It happened again the other night. I had put my oldest son to bed and was headed into my youngest’s room when I heard a faint whisper/longing and looked across the hallway to our empty guest room. “Soon you’ll have another to put to sleep.” Such a weird thing to hear considering we have adopted twice, but don’t even have an active home study at the moment. Excuse me… what, God? Come again?
If you’ve been following the journey of our family, you'll know that after years of primary infertility we embarked on an adoption journey and ended up adopting our oldest son through domestic private adoption. He was 5 at the time. A year later we embarked on another adoption journey, but this time we adopted a newborn baby. We had an unexpected 6-month experience with the foster care system/kinship care for a half sibling of one of our boys. Now, a year later, it’s just the four of us. I had NaPro surgery this past summer (endometriosis removal, uterine polyp removal and an ovarian wedge resection) but we have still never had a pregnancy. Our story does involve co-factor infertility so we know a lot of factors are at play.
Before we adopted the first time, I regularly watched a WFAA news segment called “Wednesday’s Child”. This segment featured “Waiting Children” with the State of Texas foster care system. As we were in the very long first adoption wait, I purposefully kept up with the segment each week. We started our first adoption with the intention of only adopting an infant, and I know now that God was using that segment to grow my heart… He knew then that He had a 5 year-old for us.
I hadn’t thought about “Wednesday’s Child” since the adoption of our first, but the other night as I was working my second job while the rest of my house was asleep, I heard the whisper “Wednesday’s Child”. Before I knew it, I was 20 episodes deep and my heart was growing! Questions that I hadn’t considered were flooding my mind. Before I knew it, I was on the state’s Waiting Children website and there he was… a beautiful little boy with big eyes that looked like my youngest’s. Boom: a child is growing within. I know that the probability of that particular little boy ending up in our home is very slim; but I know how the Holy Spirit moves things along. After walking two very different adoption journeys before, I’ve come to recognize the gentle nudges that eventually lead us in the right direction. They are always gentle, but in my experience they are firm and aren’t easy to forget. Peaceful thoughts that start the process of the expanding of my heart and encouraging exploration on the topic. With both previous adoption, these thoughts have not been fleeting, but seem to grow as the days move on.
Over the course of a few weeks, I’ve gone from enjoying our life as a family of four (not thinking about adoption AT ALL) to researching options for a third adoption and thinking about things like car seats, daycare/school, and what the holidays would look like if we started the process now. There’s nothing that sparked this growth other than the faint whisper that led me down a rabbit hole.
I’ve never been pregnant, but I imagine that this whirlwind is similar to when a woman finds out she’s expecting. Lots of questions, situations, and emotions come to mind. How are we going to announce it to family and friends? What would they think about us adopting a child older than our youngest? What agency works best for adopting from the foster care system? How will our oldest adjust?
Children truly grow in our hearts. This process is so individualized for every party involved. I ended up waking up my husband that night to show him the photo of the little boy… he was not amused (probably because your wife springing on you the thought of adopting a third child in the middle of the night is not the best way to have that conversation) but he was wise enough to tell me we would talk about it in the morning. The whole adoption process is very stressful for my husband and so he gave me permission to begin researching agencies and asked that I refrain from talking to him every day about what I’m exploring. We've both learned a lot about what we need through the adoption process: I need to do all the research, and he needs the facts regarding a shortlist of agencies I’m considering. Although his experience of letting a child grow within is very different to mine, I can tell that his heart is expanding as well; for him it’s a quieter process and one that takes a lot of internal reflection. He’s probably similar to St Joseph in that way.
Children do grow in our minds and hearts; I like to think that the growth of a child through adoption is a spiritual experience. It’s breathtaking in it’s own way and very hopeful. As our Father has made room for each of us, He journeys with us to help us prepare a way for something new.
The blog post above was written on November 3, 2024. Today is November 27, 2024 and I would like to ask for prayer for our family; we are meeting someone special this weekend...
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