Tag: adoption

One Who Understands

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pic_windswept_hawthorn1The following reflection was written by Hawthorne. 

We couldn’t have children. That’s what the doctor said. Technically, we couldn’t have children without major medical intervention. We had done that for years already, and I was so, so tired. We had done everything–fertility drugs, multiple I.U.I.’s, two rounds of IVF. My emotions were worn raw and my relationship to them, and to my body, so tenuous. I hadn’t been able to trust my emotions in years: The hormones coursing through my body from the injections I took in an attempt to regulate my body’s broken reproductive signals made me doubt everything I felt and thought. I was done. Three years of trying was enough for me. My heart couldn’t take it anymore.

We quit trying to have kids in November of 2016. It was one of the hardest moments of my life, and for a long time I could do nothing each day but wake up and remember that I was not alone and God was with me. I had no hope in a future that held joy, and everything, even breathing, took effort. Then, slowly, my husband and I started to heal. We had sweet time together. We had great conversations about why we had wanted kids in the first place. We decided to adopt. My heart for adoption grew even bigger as we learned more about the process, although there was definitely fear in that as well. We went through the process and were put on the waitlist for a baby.

And then I got pregnant.

Out of the blue, without intention, without warning. And I couldn’t believe it. My initial reaction was disbelief, followed by anger and grief. I couldn’t talk to hardly anyone about how I felt because my emotions didn’t make sense to anyone I knew–including my husband, although he tried to understand. I didn’t know how to explain to him that I had moved on. My heart had closed to this desire, and to get pregnant after all that just made me feel like the whole infertility experience was a total, meaningless waste. It reminded me again of all the pain of constant disappointment, the constant fighting to not feel rejected by God, and the grief of my early miscarriage.

I think somewhere in my mind I had become a new person after infertility. A person who couldn’t have babies…a person who had been shaped and built by grief. A person who could understood people’s pain and could empathize with others. Honestly, pregnancy made me feel like God had hit the restart button on my life. It felt like he was saying “Oops, my bad, that’s not how it was supposed to go for you! Hang on a sec!” It felt like all the truth and beauty I had found after healing from infertility was a lie. It felt like God had just played with my emotions for four years. It felt like my pregnancy meant my infertility was a giant mistake, honestly, as opposed to some harrowing and horrible journey I had gone on that had ended somewhere good. In my mind, it negated the whole experience.

It took me a long long time to be able to verbalize any of this. No one I knew could help me figure out what I was feeling, and honestly, most people in my life were just super confused about my attitude toward being pregnant. They were overjoyed for us, and so was my husband, but for me it took almost my entire pregnancy before I could believe and feel pregnant. Even then, I dreaded anything stereotypical, from baby showers, to people touching my belly, to getting attention from people. It all made me feel so, so sad and I didn’t know how to communicate to anyone how I was feeling. I felt guilty about the whole thing. Honestly, it was perhaps the loneliest part of my journey toward becoming a parent.

My son was born recently, and parenthood has been so sweet. I am so in love with this tiny person. His birth and being his mom has validated how sweet and real and normal a desire it is to be a parent and has validated how real a loss infertility is for people.

I wish that I could put my experiences in a neat package and give them a purpose. I wish I could say why God made us go through all of that pain if it was going to end the way it did. It was, honestly, meaningless in many ways. But pain often is. Not all darkness leads to discovery and not all tragedy is part of some beautiful story. I wish it were, but I think to do so would be a disservice not only to myself but to everyone who has gone through infertility.

God is not necessarily teaching you something, building you into a better person, or going to give you something “better,” although that may end up being a result of your experiences. He is not preparing you to be a better parent or teaching you a lesson for some past sin. If you do get pregnant, it is not because you did something to earn it or because he has decided after all to “bless” you. This may rub people the wrong way, but listen to what I do believe:

God is with us through it all. He is not toying with us; he is grieving with us. He is our constant companion in a broken, sin-riddled, and painful world. He is showing up and holding our hearts when everything is just too hard. No matter how our stories end, He has promised to be there with us and to hold us as we heal. He is not the grand manipulator teaching us lessons as he jerks our puppet strings. He is our friend, our suffering Savior, and he is the only one who can truly understand our hearts.

 

E for Epiphany

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forsythia

The following reflection was written by Forsythia. 

This story contains spoilers for the film and/or graphic novel V for Vendetta.

I am a Christian. At the heart of my chosen doctrine is the foundational belief in a sovereign God who is crazy in love with me, to the point of great personal sacrifice—his beloved son Jesus. This belief undergirds all other aspects of being a Christian, and so when it is in question, all things are in question.

How can a good, a loving God withhold from me something as natural and beautiful as motherhood? It wasn’t long into trying to get pregnant that this question sprouted in my mind. Years later, its roots were firmly about my worldview. This question—an unresolved doubt about my God and his character—became spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually paralyzing. I found myself either struggling to believe what the Bible said about God’s goodness, or what it said about his power. For how could suffering exist of both of these things were true? It was causing me to abandon the thing that most gave my life purpose, hope, and meaning, at a time when I needed those things the most.

About 5 years into infertility, I was just starting to read the Bible again, and found myself stuck on a chapter in Galatians that spoke about the gift of suffering. I happened to be wrestling with this idea in a lull at work, texting with my best friend as I tried to reason it out, to understand, to make sense of my suffering.

“Is it possible that what feels like torture could actually be love?” I processed with her.  

And then in the room next door, a professor started up a film his class had begun earlier: V for Vendetta. I am so familiar with the film that I could picture its exact images as I listened to the dialogue, sound effects, score. It’s one of my favorites, but I hadn’t thought of it in a while.

