New Milestones

The decision was made. The application was submitted. And somehow, despite finally making a decision, there were still so many questions. To this day, Jacob and I look at each other every once in a while and ask, "Do we just have a weird bent toward making our lives way more complicated than they need to be?" Maybe that's a normal question when you find yourself pursuing embryo adoption. Maybe it's just us.

If you're walking a similar road and feel buried in uncertainty, I hope you know you aren't alone. Some days, I feel completely confident we're walking exactly where God has called us. Other days, I look at Jacob and ask, "What the hell are we doing?" I've come to believe God makes room for both.

One of the biggest lessons this journey has taught me is that walking in obedience doesn't make the path easy. If anything, it sometimes feels like the opposite. I don't believe following God usually comes with turn-by-turn GPS directions and flashing neon arrows pointing down the road. At least it hasn't in my life. More often than not, the nudgings of the Holy Spirit feel incredibly ordinary. They're usually only obvious in hindsight. They rarely hand me a completed map. Instead, they seem to offer just enough direction to take the next step and trust God with the rest.

I also don't pretend to be an expert on how the Holy Spirit speaks. I only know what I've experienced. Looking back over our lives, I can honestly say I believe God has made our path straight, though not always straightforward.

I've loved the opening lines of Delta by Mumford & Sons for years because they capture that feeling better than I ever could.

"But I'll meet you at the delta

Where the rivers run into the sea

And I'll meet you at the delta

What's behind, I can clearly see

But that beyond, that's beyond me."

Those lyrics have become one of my prayers. "God, help me clearly see Your faithfulness in the past, and help me release the future into Your hands, especially when the road ahead feels beyond anything I've walked before." One of these days, I might finally get the tattoo I've been talking about for years.

Naturally, I assumed that once we submitted our application, we'd jump straight into the home study. Instead, we were greeted by an entire mountain of pre-home-study paperwork.

Now, if you know me at all, you know I'm about to say something deeply strange. I love paperwork. Paperwork is comforting. There are instructions, boxes, and deadlines, all of which equate to progress. Fill out the form. Check the box. Move to the next step. When my anxiety starts looking for something to control, paperwork happily gives it something productive to do. Jacob, on the other hand, has what I consider a supernatural ability to sit in seasons of waiting without feeling the need to manufacture progress. It's one of the gifts I lean on most. Paperwork, however, is not his spiritual gift. Eventually, we finished everything required before the home study and moved on to the next step. Progress. Even if it came one signature at a time.

As we were working through piles of paperwork and seemingly never-ending crucial conversations, life kept happening around us. I walked alongside one friend in the aftermath of a miscarriage. Another continued her long battle with infertility. Seven other friends announced pregnancies.  I wasn't prepared for the grief I would experience while pursuing embryo adoption, or for how complicated those relationships would suddenly feel.

There is something sacred about walking beside people in their pain. I am incredibly honored to have those friendships and cherish the trust and vulnerability found in them. But, that grief on their behalf has also been accompanied by a level of guilt for struggling with our own waiting. After all, we already had a child. We had a path forward. Who was I to complain about timelines?

And yet...

I also understood something I never had before. I understood what it felt like to watch your life unfold differently than you had imagined. The more I sat with that realization, though, the more I recognized that our grief was a little different.

Given everything we knew, we believed we could probably have another biological child. We were grieving because we had decided we wouldn't. That distinction became incredibly important to me. Infertility often means grieving a hope that must eventually be released to move forward. This felt like grieving a choice forcibly pulled out from under us, while also recognizing we could make a different choice if we wanted. Knowing the other door was slammed shut and that we were choosing to leave it there instead of finally letting the crack softly close carries a unique kind of sadness; at least it did for me. 

The hardest moments came during Wednesday playgroup. Our three kids are only a few months apart. Watching them grow up together has been one of the sweetest gifts of early parenthood. Then my two close friends became pregnant again. Their timing exactly bookended the timing window we had imagined for our second child. Those first several Wednesdays after their announcements became a quiet reminder that, had life unfolded differently, our families probably would have been walking through those milestones together too.

I felt left behind. I also hated admitting it. Jealousy is one of those emotions that feels ugly the moment you say it out loud. It felt wrong at my core, yet I couldn’t ignore that the feeling was there. I desperately didn't want to become bitter. I didn't want someone else's joy to feel like my loss. So I confessed those feelings often, mostly to Jacob. I'm incredibly grateful for the way he has responded.

While I tended to look backward at the road we weren’t taking, Jacob gently reminded me to look forward. Not because our grief isn’t real. But because he genuinely believes what we are doing is beautiful. He has reminded me, over and over again, that this path isn’t our backup plan. It is becoming our story. His confidence has helped me loosen my grip on all the "if onlys." I'm grateful that God gave him that perspective when I needed it most.

I also began to recognize another unexpected gift in this path. People often talk about experiencing God's love in a new way when they become parents. There is something about the unconditional love between a parent and child that gives us a glimpse of a love much greater than our own. I have experienced that with our son, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. What I hadn't anticipated was that this different path toward parenthood might offer us another perspective entirely.

Scripture describes our relationship with God not only as children loved by a Father, but as children adopted into His family through Christ. As we have begun making room in our own family for a child who won't share our genetics, I've found myself thinking differently about the adoptive love of God—the love that made a place for me in His family and calls me His own. It's another picture of God's love that I never expected to have the opportunity to understand quite this personally, but now that we're here, it has become one more thing to be grateful for.