Today I took a shower. For most of you, that isn’t much of a feat. It’s normal for a person to bathe daily, though I’m told unwashed hair holds styling better, but this isn’t a fashion blog and I don’t do any styling to my hair anyway. It may have only been 5 minutes, but today I took a shower and for me that was a huge accomplishment. Because I’m a new mom now. I have a son.
Just typing those words feels surreal. This blog has been all about infertility, perseverance through adversity and firm faith, and then adoption, obedience, trust, and patience, but now we’ve passed from the family planning season to the parenting season in what seems like a blink of an eye.
It’s amazing to think of how quickly things progressed once we decided not to continue with IVF. In March, our last IVF cycle failed. In July we started the adoption process. And in October, our son was born and we brought him home. A series of big decisions and lots of hard work brought us to the moment our son became ours 7 months after my final miscarriage. Did all this really happen in just 7 months?
No, it didn’t only take 7 months. It took 31 years. It took eons. God had all this planned out, written in His book before time began. It’s been amazing to look back over my entire life and realize everything I’ve ever done, everything that’s ever happened to me was to prepare me to be Jace’s mom. To prepare Michael to be Jace’s dad. To grow our faith, to strengthen our marriage, to mature and mold us into the people God wanted to use to parent His son Jace here on earth. We’ve done nothing but marvel at God’s sovereignty, power, and goodness since Jace became ours.
Now he sleeps soundly, swaddled in his nursery, monitor turned up, humidifier steaming, sound machine on full blast, salt lamp softly glowing, probably loading another nasty diaper for his middle of the night feed. I thank God for those foul diapers because they mean Jace is healthy. I find myself constantly thanking God all day for things like burping and tooting and poop. Oh to be a baby and get praised for passing gas.
I’m planning to continue writing, maybe about the challenges of parenting. Any parent knows there’s plenty of material for that subject. I also want to shed more light on adoption, advocate for it as an option not only to grow a family, but also for women experiencing an unwanted pregnancy in a world that’s quickly forgetting the sanctity of human life. My next blog will be about our adoption story and how it all went down.
Adoption gives a child to a family and a family to a child. Adoption brings together people who are lacking something and through their relationship creates a whole. For us, what started out as a quest for us to have a child, turned into a quest to give ourselves to a child. And once Jace was in our arms, he became ours to love, protect, nurture, raise, discipline, and encourage. We adopted him, meaning another woman gave birth to him and gave him to us, but we accepted him into our family unconditionally and now he’s just our son, part of our family forever no matter where he goes or what he does. Sounds familiar…
Cedar N' Steel 