We are halfway through this Forty Days to Forty writing adventure!  I have loved getting to write about some of the things that have impacted my life.  Just the practice of consistently writing has been challenging and fun.  I am excited to keep going after these 40 days are over.  I don’t think I can keep writing everyday, but I would love to be more consistent.  Maybe that is something I will become at 40, a consistent writer.  Who knows what life has for me in this new decade, but I am so excited to find out!

Today is Orphan Sunday.  It is a Sunday in the middle of National Adoption Awareness month to bring attention to and rally support for vulnerable children all over the world.  It is a global initiative to inform, activate and inspire people to action on behalf of children who need families.

I wrote in an earlier post about how and where we got started on our adoption journey.  This week I will be writing about the major highlights of how our boys came into our lives.  Today I am writing about how loss and grief prepared us for what was to come.

Loss is a powerful instrument and grief is the healing salve of the soul.  I have been familiar with loss and grief in my life.  I have written about some of and it and will continue to write about it in the days to come.  Adoption is a journey riddled with loss and grief.  It is a complex pilgrimage through beauty and pain.  It is emotionally exhausting and physically taxing.  However, I am truly grateful that this is the way God chose to grow our family.  I could not have written a better story if I tried.

Many people ask if we could not have our own children.  They need a justification for why we would bring “other people’s children” into our home.  (I have a lot to say about the questions people ask about adoption, but it’s another post for another time.)  The truth is we have never had biological children, but my doctor never said I couldn’t.  He was confident he could bring a child full-term with the help of modern medicine and a lot of money.  It was not something Kevin and I felt led to do.

I got pregnant several months after my died.  It was a complete surprise.  We were living in a one bedroom apartment and I got up to get ready for work.  I didn’t feel quite right and I randomly took a pregnancy test I had purchased for just this occasion.  We were not trying to get pregnant, but the test said I was.  I didn’t know what to do, so I took another one.  It still said I was pregnant.  Kevin was in bed so I went in the bedroom, sat on the side of the bed and told him the news.  His response was . . . complicated.  He was nervous, excited, confused and unsure that this was really happening.  I took two more pregnancy tests before work.  All said I was pregnant.

My heart was so excited to be experiencing something so joyful when we were still so sad about losing my mom.  I was also so sad that my mom was not there to share in this moment and tell me what to do.  I was also terrified about us living in a one bedroom apartment with no money.  I was convinced our baby was going to have to sleep in a drawer and our neighbor was going to get us kicked out of our apartment because if he thought our quiet TV was loud, he was definitely going to think a screaming child was loud.

I went to work and tried act normal.  I don’t know how to hide emotions and I told my friend that we were pregnant.  Her reaction was less complicated than Kevin.  She was utterly thrilled and then just started asking me questions to make sure I was doing what I needed to be doing.  It was exactly what I needed.  I made a doctor’s appointment and tried to concentrate.  We told family and Kevin’s emotions went from complicated to pure joy.  It was going to be OK.

Two months later, I was at an event for work and Kevin came to pick me up.  We grabbed lunch at a local pizza place and headed home.  I was so tired and I wasn’t feeling very well.  I took a nap and when I woke up I knew something was not right.  I called my mother-in-law and my doctors office.  They told me what to watch for and what to do if things got worse.  Things got worse and we lost the baby.  We had just gotten used to the idea of being pregnant and then the baby was gone.  Just like that.

My heart was broken.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone.  I took a couple of days off work, but when I re-entered life I was bombarded with everyone’s story of miscarriage.  Where were these people before?  No one had ever told me that this was a common thing.  No one told me the first trimester is the most vulnerable time and that you shouldn’t tell people you are pregnant until you have made it through.  No one told me what to say when you don’t want to say anything and you just want to hide under your desk until the work day is over.

This loss, however, did not lead us to adoption.  It would be two years before God  would call me to adoption on top of a mountain in Jamaica.  Our boys did not come into our family out of our inability to have biological children.  Our boys came because we obeyed the call that God placed on our life.  The loss of our biological child, and eventually children, helped prepare us to deal with grief and loss.  These lessons were invaluable in understanding adoption because while adoption is beautiful it is also broken.  Our kids have experienced so much loss in their little lives and they came to parent’s who can empathize.  I’m not sure how we could be parent’s to our boys without experiencing great loss ourselves.

Our loss has also given us great empathy for others.  It opened our eyes to other people who were hurting, especially in the Church.  It’s Sunday.  If you go to church today, peek at the church calendar.  Most church events are built around families and people with children.  Church can make people, especially women, feel less than because the message seems to be that the highest calling on a woman’s life is to be a mom (and submissive wife . . . another topic for another day).  I love being a mom, but I am not just a mom.  I am a friend, lover of words, hater of injustice, person with a voice and follower of Jesus.  The job of mom is so important, but it is not THE most important.

It is my prayer that my boys can take their loss and turn it into empathy for others.  I hope they see their adoption stories as a beautiful pictures of how God can make all things new.  I pray they are not afraid to trudge through the hard emotions of grief because on the other side is strength, empathy and love.