{On the Soapbox} About Birthmothers

While things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately, I can assure you that life certainly has not been so calm. As my last post mentioned, we will soon be packing up everything we own (after purging/selling/donating a good portion of it) and making yet another big move. Since we first got word of our next location, our moving date has been bumped up a few months, the last of our home study paperwork has been turned in and is waiting for approval, and our family profile has been completed! I have a stack of them just waiting to be sent out the moment we get our home study approved.

The past few weeks have been pretty intense, as the reality of our current situation seems more and more daunting. Moving is always a rather scary and expensive thing, and coupling that with an upcoming rather scary and expensive adoption makes everything seem even more scary and more expensive. We have a LOT of unknowns ahead of us, especially since we don't even know if we will have our baby before we move. That extra person makes a pretty huge impact on how a lot of our decisions will be made. I've found myself getting caught up in our own circumstances a lot more than I should.

So while I alternate between excited anticipation and overwhelming anxiety, I've begun to get emails of potential "situations" from our adoption consultant. "Situations" are notices of expecting families who are considering potential adoptive parents to place their baby with. The first of these emails I received simply broke my heart (and each one since has continued to do so). Not only was the expectant mother in a really hard place, but getting to see her picture and read a little of her story made this whole thing so much more real. It's not the same as picking out a baby doll from a store or choosing a cute puppy from a breeder. These are real people with real problems who need real love. The joy we will have in welcoming a precious baby into our home (or extended stay hotel room, depending on the timing) cannot happen without the broken sadness of the birth family. Giving us their baby is not the extent of their story. They will continue to exist with the empty space the baby will leave behind. We will not be able to forget them regardless of how open or closed our adoption will be. In fact, there have been one or two of these emailed situations that I have not been able to stop thinking about, even though we never even had a chance at adopting their babies. I dream about them. I cry over them in the shower. I pray for them. And while I will probably never actually meet them, their faces are imprinted on my memory. Knowing we could not be matched with a particular one of them (due to our home study approval seeming to take FOREVER), I still found myself checking with the agency to make sure she had found a family to adopt their little one and was thrilled to find out she did.

I know I'm probably not alone in being quick to judge others for their poor life choices, but this process is making me more aware that these poor life choices are always made by people. Hurting people. Broken people. Confused people. Misinformed people. People just like you and me. Contrary to popular belief, these ladies are not rebellious teenagers who are too lazy or too stupid to care for their own children. A lot of them are well out of their teen years, and some of them are even married to the baby's father. But for one reason or another, they don't have the resources or ability to raise their children the way they want to, so they make the selfless and more difficult choice of adoption. Before we started actively pursuing our interest in adoption, I assumed birth mothers were taking the easy way out and abandoning their children out of selfishness. I was so very wrong. They love their babies enough to give them the best chance at life, and that speaks of more courage than I can even imagine. I'm very sorry that I ever looked down on these brave ladies, and I hope our own adoption story can help change some of the common misconceptions many of us had/have had about such things.

Making Like a Tree...

Back in 2012, when we were in the midst of our move nearly halfway around the world, I mistakenly said to Darling, "After all the craziness these past 4 years have held, life is going to seem so boring and uneventful in comparison from here on out." Two and a half years later, and I can honestly say things got more interesting, more eventful, and more memorable than I ever could have imagined. This tiny little southern town and its surrounding areas hold some of the sweetest, dearest, and absolute bestest people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. Some of them held our sweet Osias, and some of them held me during the difficult moments of his life and afterwards. Some of them welcomed us back to the church family after our too-long absence and encouraged us to grow and rediscover how much God truly loves us. Some of them have become lifelong friends that I will always treasure, and that I truly hope to reunite with again someday.

My last three pregnancies began and ended here. We bought our first house here. Our kids saw a squirrel for the first time here (seriously! Hawaii doesn't have squirrels). Our oldest kids learned how to ride a bike here. This was the place that offered so much sweet tea that my kidneys hurt for the first few weeks we lived here. We saw our first monster truck show here. We laughed here. We cried here. We hurt here. We healed here. We grew here. We loved here.

And now we are leaving here.

Being a military family, that isn't really too surprising, moving and all. It's a known fact we most likely won't ever stay in one place for more than 3 or 4 years, and we had no expectation (or desire, if I'm being completely honest) that here would be any different. Yet somehow when Darling got his orders, I realized just how deep our roots were planted during our time here. This is the only house I've ever dreamed about, besides my childhood home. It's going to hurt to leave this place in a few months. I know I'm going to be leaving a hefty piece of my heart here when we go, even though I hope I gain a new piece of my heart in our new home. And while I now know better than to make any predictions about how eventful or not our next chapter will be, I'm filled with bittersweet excitement to begin it. I want to live out the next few years with more passion and interest than I have in the past, because I know more now than I did when our last chapter began. I carry a powerful reminder of how short life can be, and I know that this moment is the only one we are guaranteed to have.