Now What Do We Do?
It was actually almost seven years ago that we found out that we would not be able to have biological children. That we would have to make another plan if we wanted to be parents. What were we going to do? I was a complete mess! On one hand, I was so happy to finally have an answer for all of my years of struggling. On the other hand, I felt like I was grieving this great loss. The loss of never carrying a child. Never feeling our child move inside of me. Never hearing that first heartbeat. Never feeling the excitement of seeing that positive pregnancy test. Never seeing Shay's blue eyes look up at me as I rock our baby to sleep. Never brushing that long blonde hair. My heart was shattered!
Now, I also felt like we had just wasted the last 12 years of our lives and our marriage .The anger was starting to set in! All the "what if's" started to play over and over in my mind. What if they would have done the surgery sooner? What if I would have spoken up? What if we had just done things different? Where would we be? But I will tell you, that only leads to complete insanity! As much as I wish I could, I could not change any of it.
The only thing that I could do from here was to work through all of these feelings. The first thing I had to do was realize that it really was ok for me to feel everything that I was feeling. No matter what anyone else was telling me. I had a right to grieve, to be angry, to question, to be disappointed, to be depressed and to have a broken heart. But after a while it was time to move on. I just needed to figure out what that looked like for me and for us as a couple.
Since the day that Shay and I got married, we always talked about adoption being an option in our lives. This has always been something important to me as I was adopted by my step-father when I was young. I don't want to think about what my life would have been if he never came into it. He is my father. So even when we had biological children we were always talking about being open to adoption. God just took out one part of that equation. This was our obvious next step. We both knew in our hearts this was the right choice and we were finally at peace! Now it was time for the next step to begin! How do you even begin to pick an adoption agency? All we knew to do is to research and make some calls. During our research, we were finding that this was a very popular route for couples. There were places wit waiting lists that were years long! Ok, now I was second guessing everything!
We never felt so strongly that this was Gods plan for us, so we put our name on the lists. One particular Agency had a two year waiting list. We gave them our information anyway. The next day the woman called Shay. She said “ this has never happened but everyone on our list has either gone somewhere else or changed their mind. We have two openings in our program “! Um, what? Let us know when to be there!!!!
Yes, there is endless paperwork and they will eventually know more about you than you do. But, holding our son for the first time made every minute worth it!
And if we questioned God’s plan, it was nine months from the day we were accepted into the program to the day our oldest son was born ❤️
Check out the boys as babies on my YouTube channel this week- https://youtu.be/Cxcl9yOrtN0