5 and 1

I am not the first person to lose a mom, nor will I be the last.  Yet it still sucks.  It has been 5 years since my mom took her final breath. 

My sister said today that my mom has missed a sixth of her life.  The best sixth.  What crap.

I miss her so.  

Just like my sister wishes my mom could have witnessed these last 5 years of her life, I so wish she could have witnessed the last 5 years of my life.  

She has missed out on squishy Asher snuggles, hysterical Grayson jokes, my pursuit of my midwife calling, an unexpected job transition for Jon, two moves, and most recently an incredibly painful and hard year that unexpectedly led to our decision to adopt.

We are fortunate to have family and friends that have surrounded us in the last 5 years with love.  But big transitions have definitely led to some lonely nights where I wished more than anything I could call my mom.

Grayson was conceived intentionally when my life felt just fine and comfortable.  An ideal time for us to become parents, we thought.  But then when I was 6 months pregnant my mom had the initial heart attack that led to 8 of the most challenging, painful, and rich months of my life.  No one would chose that road, but I do believe that those roads are the ones we are meant to walk.  They are the roads that bring us to our knees, the roads that help us realize what really matters in life, the roads that help us truly connect with other humans both in those hard moments as well as when you later walk alongside someone on their hard road. Grayson was such a sweet gift in those hard months.  If I knew my mom would get sick and require what felt like all my heart and care, I would have never chose to get pregnant when we did.  But of course, looking back we wouldn't change a thing.

This last year has been more privately painful.  It has been one year since Jon started his transition out of ministry.  It was hard, painful, and lonely.  I have wanted to be able to call my mom more this year than any other since she has been gone. I was created as an unfiltered, truth telling, open book kind of gal.  It brings peace to my soul to be able to share my story and our lives to be able to connect with others.  Alone is not something that I do well, adding to the difficulty of this last year in which I often felt that way. 

5 years ago I was praying for my mom to walk through the veil between earth and heaven.  I wanted her pain to stop.  And my prayers were answered.  While there was so much grief, there was also so much relief and joy for my mom.  

Now, being 1 year out from last February, I am so grateful that there is once again joy.  In the last year I have wanted my pain to stop, but I also wanted to practice what I preach and sit in the shit.  I wanted to learn what I needed to learn.  To seek healing and wholeness, not just escape. I knew we needed to do the hard work of this year, and not just survive it. God's redemptive work in our lives is so very sweet.  I am so grateful that God could use the pain of a job loss, transitions in community and friends, a miscarriage, the stress of grad school, and just the nitty gritty of life to again bring us to our knees.  

It was in this sacred space that we found our next steps.  1 year ago I never would have thought we would be in this crazy, joyous, and exciting place with our adoption journey.  1 year ago, much like 5 years ago, I was spending a great deal of time crying in the sacred space of my shower.  I prefer to cry where I cannot differentiate between the water and my tears.  I am so grateful for seasons, and that there is always a hill on the other side of the valley.

The adoption process is quite the hill to climb, with so many bumps and challenges along the way, but we know the end result, and we are confident once again that this is our road to walk.  Our hill to climb.  We know there will be joy not just in the end, but also in the process.  We are so thankful for those willing to walk alongside us.

Next week we are hosting a big party and fundraiser that is breaking down my pride in all sorts of ways.  

Remember how I don't do alone well?  I know that this adoption process and journey is a road where I want people next to me, in front of me, and behind me.  My deepest self wants that.  My prideful self wants to just do this all on our own and act like it ain't no big thang.  I am scared to once again chose openness and vulnerability. My inner self is super confusing, welcome to crazy town. 

I love helping my friends.  I love celebrating with them.  I love standing behind them and supporting them in a multitude of ways.  Why wouldn't I think our friends would want to do the same for us?  

When I was open and vulnerable during our last challenging season, people showed up.  I am trusting that it will happen again.  We can do hard things.  I will continue to chose to do hard things.  And I will continue to do them in community. Because in the depths of my soul I think this is how we are supposed to live.  I think we have an abundance in our lives, and it is meant to be shared. 

I so wish my mom could be at my party.  I wish she could celebrate this season of redemption and our growing family.  But I am so very grateful for what she instilled deep in my soul.  That she encouraged this open book girl to live how she was created.  My mom loved birth and was pursuing becoming a doula.  How proud would she be that I finally owned my midwifery calling?  She always created space in our house for others.  Whether it was long term or short term, there was always room in our family for those who needed it.  I am sure this planted the adoption seed long before I knew it was our future. While my mom may not be here, her fingerprints are all over my life, and the ripples of her love are continuing to spread.

You are welcome to join us at our party.  Please do.  I can use all the hugs, and love, and support you are able to share.  Adoption, especially the finances, feel challenging.  But we are not alone. We have room in our house and our family for another babe... maybe you have room on your calendar for a party and can love us in the process.  

This is a picture of my mom and I at another celebration.  Gosh I miss her.

You are welcome.  In our lives and at our shin dig.  If you are free and can join us, please do :)

Feb 24 5p-7p

52 E Northwest Hwy, Des Plaines

Come celebrate our upcoming adoption with us while enjoying

-walking tacos

-amazing raffle prizes (drawn at 6:45)

-fun fair games

-beverages for adults and kids

-face painting and balloon animals

If you cannot come to our party but are still willing to support us financially, there are tickets for the larger raffle prizes available for purchase online here.

