School’s Back in Session

If you've walked through the traditional adoption process, you might be surprised to learn that the "home study" for embryo adoption isn't a home study in the legal sense. Embryos occupy a strange place in U.S. law. In most states, they are considered property rather than people, but they also can't simply be bought and sold. Agencies facilitate the transfer of ownership of embryos and provide services such as education, matching, home studies, and shipping coordination, yet the legal framework differs significantly from traditional adoption.

Because of that, Nightlight developed what they call the Snowflakes Family Evaluation (SFE) instead of a traditional adoption home study. It's shorter, more tailored to embryo adoption, and heavily focused on education. As it turns out, the education component became my favorite part.

As we worked through the videos, required readings, and various articles, I found myself holding two thoughts that felt somewhat contradictory. The first was that I deeply valued the process. If I were placing embryos, I would want every assurance possible that the family raising my biological child was safe, loving, and prepared. And, as I would soon discover, there were aspects of adoption I genuinely needed someone to teach me.

At the same time, there was an irony to the whole thing I couldn't quite get over: we were already parents.

That thought usually manifested itself out loud as something like, “No one goes to the courthouse for a marriage license and has to apply for a procreation license.” No one had asked us to prove we were safe, loving, financially stable, emotionally healthy, or adequately prepared before we brought our son home from the hospital.

There had been no interviews, references, background checks, required reading, or any evaluation of whether we were fit to raise him. Yet here we were, already entrusted with one tiny human, and being asked to prove we were qualified to raise another. The amount of time, emotional energy, education, paperwork, and money required to parent a child who doesn't share your genetics is extraordinary. Meanwhile, becoming a biological parent requires no demonstration at all that you're prepared for what you're about to undertake.

Yet the further we got into the process, the more convinced I became that the preparation mattered.

That's perhaps the greatest irony of all. I started the SFE occasionally wondering why I needed to prove I was fit to do something I was already doing. I came out of the education realizing there were things I hadn't known I needed to learn.

Before beginning this process, one advantage I saw in embryo adoption was that, unlike domestic infant adoption, the baby would never be separated from the woman who carried him or her. The placing family had fought for these embryos to exist and had invested enormous amounts of time, money, hope, and heartache in creating them. Somewhere in my mind, I had concluded that embryo adoption somehow bypassed many of adoption's hardest realities. I couldn't have been more wrong, not because these things aren’t true, but because biology still matters.

One sentence from Lori Holden's The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption completely reshaped how I thought about adoption. She writes that when there is a split between biology and biography, that divide eventually has to be acknowledged and healed for a person to become whole. I don't know why I'd never considered that before. Maybe because I was still thinking about adoption primarily from the perspective of parents.

The education gently but consistently shifted my perspective toward the child, and that changed everything. I realized embryo adoption wasn't a way around adoption. It was adoption under a different set of circumstances, but the questions of identity, belonging, loss, love, and connection remained. Those weren't problems to solve; they were instead realities to honor. Oddly enough, recognizing that didn't waver our commitment. It made us more devoted to doing this well.

One of the required books, Three Makes a Baby by Jana M. Rupnow, introduced me to a concept I mentioned earlier, dialectical thinking. I had never heard the term before starting this process, but the more I learned about it, the more I realized adoption might be one of the clearest examples I've encountered. Two things that seem contradictory can both be completely true.

A placing family can experience profound grief...

while also making an incredibly loving and sacrificial decision.

An adoptive family can experience tremendous joy...

while also grieving the closed doors that brought them there.

An adopted child can feel deeply loved by their parents...

while still wondering what might have been.

Those aren't competing truths. They're all true at once. That idea has significantly changed how I think about far more than adoption. Maybe that's why this process has stretched me so much. God keeps inviting me into situations that refuse to fit neatly into either/or categories. Instead, He keeps asking me to hold both.

As we worked through the paperwork and educational material for our home study, we were also creating our family profile. I started working on it almost as soon as we submitted our application because I figured it would be the part of the process that required the most thought. It became a surprisingly enjoyable exercise in trying to distill an entire life into a handful of pages and photographs. How do you communicate who you are in such a small space? How do you help someone who has never met you decide whether they can trust you with their child? It's an intimidating prospect. Thankfully, I come from a talented family.

