Emotionally, these last several months have been crazy. I don't think I realized how many emotions one person could experience in one day until these last couple of months. I have been slack at writing on my blog since July as we have been trying to prepare our lives and our home for the next hopeful step in our lives....foster care and adoption. While we know where we want to be headed, so much of the process is in the hands of someone else other than us and God. It's currently in the hands of someone else who makes the decision if we are fit enough to have a foster child in our home...if our home is good enough...if we are good enough. The waiting sucks.
I know that whether I was personally pregnant or whether we are choosing to adopt, there will always be a sense of waiting that must occur. At least if I could have been pregnant I would know that usually the gestational time doesn't go past nine months. With our foster care and adoption process we don't have that option. What if the child that we fall in love with ends up not being able to become our child legally? What is the judge chooses a family member that is a total stranger to that child over us? What if we don't get approved? We are warned to guard our hearts but how do you guard your heart when a family is everything you ever wanted?
The wait gets harder. Every time I hear of another person becoming pregnant either on Facebook or in my life, it makes the wait longer and the fear that we won't be good enough to be foster parents (or even just a parent) even greater. Emotionally it drains me. The future is uncertain...how can I plan for anything, hope for anything, when we are in the wait. Every ring of the phone or piece of mail that comes to our mailbox is anticipated to be some sort of news on this path of ours to become a family but usually ends with disappointed as we continue to wait.
Emotions run high now with anger as I watch so many young pregnant women who are so complacent about what it is that they carry inside of them. Has our society lost site of the fact that the act of conceiving a child is really a miracle? Especially when statistically that egg and sperm have such a small window of opportunity to meet and actually join together and then the further complication of making it to the uterus where it has to implant into the wall. It truly is a miracle. In my eyes I would do everything to assure that the miracle I would be lucky enough to have (if only I was lucky enough) inside me was cared for in such a way that I wouldn't put it at risk for disease, developmental delays, or even the risk of death. Why don't these pregnant women who smoke and drink and abuse their bodies in other ways during their pregnancies not care about that miracle? Emotionally I want to scream.
I know that there would be fear irregardless of whether I was carrying a child of my own of the process we are currently going through. I guess that is where hope comes into play. I won't stop believing in miracles. It has gotten us this far. When I feel like giving in and giving up I continue to look at the silicone bracelet I wear that says BELIEVE IN MIRACLES. Maybe our miracle will still come...whether adopted or conceived on our own. I just know that when I look into the eyes of the child we hope to have as ours someday and hear that child call me Mommy or my husband Daddy, that I believe a little hard and hold on stronger to hope.
If you are in the same boat, don't give up. Keep believing and keep praying.
