My brain is spinning.
Our home study is complete. Now we hurry up and wait for a referral. Then we hurry up and wait for a lot of paperwork and procedures to bring said babe home.
Adoption is weird. When you are pregnant, you don't get to tell God what you can handle. Let's be real, while I may think I know my own abilities and limits, we often lean towards the comfortable and don't jump head first into the challenging. When you get pregnant with a baby with high needs, medical or development...or something catastrophic happens to your nice and neat little family, you pony up. You get on board, and you figure it out.
Honest truth, I don't know that I would have chosen Grayson. Of course now I cannot imagine our family without him. If I was told to what his first few years of life would entail, or if I had known my mom would have a heart attack and die 4 months after his birth, I might have paused that whole baby making idea. Our life was going so very well in the worldly sense. We had completed masters degrees, we had jobs in fields that we loved, our families were all healthy-ish and happy-ish. And then life happened and our comfort was drastically interrupted. As it needed to be.
Grayson has humbled us. He has challenged us. He has made us question our abilities and our intelligence. But he also grew us and loved us. That little life showed us we were capable of much more than we ever would have thought. Having him in such a tumultuous season of our life was perfectly ordained. We learned that we can do hard things and we can do them well. He was such a sweet spot in such a hard season, and we lived to tell the tale.
Choosing to check off things like "birth parents with severe delays," and "major and minor cardiac conditions," and "fetal exposure to alcohol" feels crazy. Because it all sounds really freaking hard. Super hard. But the kid whose parent's have severe delays, who may have inherited said delays, is still a kid. It's still a life, with as much inherit human value as Asher and Grayson. And those boys are invaluable to me. So even though being open to hard things seems crazy, it also seems so necessary and so right.
The more I learn about adoption, the more my heart breaks. There is a large part of me that wants to run away from this process because of the injustice of it all. Much of what I have learned about adoptions from Korea (as well as many other countries) include many single moms needing to place their babies up for adoption because they cannot afford to raise them. What in the actual expletive?
Who am I? Who are we to live this life of lavish privilege to be able to afford another baby with ample friends and community at our side when other mommas are handing their babes over out of love to try and give the child a better shot at life. I want to vomit in my mouth.
There has got to be a better way. I need to continue to learn and to research and find ways to support moms keeping their babies. Because while we feel called to adopt and make the life of at least one child better, there are some major systemic issues in place that I had never thought about before, but now they weigh heavy on my heart. Adoption is hard and beautiful and loving and challenging. It’s all the things in one single breath. And while there are a vast number of reasons that adoption exists, it seems that both immense grief and love lie in the center of many adoptive situations.
So, we as a family will keep saying yes to the hard things.
We will continue to share our abundance.
And we will continue to learn.
Those are my new years goals.
That and to become and midwife and adopt a baby. NBD.
I can jokingly say that because it is crazy and true. Because we are fortunate enough to have people and resources and safety and love. And I want to share it all. Both with the little life who we hope will join our family, as well as the multitude we encounter and interact with on a daily basis. Hoping the Noto family can make earth more like heaven in 2018.
