How we became a family of 4: A Short Story Part 1

I've had a few people say that they would like to hear our story of how we came to adopt Michelle and Anna.  I've been mulling over ideas of how I could/should share this and how much I wanted to say about it over the last few months.  So... I decided to write a short story on my blog.  A short story because I believe that you have to know how it all began to fully understand why I give God the glory for our little blessings.  This blog because this story is a part of my spiritual growth journey, plus this way everyone that wants to hear our story will have it and those that don't (or have already heard it 1000 times) can just ignore this post and move on. :)

You have to know that I have ALWAYS wanted to be a mom.  My mom used to tell me about when my brother was born, I was 2 1/2, how I would try to pick him up or change his diaper or "mommy" him in some other way.  The first time I remember holding a baby I was about 5 or 6 years old.  My step-cousin, Margo, was born and I got to hold her.  I remember sitting on the couch at our house when they put that tiny little baby girl in my arms and I was overjoyed!  I could have sat there forever.  And that's how I felt every time I held a baby from that day on.  I remember the name of every single baby that has captured my heart.  When I played as a child I played with baby dolls or house where I was the mommy.  I don't know when I learned about being pregnant but I always pretended that I had a baby in my tummy.  I would stuff my shirt with whatever I could find and show off my "baby bump".  As I grew up the desire just grew stronger.  I used to daydream about someone leaving a baby on our doorstep or what would it be like to have a baby of my own.  When I was in high school there were always women having babies at our church and I just couldn't hear enough about the whole pregnancy and birthing experience and breastfeeding.  I couldn't wait until I turned 18, got married and started having babies!  (yes, that is really what I thought would happen!)  I used to have dreams about having a baby and dreams about breastfeeding a baby.

There was a part of me that feared infertility.  I knew that my aunt suffered and yet believed that God would give her children.  My mom would tell me about how the doctors told her that she couldn't and shouldn't have children, but she would put scriptures on her wall and keep trusting that God would give her the desire of her heart.  And He did... He gave her two boys and a girl.  That didn't give me any comfort, though.  I was afraid that I would be told I could not have children but that I wouldn't have as much faith as my aunt did and I would go childless.  I would try to push these thoughts and fears out of my head and yet they would always creep in.  I don't know where the fear came from.  Was it prophetic?  Was it just because I wanted it so badly? Did I think that God wouldn't give me the desire of my heart?  That I didn't deserve to be happy?  I still wonder sometimes why I was so afraid this would happen to me.  I also wonder why I never thought, "I could always adopt.".  I have always thought that I would adopt after I had biological children, but I never thought about adopting instead of having biological children.  It was like I wanted what I wanted how I wanted it and that was it!

When Tripp and I got married we decided that we would wait five years to have our first child.  I don't know why we said five years.  I guess we thought that was a good amount of time for it to be just the two of us.  We had been married just a little over a year when we started thinking about trying to have a baby.  The problem at that time was that I was starting to get really sick because of my Graves Disease which I had let go untreated for about 3 years.  I had to have treatment and the treatment we decided on meant that we had to wait at least 6 months to get pregnant and they really recommended 1 year.  Again, the fear of infertility popped in my head and I hounded the doctors about whether or not my treatment would keep me from being able to get pregnant.  I was assured it would not so we went ahead with the treatment, but I had to get back on birth control (it's funny now that I ever bothered with that stuff in the first place!).  So when the 6 months was up I got off birth control and we started trying to get pregnant.  September 2004 the painful part of our journey began...

Shortly after we started trying to get pregnant I got some exciting news.  One of my best friends was pregnant with her first baby.  I cried.  I don't know why but it broke my heart.  I was so excited for her and it wasn't like we had been trying very long but I was still so jealous that it wasn't me!  I remember driving, sobbing and praying, "Lord why does this hurt so bad?  You know much I love her and that I am so excited for her!  So why do I feel this way?".  It didn't take me long to get excited about my friend having a baby though, and I couldn't get to Texas fast enough to see her when she was born.

We wanted to be close to family when we did finally have children so we figured this was the time to move to Georgia, where Tripp's family was.  We kind of kept our plans to have a baby to ourselves and didn't really talk to many people about it for that first year.  I remember other friends getting pregnant and feeling sad, again, that it wasn't me but other than that we really didn't worry about it too much.  I felt like it would happen in God's timing,  even though I really wanted God's timing to be my timing which was now!  It wasn't until we moved into our house and the 2 year mark was creeping up on us that it really started to wear on me.  I started reading books and looking online, talking to friends about tips on how to naturally "make" by body get pregnant.  I would try to remind myself that God was in control and it just wasn't His timing.  I cried when some people got pregnant and rejoiced with others.  My doctor was encouraging me to get tested but I wasn't ready.  I was afraid that they would find something and I would hear the dreaded words that I had feared for years, "There's nothing we can do.  You will never get pregnant.".  It was amazing, once we started sharing that we were struggling to get pregnant, how many people we knew had also struggled.  God surrounded us with people that had been there, knew our pain and were able to comfort us in a way that other people couldn't.  Through the encouragement of the people around us and books that I had been given to read, we decided to heed my doctor's advice and get tested.

