The following reflection was written by Forsythia. 

I am an adoptive parent.

I wish I could say that adoption was something I’ve always been passionate about; that I’ve always wanted to adopt and that my heart is full of concern for children without parents.

It is important to me that adoption not be seen as “the answer to infertility,” because there are many ways that this perspective is unhealthy to the family and unfair to the adopted. I do not believe that adoption is only for infertile families. I want to be the noble, sacrificial self that people assume of adoptive parents.

And yet…and yet.

I did not come to the option of adoption by compassion or self-sacrifice or passion or choice. I came to it because of my life circumstances.

It was a long journey from attempting natural conception to infertility testing to adoption; a long road littered with grief and loss and confusion and shame. It is an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

And yet…and yet.

Our messy and unconventional story opened our minds first and then our hearts to a child that isn’t biologically ours.

My life experiences leading up to our infertility gave me no context for anything other than a traditional family and biological children. I could not imagine loving or bonding with a child with whom I didn’t share a biological connection. I was too afraid of the risks of adoption to move beyond them. I had spent years—my whole life, really—constructing a dream that did not include adoption; all my expectations and hopes had taken a different route. When infertility set fire to this life map, I found myself utterly directionless.

Infertility was the cause of my confusion and disorientation. It was the cause of my loss and the death of certain beautiful dreams.

And yet…and yet.

It was also the compass that redirected me. It was the sign pointing me in a new direction: because I knew the places I could not travel, I also knew the places where my feet could move forward. Adoption was new territory that I had not considered, would not have considered, without infertility’s presence in my life.

It feels very risky to say this out loud, but I know it to be true in my life: I am thankful for our infertility.

Over the six years that I screamed and kicked and wailed at infertility, wishing it a horrifying end as if it were an embodied thing, I never once considered that I might say those words…that I might actually associate gratitude with infertility. But I say it now with whole and pure conviction.

I thought I was being denied a child that was the product of our marital love; my adopted son is absolutely a product of our love. I thought I would feel disconnected from a person who did not share my features, my DNA, my blood; my adopted son is as close to my body as my own breath. He is the child that I dreamed of. And yet, I didn’t dream him up. He is a gift that I did not truly ask for or expect.

I am grateful that God saw my whole story and was faithful to see it done. Did he make us infertile so that we would consider adoption? Do both pain and joy come from his hand? Or does he simply work joy out of the pain that the world gives us? I don’t understand these mysteries. I love this little boy with my entire being. He is a gift I did not imagine or deserve. The process of adoption, living in an open adoption, being his mother…these things are doing something in me that is full of beauty and power, that is making me a more open minded, honest, tender, compassionate woman.

I don’t understand these mysteries. But I see my story becoming so much bigger, so much more exquisite, than the one I had in mind. I am grateful for the agents that helped to shape it. Yes, including Infertility.