Jeremiah

It is impossible to talk about adoption without talking about loss. Adoption by design is born out of loss.  Loss for a family who can't conceive a child of their own.  Loss from babies families never got to hold.  Loss for a birth mom who for one reason or another is unable to parent the child she is carrying.  Loss is difficult to talk about but I feel we can only grow after we have confronted our pain and have been honest about our loss.  Pain has a very specific purpose....generally speaking, pain is given to immobilize us while we heal from an injury.  If we feel enough pain then we usually have to stop whatever we are doing....well let's come back to that in a bit....

In the winter of 2008 we decided to begin our home study update.  We contacted the agency we had used with Jordan.  They immediately began to show our profile book.  Within a week we were chosen by a birth mom who was five months pregnant.  We were ecstatic!  We began to pull out Jordan's baby stuff and set up a nursery.  As the weeks passed, we waited for doctor's visits and I would cling to every piece of information I could gather about out this baby we were expecting.  From the beginning I knew that baby was a boy, not because of an ultrasound, just that mother's knowing.   I prepared bags, washed clothes and put all the finishing touches on the new nursery.  We picked names and planned the details of the homecoming.  I dreamed about what the baby would look like.  Longing to hold him, smell him and put him to sleep at night in his crib knowing he was safe at home with us.  I couldn't wait to feel like our family was complete.  Then the time drew close.  I got a call that our birth mother was in labor.  The kids and I all packed our bags and waited for daddy to get home from work.  The older kids had decided that they did not want to stay and wait in Maine this time; instead they wanted to take the trip to Ohio with us to meet their new sibling.  We loaded up at the crack of dawn and headed off to make the 900 mile trek.  We continued to get updates from our social worker throughout the morning.  We talked about how excited we all were and we played the guessing game...where you all guess the baby's gender/weight/height....whoever gets the closest wins.  This is a tradition in our large, extended family.  Then we got the call!  It was a healthy, baby boy!  I knew it all along!  The next few hours was filled with driving, phone calls, and the kids fighting over where the baby would sit on the way home.  We named him and all guessed if he would have hair or not.

And then it happened....I got a phone call from our social worker saying the birth mom was having second thoughts.  We pulled over to catch our breath from the flood of emotions hitting us.  The kids and I went into Target to get some snacks and some new dvd's.  Adam stayed behind to wait for a call from our social worker.  The next thing I knew he was standing in front of me with tear-stained eyes.  His face said it all.  She changed her mind.  Time stopped.  In the middle of the Target aisle I begin to do everything I could to barter with God asking for Him to change it! Now I felt a hole, a void....where there had been hope and excitement there was emptiness!  I remember waking up in the middle of the night at that hotel in New York and realizing it all over again. He was not coming home with us.  It was a tangible sadness like I had never known before.  The kind that makes it hard to catch your breath.  I remember over those next few weeks and months.. I thought I would never feel whole again.  My heart was broken, my nursery was empty, people didn't really even know how to acknowledge our loss because they didn't understand it.  I was lost.  So, how do you get here from there?

All I can say is one breath at a time.  Little by little I rallied.  In the beginning I was too scared to think of going through anything like that again but the other side of it was I had a dream in my heart that was not fulfilled.  There were only two choices.  Let my pain stop me from moving or risk it all again for love.  Love is always a risk in all of it's forms.  I continued to pray for my little "heart-born" son and through that God began to show me that he had another plan for him.  We had named him but God gave him another name....Jeremiah.   At first I did not want to see the irony in his name but the more I prayed the more it became impossible to ignore.  Jeremiah  29:11 had always been a very special verse to me.  God had spoken it into my life as a young woman heading off to Bible school with my new husband.  Through Jeremiah's life God was showing me there was a plan....He didn't want to hurt me... He wanted me to have Hope!  He would fill that void in my heart if I would trust Him!  See pain is designed to immobilize us but He was saying get up and keep moving and from this you will see great things that I will do!!!  Would I have wanted to go through that?  Of course not and as a mother I would have never wanted my children to know that kind of pain.  However, there is a victory that only comes from rising out of a heap of broken pieces!  Until I was broken in that way I could have never been able to help others who were broken like me.  Getting back up takes a special king of strength....I think of it as the kind you "guts" are made out of.  So, our journey will always include Jeremiah..He will always hold a piece of my heart and I have asked God to always keep me mindful to pray for him and his future and that of his family.  Was I allowed to be in his life to support his mother and give her Hope to get through a pregnancy that she otherwise was prepared to end?  Or maybe he was put in my life to teach me a lesson I could not have learned any other way.  Our family grew stronger through this, our marriage grew even more solid as we leaned on each other through this.  I learned to trust God in a way I had never know!  So that is the story of Jeremiah born June 11, 2008....forever in our hearts!  <3