New Arrivals Day

This past Sunday was New Arrivals Day at our church. Because our new baby girl snuck in at the tail end of 2012, we got to present her to and celebrate her with our church family. We were asked to speak about our story of becoming parents, but I was too busy to even think of putting something together to say. I had forgotten about the following that I wrote a while back. It means a lot to me, so I would like share it. This was written before my newest arrival came into my life. I promise to write about her journey into our family too. Her story is as beautiful and as special as her big brother's.

The Choice of Adoption

I remember when my sister told me she and her husband were trying to get pregnant.  My response was one word: why?  I’m not sure which was more of a driver behind my question, that my formerly party-crazed sister wanted to be a mother or that people could choose to have a baby.  I thought babies happened accidentally for the most part.  I’d never thought about someone planning to have one.  My sister was three and a half years older than me. Most of my friends were still in the stage where you pray that you aren’t pregnant and not the reverse.  On top of that my sister and I, both, have health problems that complicate the whole fertility process.  I found out when I was eighteen.  A nurse practitioner ordered an ultrasound, handed me a pamphlet, and sent me on my way.  I didn’t even know what it meant until I shared the pamphlet with my mother.  She cried, mourning the loss of future grandchildren that I may not have had anyway.  My mom’s tears affected me, and I did feel bad, like I’d lost something that I never even thought about pursuing, but I was eighteen.  Not having children didn’t mean much to me at that point. I never fully accepted that pregnancy was even an option.

My sister shared her fertility pursuit with me.  I was curious to learn how much people would go through just to have a baby.  I watched her cry over failed pregnancy test after failed pregnancy test and the strain it put on her marriage. And still, when I reached that same decision point in my life, after scoffing at my sister’s choice a few years earlier, I walked straight into the door of hope, believing that I, too, could get pregnant.  My sister was older and I knew that meant that she would have the first grandchild.  I really struggled with the decision to start the process.  I saw how much pain she had been through in her quest to become a mother, and I didn’t want to add to it by getting pregnant before she did.  At the same time, I didn’t want to miss my chance.  The odds were stacked against me; I at least needed youth on my side. 

Looking back, I don’t know why my husband and I didn’t consider all of our options to begin with.  We, like all other people seemed to, assumed pregnancy was the first route everyone had to choose if you wanted to be parents.  We lined up like cattle along with all the other couples being prodded through the fertility clinic gate.  We went along with the whole regimen.  We did as we were told; I took the pills I was supposed to take.  We had scheduled intercourse according to the doctors’ schedules and not ours, it was no longer making love or even sex, it was a mandated mission.  They made appointments and I showed up, sometimes not even knowing what was on the agenda for the day.  The first time there was a real chance of pregnancy, I found myself believing.  I let go of all my inhibitions and all the voices telling me it was impossible, and I believed.  I enjoyed a few weeks of bliss, a few weeks of still having a chance.  I hadn’t read the negative test yet; I could still pretend it was happening.  I even told my husband to just let me enjoy pretending that it worked because I knew it might be the closest I’d come to getting pregnant. And when I did read the negative test, I fell hard.  I was devastated.  I felt like a fool for believing. I couldn’t go through it again.  I had two more appointments scheduled at that time, but I didn’t show up.  I didn’t even call to cancel. 

I pushed the longing to be a mother just outside my reach and tried to move on with my life.  My husband and I had spoken the word adoption before.  With all the fertility issues, it was bound to come up.  We had always said it was a beautiful thing and that if the biological route didn’t work out we’d consider it.  I was just talking, though.  It was just something you say, something to take the pressure off.  I never even thought it through; at the time I still believed I would get pregnant.  Sometime during my motherhood hiatus, God started to work on me.  Maybe he started before that even, but he kicked it into high gear during that time, while he was rebuilding my heart.  During that time my sister started working at an adoption agency.  She told me beautiful stories of families uniting.  She told me about the process, the good and the bad.  I found it all interesting, but I hadn’t thought about it for me yet.  I think some part of me was still waiting for her to go first. 

This was also the time period when Angelina Jolie was about to adopt her second child.  She has been criticized by the media and has been the butt of many jokes.  I don’t know her.  I don’t know how she is in real life, but she served a purpose in mine.  I saw pictures of her with her tan-skinned baby boy clinging to her neck.  She was his mother and he was her son.  I could see, from a picture of someone I had never met, that your mother is not only the woman who gave birth to you.  Genes don’t matter.  Children know who their mommies are.  I dreamt of my own tan-skinned baby after seeing that picture of her.  She named her baby Maddox and so did I.

My husband and I came to the decision at the same time.  The day we heard on the radio a woman born in Korea, telling her own adoption story, of how at eight-years-old she spit in the face of a tall white man and still he chose her, we grabbed for each other’s hand and shared a look – his wistful, mine tear-filled – and we knew right then that we were going to adopt someone.  We were going to accept a living breathing person as our own and raise him as our child.  Several months later, when we got our referral and were given pictures of a tiny four-day-old baby, we did the math.  My Maddox was conceived around the same time my husband and I had made our decision.  He belonged to me from the beginning.  From the moment he was two cells combining, he was mine. 

Adoption is miraculous and meaningful, but the choice is not as simple as, “I want to be a parent.”  That’s the basis, but it’s more.  You have to also choose to love, accept, and parent a child who is different than you.  Even in same race adoptions, the child is not physically an extension of you.  You have to accept what all that means before you open your arms and your home to a child.  But even though the child isn’t a physical extension of you, he will be an extension of your love, if you let him.   

Someday I will tell Maddox how much he means to me.  How God made him for me, and how special he is.  For he has not one mommy, but three who loved him dearly.  A birth mother who loved him enough to save him from a life of hunger and poverty; a foster mother who loved him as her own for the first eight months of his life, knowing the whole time it would end too soon, and not loving him less because of that; and me, the mother that prayed for him to belong to her for years, not even knowing who he was or how he would come to her.   I will also tell him of the sacrifices the other mommies made for him.  I promised his foster mother that I wouldn’t let him forget her and I intend to keep that promise.