Onward and Upward…. Maybe

By about mid-to-late February, we finally had the answers we had been waiting for. Jacob's test results were clear; we knew our son's diagnosis, and a week or two had passed to let some of the dust settle.

I decided it was time to bring back up the conversation that had opened the door we were now walking through and ask Jacob what he thought about another child.

If you're cringing right now, I completely understand. Honestly, I am too. My ability to sit in pain without some kind of positive forward momentum is next to none. The phoenix needed to rise from the ashes, and I desperately needed somewhere to direct all the energy that had previously been spent crying.

Jacob, on the other hand, wasn't there yet.

He was standing at the edge of the giant chasm that had opened up in front of us, hoping a bridge would eventually appear to carry him across. I wanted to start building the bridge. He wanted to wait until he could see one.

The practical reality was that we both knew building our family after a genetic diagnosis was going to require significantly more time and money than we had originally expected. If we wanted any hope of having children close to the age gap we had envisioned, we couldn't wait forever.

That created a painful tension.

Practically, we both knew we needed to begin exploring our options. Emotionally, one of us was ready to move while the other was still grieving. Those conversations were difficult, but they allowed counseling to shed some light on something we had previously missed and provide one of the greatest gifts it has given our marriage. We discovered that we respond to stress in almost opposite ways. We had seen glimpses of this dynamic before, but usually in situations with lower stakes, or when other issues overshadowed it. This time, there was nowhere for it to hide.

If I had to graph it, my speed increases almost proportionally to the difficulty of the problem. The harder life becomes, the faster I want to move. Jacob is almost the exact opposite. The bigger the storm, the deeper the hole he wants to crawl into until it passes.

We have learned that neither response is right or wrong; they're simply different, and we need to appreciate the good each brings. One prevents stagnation, the other creates space. Understanding that difference, along with some practical tools our counselor gave us, created a level of empathy I'm not sure we've ever had for one another. It didn't make those conversations easy, but it helped us stop assuming the worst about each other. Instead of seeing someone who didn't care enough or someone whose pace was unreasonable, we began to recognize that we were each trying to love our family the best way we knew how, and deal with the pain we didn’t have a better way to handle.

As we began evaluating our options, we ruled out IVF fairly quickly. Technically, IVF with preimplantation genetic testing would have allowed us to select embryos that did not carry MEN1—assuming there were unaffected embryos to choose from. For us, though, that raised several difficult questions. We couldn't escape the thought that an embryo carrying MEN1 might grow into a little boy just like our son. How could we look at him, at this child whose life we wouldn't trade for anything, and then intentionally choose one embryo over another because it carried the same condition he did? We couldn't reconcile that tension. There were broader questions about the sanctity of life, when life begins, and what responsibility we would have toward the embryos we didn't choose woven into our decision as well. Ultimately, it was not a moral and emotional weight we felt equipped to carry.

On a much more practical level, I also know my body. I struggle enough with hormones on a normal month-to-month basis that I couldn't imagine putting myself through ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval, and embryo transfer. I have enormous respect for the women who have walked that road. It is physically, emotionally, and spiritually demanding in ways I don't think I fully appreciated before this journey. Ultimately, we decided we would rather not have another child than pursue that path.

We also never seriously considered using a sperm donor. Our feeling was that if one of us was not going to be genetically related to our child, we would rather neither of us be genetically related, so we pursued adoption instead.

I want to pause here and make something very clear. These were deeply personal convictions. They are not universal ones. I have many friends who have pursued IVF, and I am genuinely grateful modern medicine has made parenthood possible for families who otherwise might never have experienced it. I have no interest in telling someone else's story or suggesting they should have arrived at the same conclusions we did. I only know what we believed God was asking of us.

With IVF off the table, domestic infant adoption seemed like the obvious next step. I reached out first to the adoption ministry our church partners with locally. I remember thinking this would be our ticket. By that point, I had done enough research to understand the broad outline of the process: apply, be accepted, complete a home study, create a family profile, wait to be matched, wait for the baby to be born, and finalize the adoption.

Simple.

Not easy, but straightforward. I should probably also confess something about myself. When I'm faced with a challenge, I have what I lovingly call a "winner mindset." It's not that I think difficult things are easy. It's that I tend to assume we'll somehow be the exception.

The paperwork?

We'll get through it.

The home study?

We'll be fine.

The family profile?

That'll be a fun project.

Then we'll wait a reasonable amount of time before eventually welcoming a newborn into our family. I was wrong. Very wrong. What I hadn’t bargained for was the agency wasn't accepting applications. When I asked when they expected to reopen, they couldn't give me an answer. It’s hard to predict timelines or feel like there is any progress when you don’t even know when you are going to start. I hung up feeling discouraged but determined to keep looking.

A few days later I called another agency. This conversation was much more helpful. Unfortunately, they weren't accepting applications either. This time, though, someone took the time to explain why. They already had more waiting families than they could reasonably expect to match. Bringing additional families into the process would only lengthen everyone's wait. I remember hanging up the phone thinking, Wait...that can't be right.

Up until that point, I had assumed there were far more infants needing adoptive families than families hoping to adopt them. I thought children who weren't adopted as infants simply entered the foster care system. I couldn't have been more mistaken. That conversation began dismantling almost everything I thought I knew about adoption. I learned that infant adoption and foster care exist for very different reasons. I also heard a statistic that would be repeated to us several more times over the coming weeks. In the 1970s and 1980s, roughly seven percent of pregnancies in the United States resulted in adoption placements. Today, it's closer to one percent. For that agency, which served our entire region, only two expectant mothers had contacted them in the previous eleven months.

As I expanded my search from local agencies to agencies across Alabama and eventually national organizations, I found the same message almost everywhere. Many agencies were limiting or closing applications, not because they lacked compassion, but because they wanted to give the families already waiting a realistic chance of being matched without oversaturating the pool.

Another unexpected gift during that season came through a book one of the agencies required prospective parents to read: The Connected Child by Dr. Karyn Purvis and Dr. David Cross. I decided to read it anyway, hoping that if applications reopened, I would already have one box checked. Instead, the book checked something in me.

It opened my eyes to the kinds of loss, trauma, and uncertainty many adopted children experience, even those adopted shortly after birth. More importantly, it offered practical, hope-filled ways to parent children from hard places. It was one of the first times I began to understand that adoption is not simply another way to build a family. It asks something different of parents.

That realization led us into one of the hardest conversations of the entire process. Loving a child deeply and having the capacity to meet all of that child's particular needs are not always the same thing, and I don't think admitting that diminishes the love. Sometimes parents discover needs they never could have anticipated, and there is no choice to make. Then the task becomes learning what this child needs, asking God for strength and wisdom, gathering whatever help is available, and loving the person entrusted to us as faithfully as we can. There is no shame in finding that difficult or discovering that we cannot do it alone.

In our case, though, we did have a choice. We were standing before a potential path and had the opportunity to ask what we could reasonably and responsibly take on before walking down it. With the known medical challenges already present in our family, we had to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: Did we have the capacity to intentionally take on another layer of significant unknowns?

We had to answer that question honestly.

What had started as a search for family-building options after a genetic diagnosis was slowly becoming a process of elimination. As we weighed our capacity and the reality of the expected timelines, we slowly began to sense that God was closing this door as well. Walking away from domestic infant adoption was disappointing, but it also felt honest.

Our prayers continue to be with the families who walk that road, whether through domestic infant adoption, foster care, or international adoption. We have tremendous respect for those who are called there, and we are deeply grateful for the ways they reflect the love of Christ to children who need safe, permanent families.

It simply wasn't the path God had for us.