There are over 40 other raffle baskets available at the event.  How incredible is that?  Our friends, family, and community have been so incredibly generous.  Both 5 years ago, and now. 

If you are reading this, thank you.  Thank you for praying for us, for coming along side us.  For bearing witness to our hard roads and knowing we are capable.  Thank you for pulling us up and pushing us on towards good things.  Thank you for walking this journey we call life with us, even if it is only through prayers on a screen.  Please know that I am always here to connect through email if you too need someone to come alongside you, or if my hard roads are similar to yours.

Happy 5 year Heaveniversary, Mom.  All my love.

**Update:  My brother has written a tribute to my mom.  Being 5 years older than me, I enjoyed hearing his different perspective.  He gave this to my sisters and I, and he wanted to share it with anyone wanting to learn a little bit more about her.  Link below.

Noah's Story: Memories of my Stepmother, Nancy

Raffle and Par-tay

Please come to our party.  That is all.

We cannot wait to celebrate with our friends and family.  This feels like our wedding.  We get to invite everyone we know and love to one location and celebrate some of the sweetest moments that life offers. 

Open invite.  If you know nice and fun people, they can come.

Link at top of page to purchase raffle tickets to the biggest and most amazing prizes if you are unable to attend.

We cannot wait to see you.

Feb 24 5p-7p

52 E Northwest Hwy, Des Plaines

Come celebrate our upcoming adoption with us while enjoying

-walking tacos

-amazing raffle prizes (drawn at 6:45)

-fun fair games

-beverages for adults and kids

-face painting and balloon animals

If you are able to join us, send Jaci a text or email.  We wouldn't want to be short on walking tacos or drinks. 

Also, there are too many raffle prizes to list them all for e-sales.  You seriously don't want to miss it.

Goals

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.

When you aren't picked, start planning a big party!

We were not chosen for the child we pursued.  Neither was the other family.  The committee came back and said that because of the extent of potential unknowns with this babe, they think a family with experience in international adoption and special needs would be the best fit.

Crum bums.

It has taken me awhile to write this post, as we have known since last week, because it's hard to share heart ache in a vulnerable but constructive way when you are fresh in the dumps. And, because I try to not use some of the choice words I was using in private on the interwebs.

I am not crushed about not being matched with that child, per se.  What I feel most sad about... is feeling like after reading all the charts, and saying all the prayers, and having all the conversations, we felt so much peace about moving forward. Yet this is the ending.  There have only been a handful of times in my life that such crazy decisions felt so crazy clear.  Was I hearing it wrong?  Did the plan change?  Is my heart meant to endure more pain to get to the place where it needs to be?

Who the h. e. double hockey sticks knows.  I have no clarity here.  They say there will be clarity and understanding when you have YOUR child.  Can't wait for that peace of mind likely in another 6-9 months.  Sounds freaking fantastic.

I think part of my peace came from the fact that we were moving forward with a waiting child, which comes back to our motivation to adopt.  We have an abundance, and abundance is meant to be shared.  Pursuing a waiting child felt inline with that.  I think the matching process feels more like the domestic infant adoption process due to the waiting involved.  In America, there is no shortage of families willing to take a healthy newborn.  That's awesome.  We didn't want to just add to the picking pool since we did not feel like we needed to adopt a newborn. (For those that do want to adopt a newborn-more power to you, and no judgement here.  Those babes need loving homes. I like working with babies in 12 hour shifts and then getting a two day break.  Just kidding.  Kinda.)

So waiting to be matched with a child from Korea feels like that.  It feels like we are not adopting those with the greatest need.  And the number of orphans in the world feels staggering and heart wrenching.  In actuality I think it's just the politics and legal stuff that makes the adoption and the wait take so long.  Being open to medical and developmental needs may shorten the process, but all Korean babes must be eligible for adoption in Korea for 6 months, first.  And ultimately we also need to be true to ourselves, our capabilities, and the needs of the crazies already underfoot.  They get their crazy from Jon.  Just so you know.

It is HARD to keep listening to that still small voice in the depths of your heart telling you to keep risking, keep pursuing, and keep running after something that you fully know will break you down, especially after this year has already entailed quite the breaking down process.   

But here we are.  Trusting.  Saying "yes" to the hard things.  Please circle up around us and join us in the crazy.  Remind us we are supposed to do hard things.  Abundance is meant to be shared.  And, tell us how we can love you in your hard things. 

Also, come to our party and invite everyone you know.  Please and thank you.  More details to come but mark your calendars for Feb 24th from 5-7 PM and join us at the Frisbie Center in Des Plaines.  Its a senior center.  I don't know why but I find this hilarious.  Maybe you can have a free drink if you come with full on senior citizen attire.  We are going to rock a game night and fun fair with a big raffle, bingo, face painting, hopefully some balloon animals, snacks, drinks, and lots of celebrating.  I throw a good party.  And its a good cause.  If you have any thing we can share, raffle off, or serve at our event...  or if you are willing to help us set up and run games or give me emotional support, please let me know.  I need you like Donald Trump needs hair spray. 

Life and challenge is not meant to be walked alone and we have many more miles to go.  Yet, we know the finish line is sweet and there are lessons in the journey. 

Share your abundance today, dear friends, and we will continue to share ours.