There’s a part in the film when the principal character is in prison being tortured for information. She endures this for days, though she has nothing to offer them, until finally, she is told she will be executed. But what happens next is that her cell is left open and unguarded. She ventures out of the prison to discover it was not a prison after all. It was a charade, designed by a man named V.

“You tortured me? Why!” She screams. “Leave me alone! I hate you!”

V explains that it was the only way to free her from the fear that enslaved her—to subject her to what she most feared so that she could face and overcome it. “I wish there was another way,” he says.

Disbelief, rage, grief, betrayal, relief, and pain converge and she begins to hyperventilate. V takes her to the roof. There, she stands in the rain, breathing in the fresh air and feeling it all as though for the first time. She realizes that V has actually accomplished what he set out to do. The absence of fear has made her world big and vibrant, full of possibility and beauty. Fear was being used to take her life from her. Overcoming it allowed her to reclaim it.

It’s difficult to express how much this moment in my life—exposure to this scene as I was grappling with the question of suffering—impacted my relationship with God, and how much it shifted my attitude towards my circumstances and renewed hope in my heart. Not only did it open my mind to a new way of seeing my story, but it represented my pain, disbelief, confusion and heartache in a cathartic way. The scene in that film gave real emotional teeth to a concept that I was just barely able to consider intellectually at the time: that it could be possible for the hardest thing in my life to be the only way for me to reach a place in life that I was meant to reach.

This new perspective was life-altering. It helped me to see beauty and possibility in my story where before I had only seen punishment, anguish, pain, and meaninglessness. And it showed me anew the possibility of the God of the Bible that I had so fallen in love with: personal, loving, powerful.

I can’t claim to fully understand the mystery of suffering and God’s place in that reality. It’s not a new question, and one that has no easy answer (perhaps not even an answer the human mind will ever be able to comprehend). But I do know for my husband and I that if we had not been made to die to our dream of biological children, we would not have opened our hearts to adoption. My adopted son is not just a child. He is a specific, unique human being. I cannot comprehend a world without him in it. Yet, he was not what I yearned after for so many years–not the face I pictured, not the reality I prayed for. I couldn’t see the future , didn’t know to wish for this special little one who would become my little one. But I believe in a divine Someone who sees past, present and future at once. He witnessed our every grief and loss, and he also knew the unspeakable joy that this exact child would bring into our hurting hearts.

Was the suffering of infertility the only way we could have received this incomprehensibly precious gift? It’s hard to hear. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to comprehend. But I believe the answer is yes. 

 

A Loss of Autonomy

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forsythiaThe following reflection was written by Forsythia.

There are turning points in my infertility experience that will stick with me forever. Even for memories that I view differently now, their potency is as alive and near to me today as it was then. One of the most powerful of these moments is when I realized that the only choices available to us in order to grow our family required including strangers in a very intimate part of our lives. And not just temporarily—these strangers would be part of our journey for the long haul.

For six years, my husband and I had been letting go of the picture in our heads of how our children would come into being. One option after another presented itself and drifted away. Before we felt ready for it, we were spending countless hours picking apart adoption and its implications. In this process, we found ourselves drawn towards embryo adoption. Our first concept of what this would look like for us included anonymity. We were still grieving the loss of our dream for biological children, and the only way we could wrap our minds around bringing an adopted child into our lives was to think of them as ours–which is to say unattached from anyone else.

Our doctor told us that the most challenging part of embryo adoption would be finding embryos. We could go through an agency that would double the price of our procedure, or we could be wait-listed for an indeterminate length of time. Months before this appointment, we’d been told through a third party about a couple in our city looking to adopt out their embryos. What had once seemed like a random happenstance suddenly felt like a miracle. We immediately started pursuing more information about this opportunity.
Our mutual friend relayed that this couple was very interested in connecting, but asked that we meet with them as a next step. We were wrestling with so many fears associated with adoption—questions of attachment and interference and uncertainty—and we hoped, perhaps truly believed, that we could avoid many of these challenges if we entered into a closed adoption. I was so angry when I learned of their request. Having a child felt closer than ever before and this felt like an unnecessary, even selfish, roadblock between us and that possibility.
We took some time to carefully consider before responding to the donors’ request. During this period, I was standing in my kitchen with a good friend, processing the intense emotions I was feeling about whether or not to pursue this particular embryo adoption. As through a fog, I sensed an emotional block obstructing my path. I could not name it, but it was keeping me from moving forward. My friend asked one pointed question after another and I struggled to express what I was feeling. When I finally named the mysterious block, the words left my lips before my brain could even process them:
I want a child that is just ours! I don’t want anyone else to be involved, but those are our only options. 

As with most of my infertility losses, I was blindsided by this realization. It was a particularly hard one to admit because it was a complicated mix of justifiable and unjustifiable emotions. Saying it aloud helped me to see that my grief over this loss was the source of the anger I was directing towards our potential donors. The full weight of this loss settled over me, and I wept in the arms of a friend who let me feel it without judging or trying to fix me. The anger dissipated.

We saw a counselor and I attended an adoption support group for several months. We quickly came to see not just the validity, but the potential healthiness of the donors’ desire to be connected–for our child’s sake more than anyone’s.

It is difficult for me not to minimize the effect of this loss–one of freedom, of autonomy. My instinct is to downplay its trauma: Even this loss had its gain, though it took me a very long time to see it. But while I was waiting for things to make sense, this loss was a very real death. For me to have the desire of my heart–something so many around me were achieving naturally–I had to surrender independence. For whether we chose open or closed adoption, someone other than us would be part of the life of our child in a complicated, unique way.

We said yes, entering into an arrangement that required us to die to the things we had always known and imagined about this part of our lives, including a certain independence. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We mourned our dying dreams and began to let them go as we stepped into the unknown, not certain where our feet would land.