I've been carrying news with me for some time now and like most everything else in our life post-loss, it feels very layered and complicated...because it is. But it's also exciting and something that we're really anxious about, but in a good way for once.
We are adopting!
Last April, we started to feel little nigglings of something pulling at our heartstrings. It had been eight months since Evelyn died and the grief was still overwhelming but a space had opened up in our hearts and we knew, deep down, it was time to sit down and talk about our family-building options. We both agreed that for us, infertility treatment was a thing of the past. After 8 long years, we were ready to close that particular chapter of our lives. Evelyn is it, our biological miracle, our beloved daughter who far surpassed any expectation. Truly, I could not have imagined a more perfect soul that our bodies together could have created. She was flawless, like a tiny little doll. She was/is everything we could have dreamed and so much more. Her precious life ended
far before it should have and I treasured every moment of my pregnancy with her, and yes, it does indeed make me very sad to know that I will never again experience the awe of life within my own body, but it was time, for many reasons, to let go of that particular dream. Evelyn made us parents. We will ALWAYS be her mom and dad and she will ALWAYS be our firstborn, our perfect, beautiful little girl. But being parents and parenting are quite different. Yes, Evelyn is our child and yes, we parent her the very best way we can from afar, but our hearts still yearn to parent a child in a way we are unable to parent Evie. Our arms yearn to hold a child who is ours again, and we yearn to experience parenthood in the traditional sense. All of that was taken from us when Evelyn died -- to know that I will never again hold her in my arms, never hear her sweet little voice or laugh, never watch her grow and play and experience life for herself, is pain beyond comprehension. We cannot bring her back, cannot undo what is done. But we can try to find our way to Evelyn's sibling. And, we believe she will help us along in our journey to find her brother or sister.
Even though three of our friends have so graciously offered to be surrogates over the years, in the end, it just didn't feel right. At least, not right for right now. I won't say never, because never is a very long time and I never, ever thought the life we now lead would be ours, but it is. And so, I can never say never, again. While I was pregnant with Evelyn, we decided that once she was about a year old, we'd pursue adoption. It was a choice that felt right for our family then and it still does. And so, after Evelyn's first birthday (which we celebrated with friends, birthday cake, balloons and all, because every child deserves cake on their birthday), we started the adoption application process and after three months of home studies and mounds of paperwork, as of December 16, we are officially an actively waiting family! It still feels surreal, if I'm being honest, but it also feels really good to start out our new year with hope on the horizon.
The adoption process is fraught with unknowns and what if's. It's complicated and layered, just like our emotions. After all, grief is very much a part of the adoption journey: someone must say goodbye to their child, someone's life is taking an unexpected turn. There is brokenness and pain amidst the joy of welcoming another child into our lives, and I think that aspect in large part can be forgotten by people "on the outside." Our future child's birth mother/parents, whoever they are, are already people we hold close in our hearts, for we have such compassion for what lies ahead for them. We, too, have left the hospital without our child in our arms. We understand, albeit through a different set of circumstances, what that reality feels like. And so their pain will not go unacknowledged. One of the things I am most anxious about is meeting our future child's birth mother...looking her in the eye and seeing the pain of loss and grief reflected there that I know so very well. Will she trust me enough to be another mother to her child? Will she resent me, fear me, hate me? Love me? What will we say to one another? What can anyone say that fully encompasses the enormity of the gift and the loss and the miracle of this new family brought together by circumstances that defy explanation? We will figure it out, one step at a time, of that I am sure. But my goodness, what a journey.
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And so, we wait. It's been just over a month and already, the waiting feels so very heavy. But I think it's the cumulative weight of the wait I'm feeling. Next month will mark 10 years, a full decade, of trying to build our family.
T E N Y E A R S. We have been through so much, so so much, since embarking upon this journey-turned-odyssey of ours in February of 2008 and it's incredibly frightening to open ourselves up to the possibility of hope once again. The fact that we can even find hope after all we've endured feels like it's very own little miracle of sorts.
If I may make a request, please keep us in your thoughts as we wait to be matched with an expectant mother. Every new day could be
THE day and that fact has me checking my phone about a dozen times a day, just to make sure I haven't missed a call! It's an exciting time, but it's daunting, too. Knowing our life could change again on a dime is scary but we're as ready as we'll ever be. We trust that Evelyn will help us find the little one who is meant to join our family, the special child who will turn our family of three into a family four {or maybe more}. We don't know when and we don't yet know who they will be but we are very eager to find out. Until then, we hold on to hope.
"Hope is the thing with feathers..."
