Miss-Matched: An Adoption Story
I have been going back and forth on what to do with this blog site for over a year. The busyness of leading a ministry at church and my cleaning business leaves my brain drained from creativity. I have also been trying to limit my time online and in social media overall this year and have found relaxation and joy from pursuing my reading and crocheting hobby instead.
All this being said, I also started this blog to open up about our story and journey to parenthood. Going all the way back to trying to conceive, to feeling led down the path of adoption. And now we have been in a state of waiting. There's very little news to share when nothing new is happening, but I feel like I owe it to the people invested in our lives, to the people following along with our journey that are also waiting to become parents, to allow them into our lives and feel apart of a community.
So, for now, I am back to writing! Starting with our latest piece of our story: Back in January I wrote of our Summer 2024 adoption situation. And now we have a new situation on the adoption front for this Summer of 2025.
On June 11th we received the call, a birthmother chose us. Words could not describe the joy, excitement and anxiousness we felt all wrapped together. We called certain friends and family and let our workplaces know the situation. The baby was due in early July but could arrive anytime over those next few weeks. We decorated for gender, started getting more seasonally appropriate clothing, pulled out the bouncers, diaper changing stations and toys. I reread some key passages in baby books and asked my mom friends for advice. Chris and I went out to eat to celebrate and we started visualizing our lives as parents.
We were set to meet with the birth mother and her caseworker on June 16th. We stopped at a flower shop to pick up a bouquet as a way to express our thanks for being chosen. And then an hour into our drive, her caseworker called us. She had been talking with family over the weekend and they told her they would support her and the baby, so she chose to parent instead. We pulled off the nearest Exit, found a safe spot to park and just held one another and cried.
We said we would not let the enemy win like last summer, we said it was okay to feel sad about this, but that ultimately the birth mother made the decision she felt was best for her baby and that is more than okay too. We have a heart for birth mother's, this decision is not an easy one. We simply said this just wasn't our baby, but it still hurt.
We called our moms and let everyone know what had just transpired, collected ourselves and headed back home. We took everything we had put up, down and put everything we had set out, away. We crawled into bed and just went through the motions. We took the rest of the week off to rest and be gentle with ourselves, for me this meant crocheting, Chris after a day needed to busy himself so he worked on some home projects.
2 weeks later we are doing better, still have fleeting thoughts, still trying to find peace in it all. I was telling someone at church about our story and the recent events, she told me our experience was akin to a miscarriage, having had 2 miscarriages herself a wave of new emotions swept over me. Chris and I have never experienced a real miscarriage and I would never describe what we went through as anything like that, it feels too insensitive of me, but after my talk with this woman I can't help but feel like it kind of is. We were parents and now we're not, we visualized life with this baby and now it's gone. No I don't have any of the hormonal or physical affects of an actual miscarriage, but I lost a baby and the gravity of that realization is so heavy.
Chris and I were talking our frustrations out the other night and I told him that I hadn't just sat with my thoughts since the day it happened, because I want to be fine and past it all. Or maybe it's really that I don't want to feel sad, and I need to be fine so that I can continue living my life. But this morning I sat, with no tv on, no phone, no music playing and it was hard. Hard to sit, hard to face myself. I then picked up a devotional "Longing for Motherhood." and in it I read a section that talked about how we can become misaligned in our desires. How we can become so focused on idolizing the gift, that we forget about the gift-giver.
God wants me to long for Him, more than I long for a child, and that convicted me on the spot! Everything we have in life that is good is a gift from God, and I know I am guilty of taking those things for granted. My marriage, my good health, my safety, my friends, family, church, the fact that I woke up this morning is a gift, but I'm still too focused on what I don't have. I feel entitled to motherhood and it's something that I need to change in my heart.
God, owes me nothing. He loves me, guides me and is the author of my story, but I need to be better about choosing Him, leaning on Him, and longing to be with Him. Because, one day, after my children are all grown and have children of their own, it will just be Chris and me again. We all have an end date and this world won't be around forever. But God is yesterday, God is today and God is forever and I want to chase after Him and His love, the only constant in all of our lives.
We still believe that our baby is out there somewhere and we cannot wait to share our story with them one day, for now God is shaping and molding us into the parents we will need to be, the people we will need to be to share that no matter what we desire, God loves us and wants that love in return.
