visits with her bio mom stopped, and we held onto hope that we would finally be able to adopt her.

At right about the year mark, we were contacted about another little girl who needed a permanent home. She had bounced around quite a bit from foster home to foster home, and her current home was unwilling to adopt after nine months of her living there. It was quite heartbreaking, but after a year of saying no to every other phone call, we felt like the Lord was telling us to say yes again. So, after a few months of logistical nonsense with the state (a story for another post) we welcomed another daughter into our home, this time a three-year-old. She was bouncy and beautiful and full of energy, and two weeks later we welcomed her two-month-old five-pound little sister. Whirlwind is an understatement. We went from one to four in a little over a year. Our household was suddenly a tornado of activity, and this is a blog about getting real, so I will not pretend that it wasn’t crazy and hard and exhausting. It was certainly all of those things, but we LOVED those little girls. Our hope and desire was to make them all a permanent part of our family and above all to introduce them to Jesus. So, through all the crazy behaviors, crying babies, park visits, and snacks, so many snacks, we persevered. And in November of that year, we permanently gave two of our daughters our last name. Yes, I know I talk about how “All adoption is a trauma” a lot, but I am not gonna lie and say that it was not a joyous day for us. We had loved those little beauties from the moment they entered our home. I’d even venture to say we loved them before that. And we were over the moon to finally, legally, make them a part of our family. I say legally because in every other way they were already our daughters.

About three months after we adopted two of our girls, we got the surprise of our lives. We had a nine-year-old, a three-year-old, a one-year-old, and an eleven-month-old, and I found out I was pregnant. When I say we were shocked it’s because I don’t even have another word that accurately portrays what we were feeling. For TEN years we did not get pregnant, and suddenly we were having another biological child. This is where I wish I could put a shocked face emoji. Because wow we were. We were shocked, but we were also ecstatic, not in any way because we felt like we needed to complete our family with a biological child. No, we were both already sure that our family was perfectly complete with four daughters and had never expected to get pregnant again. We were ecstatic because God chose to continue to grow our family in another miraculous way. He answered our prayers, the prayers we fervently prayed for years, five times over, by giving us five beautiful children. In the fall of that year, I gave birth to a perfect little BOY. And almost exactly 22 months later, in the summer of 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, we finalized the long-anticipated adoption of our last baby girl. And just like that, our family was complete.

Why do I share? Well, there are a few reasons. First of all, this is a blog about getting real, and honestly, I can’t do that without being vulnerable. My hope is that this blog helps other adoptive mamas to feel seen and understood, like they aren’t alone. But in my humanness being vulnerable scares me a little too. Because some people have one or two or three seemingly perfect biological children with regulated brains or no children at all and may not understand the things I talk about. They may judge me. They may judge my kids. I know that. I’ve been there many times. But in this one post I really wanted to show the miracle of what God did many times over in creating the beautiful story and the intricately woven fabric of our family. All of it is His work. And my hope and prayer is that even though I write a lot about the hard, the fervency with which I love my children will bleed through every post. Secondly, I wanted to show the uniqueness with which God puts some families together. Not every family is made from a cookie cutter. Some families are a collage of different shapes and colors. And finally, I wanted to encourage those of you whose families are not yet complete to hold onto hope. God’s ways are not our ways, and His plans are almost always different than ours, but they are also always better. If we had gotten pregnant two years after we had our oldest daughter like we had planned, we would probably have never adopted our beautiful girls. We would have had two biological children as we had always planned, and our family would have been complete at four. But God’s plan was infinitely better. When I think about where my daughters might be had we not said yes to foster care and adoption, had God not allowed that time of infertility in our lives to soften our hearts toward what He had for us, it brings me to tears every time. Yes, things are hard. Yes, we could have had a much easier life. There would have been far less tears and dirty diapers, but I would not be the person I am today. I would be a much more shallow, sinful version of myself. You see, the Lord has used us in our kids’ lives, but he has also used our kids in our lives. He has used them in every way to sanctify me and change me to be more like Himself. He has stretched me and drawn out my sin and shown me how to love unconditionally even when it is not reciprocated, because let’s be honest, sometimes it’s not. He shows me more each day how to love with the kind of love He loves me with. God is good, even through infertility and sadness and heartache. Yes, we could have had an easier life, but it surely would not be a better life.

Psalm 127:3-5 “Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”

As always please contact me with questions. I’d LOVE to chat. Check out my resource page, and don’t forget to click SUBSCRIBE so you get an email when I publish new posts. Thanks for reading!