As many know, our family was partially formed by adoption, which I truly feel is a beautiful expression of God’s far-reaching love.
With November being National Adoption Awareness Month, I wanted to acknowledge the multiple blessings of adoption. Google search of this special month provided this insight: “November is dedicated to raising awareness about the need for adoptive families and celebrating families built through adoption. It highlights as well the thousands of children in the foster care system awaiting permanent homes, while also acknowledging the families and individuals involved in the adoption process.”
For seven long years, I sensed as if I’d lost a child every month. This was truly the way of my heartbeat. With every passing month, I felt the crushing despondency and hollow emptiness of a childless home.
Together, my husband and I made the decision to pursue adoption. Every story is different and unique. Without divulging too much private information, our sons’ birth mothers chose life but could not raise the babies they nurtured within — one devastatingly secretly, one thankfully with the support of her family. Both opted to place their babies with loving homes.
On our ninth wedding anniversary, we received the call from our social worker informing us our file was picked by a birth mother. Deb, our precious social worker, cautiously told us to hope for the best but expect the worst — which meant the birth mother could change her mind. This was just as brutal as our infertility journey. We were so incredibly close.
Planning on bringing our 12-day-old baby boy home, we prepared our house for the newborn, not knowing with absolute surety if we’d be bringing our son home. We could potentially come home empty-handed. I simply could not bear the thought. That didn’t stop us from trying.
I want to assure birth mothers that when they choose life for their baby, and then place their baby, they will be blessed with the knowledge they had a divine part in answered prayer.
Not only do they give their baby a chance to live, they give their baby a home where a mother and father open their arms and fully love their child with abandonment. When my baby boy was placed in my arms and I cradled him to my heart, I could barely contain my joy. It was truly love at first sight.
On the opposite side of my joy was a desperate sadness for our birth mother. She carried this priceless new life inside of her, literally giving life, for nine months. Unselfishly and with great love, she placed him with us. What kind of courage does that take? What a selfless, genuine, noble love.
When our precious boy was almost 2 years old, we began the adoption journey all over again. Not wanting our son to be an only child, we updated our file and bared our hearts once more.
This time we waited nine months almost to the day — how ironic. Our second son’s birth mother wanted her son to be adopted by a family that had previously adopted a baby, lived on a farm and had a dog. Check. Check. Check. God ordained it perfectly.
Families aren’t defined exclusively by blood. Our family has been formed not only through adoption, but also been blessed with a biological child. Our daughter was conceived 16 years into our marriage, when her brothers were 7 and 4 years old.
As a college graduation gift to their sister, our daughter asked her brothers to get a tattoo with three J’s in small caps — their first names’ initials — to cement their bond. All three went to a tattoo artist and got them together. While they are not blood siblings, this common tattoo reminds them they are siblings through love.
Adoption is a beautiful triangular journey — birth mother, adoptive parents and child — full of heartache and love, with a depth of emotion I cannot fully express. We are privileged and wholly blessed to be woven together in this unique and special way.
I have the exclusive knowledge of while being fully able to understand the all-consuming crushing weight of infertility, I also fully understand the boundless joy of motherhood through experiencing first adoption and then, years later, a biological birth.
Thank you, Heidi, for giving us your son. Thank you, Ann, for giving us your son. Your love-yes to choosing life will always be cherished deep in my heart, and I am forever grateful.
The Adoption Creed plaque my sister gave me when we adopted our first son reads, “Not flesh of my flesh nor bone of my bone but still miraculously my own. Never forget for a single minute, you didn’t grow under my heart, but in it.” Truth. Absolute truth.
During this National Adoption Awareness Month, please take the time to pray for the children who are awaiting homes, potential birth mothers who choose life and then choose to sacrificially place their babies in loving homes, adoptive couples who are waiting to be parents and also for compassionate social workers who pave the way. God hears our heartfelt prayers.
(“He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will.” Ephesians 1:5)
Kay Reminger was born and raised on a dairy farm, and she married her high school sweetheart, who happened to farm for a living in Leopolis. Writing for quite a few years, she remains focused on the blessings of living the ups and downs of rural life from a farm wife’s perspective.