Seven Month Adoption Check In

** I want to start off by apologizing for the nearly half dozen email notifications about this post before it was finished. There was a server glitch and instead of automatically saving the draft for me while I was still writing, WordPress was publishing the drafts. Yikes! I deleted the unfinished published posts and I’m starting over. Sorry!**

In a week or so, we will have been a waiting family for seven months. SEVEN. That seems so long. I honestly thought we would be matched by now. I was certain we would be matched by the six month mark. I thought it was either an intuitive feeling or some kind of hope from the Lord that was leading me to believe in that six month mark. No cigar. I don’t regret having placed my hope in a certain time frame though. A bunch of friends and family warned me not to pin my hopes on any specific time frame, but I think I needed that at the time. I needed something tangible, like a date {even if it was wrong} to hold onto when things were really getting tough. There’s nothing wrong with thinking positively, especially in adoption. I’m sad that I was wrong, but I’m not discouraged.

Over the past few months, we wrestled with our options in many ways. About a month ago, I started doing research on HG, and read that with pre-emptive medical care in the earliest days of a pregnancy, it can decrease the severity of the illness. Pretty soon, Travis and I were seriously considering going through it all again. I was pretty sold on the idea. Okay, I was totally sold on it. I was having a very hard time dealing with the thought that this adoption process is for the birds, and if I had gotten pregnant when we started our homestudy last April, I would already be done with the awful Hyperemesis nonsense, and we would be the proud parents of two children. I’m not saying my situation is harder than a woman struggling with infertility, but it carries its own trials because I know that I can technically have babies.

The thought that I could go through another pregnancy motivated me and sent me into crazy research mode. I was determined to do it all again. We were trying to plan on when we might go down that awful HG road again. I’m planning to start work on my masters in the fall and am already taking leveling classes to prepare me for the graduate courses required to get my LPC. I was trying to strategically plan when to have an HG pregnancy while still trying to earn my masters in counseling. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but baby fever had hit and I wasn’t thinking clearly.

We had already started looking into reversal procedures for Travis, and we hadn’t really consulted God in our plan. I decided I should be praying about this decision, and I felt nothing but confused when I tried to pray about it. I was just certain that God had called us to adopt, and I was even more certain that He’d led us to our agency and amazing social worker. I simply wasn’t talking to God, and I was ignoring the voice in my heart that told me I shouldn’t be abandoning this adoption. Then the stomach bug hit our house. We all caught the bug, but I got the worst of it. I was HG sick. I threw up every ten minutes for seven hours, and then every few hours for the next day and a half. The thought passed through my mind at one point, “Am I really ready for this again?” The answer? No.

I realized that there was no way I could go through HG again. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder leaves deep scars that never fully heal, and I realized that firsthand when I tried to wrap my mind around going through Hyperemesis again while in the throws of a terrible stomach bug. As the days passed after the stomach flu, I realized that I needed to interpret that as my answer. I’m not big into reading into things as messages from God that could just as easily be coincidental, but this one came with a message deep in my heart. I knew that I wasn’t up to it. I knew that my answer was no. And I knew that we had been called to this adoption because God wanted to do a mighty wonder in and through our family. I don’t want to just toss that opportunity aside.

I’m so glad that we didn’t dive deeper into the process of preparation for another Hyperemsis pregnancy. By going down that rabbit hole again, {or at least taking a peek into it} I realized how beautiful the adoption process is. The wait is just kind of part of the process. Every day that passes where we don’t get that call is another day that adds to our child’s story. And I’m certain this little stumbling block {if you would even call it that} will make the adoption of our child even more valuable.

For me, conquering hyperemesis can only happen through adoption. At least for me conquering it does not mean going through it again. It means look in the face of this terrible illness and saying You didn’t win. We are still furthering our beautiful family and I’m still parenting the family I always dreamed of. With or without pregnancy.

And so, our crazy temptation to say forget it to the adoption process and try another HG pregnancy came and went in the past month. We’re back in this, fully committed to the process. I know that God has called us to adopt, and that he is changing our hearts daily on what we do and do not want in a child. In the past few months, it’s been brought to our consideration that our agency had to turn away three African American birth mothers because they didn’t have any families to offer them. Our amazing social worker called me and asked me if we might prayerfully consider opening our hearts to an African American baby. We prayed about it and visited with one of our friends who is African American {and one of the most amazing, Godly men I know} and we decided that absolutely God was calling us to open ourselves to any race of baby. My fears were rooted in social stigmas, cultural differences, and the ability to expose our child to people of their own race. I’m not worried about that anymore. If God has it in his will for us to parent an African American baby, I fully trust that he’ll make all of that all right, and I just need to commit to the process. We are so on board with the idea now, we’re hoping our babyisAfrican American or biracial!

If we hadn’t tinkered with the thought of stepping outside of what God has called us to do, I don’t think we would have arrived at this place where we’re excited and enthusiastic to be entering into a trans-racial adoption. I think I really needed closure on my pregnancy dream. I needed to bring closure to my image of what my family would look like in my mind and embrace fully the image that God had for us. It’s so much greater than anything I could imagine anyway. I just needed to let go. Facing the possibility of enduring another HG pregnancy finally brought me closure to that dream. I cannot handle pregnancy and my body cannot have biological babies. Plain and simple. And that’s okay. Our family is going to be beautiful, and I can’t wait for the next chapter in our lives.

Kat