Time Flies When You Are Chasing a Toddler

Hello Friends,

It has been almost a year since we announced that we were trying to adopt again. And then the rest of the year happened. I changed jobs to a new school and position, we lived through a hurricane, and have spent many a day chasing a sweet, wonderful, BUSY two-year-old and I neglected ye-olde-blog as only I can.

On the adoption front, April and May were exciting. We had two women whom YOU shared our information with, who were looking for adoptive families for their little ones. We sent the profile books and letters and we waited anxiously to know if this was the baby that was going to be placed in our family?! ((Spoiler, neither chose us to be parents)).

The best part of the wait, is the possible matches--we get to pray for young women making the most difficult decision of their lives, and we talk about baby names and start mentally to make preparations for a newborn on such-and-such due day, and imagining life as a family of four. And during all of that, we try in vain not to get excited.  This is also the hardest part of the wait. We cannot help but get excited and then really excited when she has narrowed it down to just a few families and we are on the short list. And then... "she decided that another family was a better fit for her and her baby" hits pretty hard.

Guys, the adoption process is so weird. We pour ourselves into picking pictures and explanations of who we are and why we should be considered to be chosen to be parents to an expectant mother's child. We sell our family in pictures and blurbs. On the other hand, we aren't the right parents for every child and expectant mother making an adoption plan and we strive so hard in those blurbs to be authentic and honest and NOT sell ourselves. The love of our family is real, the desire to grow our family and share that love with another child is tangible, but can you see that love in the two-dimensions of a book? In the 500 words of the profile? Can you see how great of a daddy my husband is, the nights we spend up with her when she is sick or teething or how much fun we have? On the other hand, can you see that we are thoroughly flawed and imperfect parents that we mess up on the daily? 

It is hard not to feel totally rejected with every "no". A few months ago I read this post by a young woman, a birth mother and ethical adoption advocate. She writes about the difficulty of the decision she made, about praying through her decision and about how absurd and unnatural it is to choose a family from a book. She writes: "I am not sorry for the family I picked, but I am sorry that the decision I made meant that you didn't get picked. I never wanted that kind of power. I never wanted to deem one family worthy of a child and another not." As hard as it is to hear that "no," I had never considered how much harder is it to tell someone such a profound "no".

Adoption is awkward and weird. It is not how families are meant to be made. In adoption, each and every adoption, something has gone wrong. Adoption, by its very nature, is imperfect and challenging. But adoption is also redemption and beauty and humanity. Our profile is not a sales listing. On paper we might not look like the perfect parents. We don't live in a huge house, I am not a Pinterest Mom, we are short and are always getting older, we have very few Instagram-worthy pictures, and we aren't rich. Frankly, I don't know if I would pick us from a pile of adoption profiles, either. But if the expectant parents knew us, really knew us, with all our foibles would they choose us to be their children's parents? No profile would cover up the fact that we are not perfect parents. But, here is the thing: no parents are worthy of being parents. Children are too precious to be given to imperfect families. And yet, and yet... 

Everything is grace. The fact that we adopted just makes our family more obviously built on that grace.

Every family is a story of redemption, beauty and humanity. We are not perfect parents, but we hope that God has a child (or even many children) in mind for our family anyway. We don't deserve to be parents. We will continue to hear "no". And we will continue to hope that someone will realize we aren't worthy, but will choose us anyway.

We heard another "no" a couple of weeks ago. The "no" will not cease to be hard, but it does give me the privilege of knowing how much of a privilege it is to be a parent. We are not a two-dimensional family, and we continue to think about and to pray for those women and those babies and the families they choose because they are not two-dimensional either. And that is the beauty that gets me through the no's and the maybe's and even through the silence.

Thanks for reading, thanks for keeping our little family in your prayers, and don't forget to share our webpage so we can hear a few more "no's" and hopefully a yes.

Peace and Good,

J