The process of infertility testing is a very emotional process.  You decide to get tested and you are nervous.  They don't find anything and you are relieved and yet frustrated.  Since my OB/GYN didn't find anything wrong the only thing left to do was send me to a Fertility Endocrinologist.  Through blood tests and ultrasounds everything looked good so the last part of the testing process was laproscopic surgery to look for Endometriosis, since I had no obvious symptoms of it.  I was really excited about this surgery.  I had talked with other women that had this surgery and got pregnant right away.  I just knew that was going to be me!  The first thing I asked when I woke up from surgery, though groggy and nauseous, was, "Did they find anything?".  Tripp said "Yes. He found some Endometriosis..." and that's all that mattered to me.  I fell back to sleep with a sigh of relief.  I was going to have a baby!  I knew it!  That was in October of 2007.  Christmas came and I still wasn't pregnant.  The doctor gave me 6 months to get pregnant on my own before he would recommend fertility treatment.  Six months would be April of 2008.  In February of 2008 I had a positive pregnancy test.  I had felt for a few weeks like I might be pregnant, but I thought that every month and was tired of wasting tests and putting myself through all of the torture that goes along with it so I tried to put it out of my mind.  But for three days I would wake up early in the morning and feel this incredible urge to take a test.  Every time I would try to put it out of my mind.  On the third day I couldn't do it anymore.  I had to get it over with so I took a test.  If you have ever tried to get pregnant for a long period of time you know how nerve-racking it is to take a pregnancy test.  I hate it because I know it's going to be negative, but I just have to see for myself and a part of you thinks, "This might just be it!".  And it was!  There it was as plain as day "PREGNANT".  Even now it makes me cry just thinking about it!  I was stunned!  I ran to Tripp, who was asleep, shook him awake and shoved the pee stick in his face!  "Look!  Look!  We're going to have a baby!!!"  But, as the day went on, something didn't feel right.  Next thing I knew I was starting my period... right on time... just like very other month for the last 15 years.  I called my best friend, who is a nurse, and told her what was going on.  She tried to sound encouraging but I knew it wasn't.  When I went to the doctor on Monday they said it had probably been either a "chemical pregnancy" (an early miscarriage) or a false positive, but I wasn't pregnant now.  I feel like this was a turning point for us.  On one hand, I felt like God was saying, "Be encouraged.  You CAN get pregnant and it will happen when it's time.".  On the other hand, I was tired and ready to just let go.  Right after this happened a friend of ours gave us an article to read about a church in Florida that just about every member had adopted children.  They saw it as "living the gospel".  They talked about how as Christians we are adopted into God's family (Ephesians 1:5) so we should also adopt.  And that it is one part of what the Bible calls in James 1:27 "religion that is pure and faultless" to care for orphans.  It got me thinking, but Tripp wasn't ready to discuss it and I was still on the fence so we kind of just let it go.  Once we finally got to the 6 month mark after my surgery the fertility treatment the doctor recommended was really expensive.  I knew we couldn't afford it, but I was still willing to do just about anything but Tripp said, "Absolutely not!  It would not be wise for us to go into that much debt to not even have a guarantee of success.".  I knew he was right, so that was it.  At that moment all we could do was trust God.  We had done all we could physically do and He was in complete charge now.

Up to this point in my story, I don't think I have conveyed the depth of my sorrow throughout this process.  I was hurting more than I had ever hurt before.  On top of the infertility issues I was also in the process of dealing with my parents' divorce, which happened the year after we got married.  I felt a lot of pressure, as a Christian, to "get over it"... all of it.  Get over my parents' divorce.  Get over the pain of infertility.  My heart and my head were kind of at war with each other.  My heart wanted to curl up into a ball and die from th epain of it all.  My head knew that God was still God and in complete control.  In my head, I knew that God was trustworthy.  But, I was afraid to let go.  I wanted to make my parents be who I wanted them to be and I wanted my body to do what I wanted it to do and neither one would comply.  If I let go I might lose both.  I thought that if I could just get pregnant, it would fix everything!  I would have a baby and that baby would bring my parents back together.  It seemed simple and not too much to ask so why was God making me suffer so much?  It wasn't fair!  He knows that I wanted a baby more than anyone else and so why am I the only one not getting one?  He knows how important my family was to me and so why is He letting my dreams of my parents being the perfect grandparents "together" slide through my fingers?  I know now that I was having to learn how to grieve.  I couldn't put on a happy face and pretend everything was great.  I had to learn that everyone suffers, and not everyone gets what they ask for.  Being a Christian doesn't mean that you will have smooth sailing all of your life.  Trials come and they serve a greater purpose.  Sometimes they are to refine us and sometimes they are to teach us something that we wouldn't have learned without the struggle.  Sometimes they come just because we live in a fallen world full of sin and death.  Sometimes our struggles end with joy on this side of heaven and sometimes the relief only comes when we die and are finally in the presence of Jesus.  There is a song by Natalie Grant that brings me to tears every time I hear it just because I feel what the song is conveying.  It says, "We're asking why this happens to us who have died to live... it's unfair.  This is what it means to be held, how it feels when the sacred is torn from your life and you survive.  This is what it is to be loved and to know that the promise was when everything fell we'd be held."  This is what God was trying to show me.  I was being held.  He had been with me from the beginning and was strengthening me for His purpose and His glory.  I had to let go and trust Him.

To be continued...