My mom spent years writing grants for a living and now works on our church’s communications team. My sister works in marketing and also does photography on the side. She came to town and turned one of our local nature preserves into the backdrop for a family photo session. Even better, she has spent the last several years insisting on documenting our family whenever she's around, so we already had plenty of wonderful pictures to choose from.

The writing was a little more challenging. My process usually begins with what I affectionately call "word vomit on a page." Jacob likes to joke that I'm not a bad writer; I just seem to have an aversion to punctuation. He's not wrong. My first draft is almost always one long stream of consciousness. The periods and commas usually show up later.

As we worked through the educational material for our home study, one of the questions we were asked was how we planned to introduce the idea of embryo adoption to both our future child and our older son. At first, I didn't think much of it. Nightlight Christian Adoptions had a list of children's books on their website that explained embryo adoption, and our son already loved books. I figured we'd order one, start reading it together, and let those conversations grow naturally over time.

Easy enough.

A few weeks later, while shopping for decorations for our son's book-themed second birthday party, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to buy our first embryo adoption book. As I started reading the Kindle previews, though, I grew increasingly frustrated. One theme kept appearing. Nearly every book centered on the parents' infertility journey.

I want to be careful here because I understand why. For many families, infertility marks the beginning of their child's story, and that part of the journey deserves to be honored. Those books will resonate deeply with the families they were written for. But they weren't our story. More than that, they weren't the story I wanted my future child to hear first.

Many of the books focused on how desperately Mom and Dad wanted a baby. I found myself longing for a story that simply celebrated the child—a story that said, "This is who you are. This is how you came into our family. We are so glad you're here." When I couldn't find that, I turned to books about traditional adoption instead. Those came closer. The heart behind them was more what I was looking for, but the details were different. Phrases like "the day we brought you home" assumed a child entered the family after birth, and I kept running into little reminders that embryo adoption follows a different path.

I hadn't expected this part to be difficult. In fact, I had assumed it would be one of the easiest parts of the process. Instead, I found myself deeply discouraged, and if I am really honest, a little bit heartbroken. Once again, we were walking down a road without much of a map.

I called my mom to tell her how frustrated I was. Her response caught me completely off guard. "You should write it," she said. I laughed. I reminded her that I was an engineer, not a writer. She had spent my entire life editing my papers. Creativity wasn't exactly the word I would have used to describe myself. She smiled and reminded me that when I was in third grade, she had written a children's book. Then she said something I'll never forget. She told me she believed I could do it too.

Later that morning, I told Jacob about the conversation. His response was almost identical. Somehow, the confidence of two people who knew me well gave me the confidence to try. That afternoon, I wrote the first draft.

Jacob read it and gave me thoughtful feedback, particularly on the rhythm and meter. My mom read it too, and after several more revisions, I cautiously sent it to a handful of trusted friends. The encouragement I received was far greater than I expected. For the first time, I started to think maybe this wasn't just an idea. Maybe it could become something real.

As that possibility grew, I reached out to another of my oldest childhood friends and asked whether she would consider illustrating it. Her answer was an immediate yes. Now, alongside the embryo adoption journey itself, we find ourselves learning about storyboarding, illustration, and publishing, a world I never imagined I'd step into.

The funny thing is, somewhere along the way I realized I hadn't actually written a book solely about embryo adoption. The more I reread it, refined the wording, and wrestled with rhyme schemes, the more I realized I had written it for my own family and well beyond.

I had written it for the child we hope to welcome someday through embryo adoption. I had also written it for our older son. And, in many ways, I had written it for Jacob too. At its heart, the story isn't really about how a child comes into a family. It's about why every child matters.

My hope is that every time we read those pages together, both of our children will be reminded that they are here for a reason, exactly as they are. I also hope Jacob will be reminded of that too.

If another child joins our family someday through embryo adoption, I want them to grow up knowing their story is something to celebrate. If our son someday asks questions about MEN1, or wonders why God allowed something difficult to be written into his story, I want him to know that nothing about his diagnosis changes who he is or how deeply his life matters.

Maybe that's why I eventually realized I had written the book for Jacob too. MEN1 may have changed the trajectory of our family, but it doesn't get to define his or our son’s story. Their lives are no less beautiful because they carry something we wish they didn't.

And if, somewhere down the road, another family finds this book and it helps them tell their children the same thing—that whatever their story looks like, they are loved beyond measure, exactly as they are, by the people God has placed around them—I would count that as an incredible gift.