This Is My Story, This Is My Song

Stories can be full of heroic acts, divine intervention, and miracles.  They can also be the things that give us courage to step off of the ledge to fly to our next destination.  Stories can make you sad, excited, lonely or full of hope.  And when you tell your story, you find others like you, some already finished with the struggle, and some that are going through the struggle.

The adoption consultants we are going to be working with to help us through our adoption told us that one of the reasons that people don't use them is because they don't want to tell their story.  They don't want people to know who they are, what they have struggled with, and why they are adopting.  And that thought keeps coming to me: I need to tell my story.  And honestly, I can only tell half of the story, because my husband is the other half of it.

So, like any good story, it has a beginning...

I'm the oldest of 4 children, and the oldest of 6 grandchildren.  My parents were both told that they would never have bio children, but God obviously had other plans.  A year and month after my parents were married, I was born.  So, my parents named me after Jesus' first miracle (John 2:1-11), because I was their first miracle.  And after me, my parents ended up with 3 more bundles of joyful and feisty children.

I have pretty much always wanted to have children.  And for the most part, I wanted to have quite a few children.  For a little while as a teenager, I kind of despised children, but I will blame that on the hormones and having siblings that were several years younger than me.

Fast-forward to my adult years, I was 18+, wasn't dating, hadn't met anyone that I wanted to date let alone marry.  I started looking into adoption as an option for children.  I honestly wasn't expecting to ever get married.  I expected to be the crazy old cat lady who took in children and fur babies.

And then I met Mike.  We started out as friends, but it grew into so much more.  3.5 years later, we got married.  I thought that adoption might be something that we would do later, or maybe not at all.  I mean, we were getting married.  We would have bio kids....

But from the start, we saw that there was something preventing us from getting pregnant.  We didn't try to prevent getting pregnant. We tracked my fertility & cycle.  We tried things that I had read about to help us get pregnant (i.e., diet, exercise, etc.).  We tried and tried to get pregnant, but it wasn't happening (Now I know, some of you reading this are going, "but it's hasn't been long enough... There is still time to keep trying."  BUT, remember I'm only giving part of the story. The part that is mine to tell).  So 3 months into our marriage, I started looking into adoption, because I realized on at least one level that adoption was quite possibly the only way that we would grow our family.

It still took several more months before Mike and I were on the same page about adoption.  He had hopes that the issue would be resolved and we would be able to get pregnant.  And to be honest, I still held out hope too.

This is not to say that I still don't struggle with the idea of not being able to have bio children.  The fact is, there are some days that I do struggle with it.  And sometimes I wish God would give me an explanation on why we will only have beautiful children brought to us through adoption and not through birth. 

But today is a new day.  I'm sharing my story.  I'm sharing this so that I know (and you can know) that we aren't alone.  Our highs, our lows, the surprises we find, the losses we have, the adventure of it all, we need to share with others.  Life is full of stories.  So no matter how insignificant you think it is or how painful it is to tell it, share your story.  Because I truly believe there is someone out there that needs to hear it.

Cana