I was 22 when I met my husband and he already had a child. A spunky, blonde-haired, blue-eyed burst of energy in an 8-year-old little boy body. My husband and I married when I was 24, and I immediately fell pregnant. I say “fell,” as I was told in college by a well-meaning nurse that my PCOS would prevent me from ever having children. Nine months later, I was a 25-year-old mother of a 10-year-old and a newborn baby boy. By the time I was 27, we had our 3 boys and our family was complete. Or so we thought.
I spent most of my adult life working with ministries in churches as a youth minister while dabbling in both children’s and music ministries as well. During this time, there was very little spoken about adoption within the church apart from the Bible actually commanding that we take care of the widows and the orphans. There was a lot of money raised to be sent overseas, a lot of children sponsored through Compassion. All of these things very admirable and very worthy causes, yet very little about adoption or foster care was spoken. As my husband and I grew to learn more about adoption through social media and the few friends we knew who adopted, we both felt the idea of adoption become more real to us. What would it look like if we adopted? There is NO WAY we could afford it. Maybe when the kids are older. Maybe when we are more financially stable. Maybe.
In my work as a youth minister, we often encountered teens that had a rough home life. After a while, my husband and I thought, “maybe this is how we will adopt.” There would be a teen who would need a place to stay and could move in with us for a time. It wasn’t necessarily adoption, but we readied our hearts to take in a teen when the time was right. While we encountered some rough situations with teens here and there, there was luckily always a family member that they could go with, or we were able to work with their parents to get everyone back on track. As time went on, we still felt led to adopt, but there was no way we could afford the “traditional” route, so we just waited for the right time.
It was when my youngest son was 18 months old that my mom called me. She was out of state, and informed me that an acquaintance of ours was pregnant, wanted to place the baby for adoption, and our name came up in the conversation. It was in that moment that I knew, and my mom knew, this was it. I immediately told her, “Have her call me.” I then called my husband, who was immediately on board. We were going to adopt a baby! We spoke with the expectant mom about twice before communication stopped. I was finally able to reach her when she informed me she had decided to parent.
I was honestly happy for her, but more confused for us. We felt so strongly that this was why we had felt that pull to adopt, but it was not going to happen. She had chosen to parent, as she had every right to do, yet we still felt a little empty and confused. A few months passed and life went on without adoption really coming up again. At that time, through the confusion, that pull to adopt faded a bit. We didn’t think we would never adopt, but felt uncertain, as we were so sure about the last time.
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Head over to Adoption.Com to read how Lita Jordan knew she was meant to adopt!
