Bursting at the seams.

My blog has been silent for awhile, in part because I stopped blogging for the company with whom I have been working for the past few months.  The extra money was great, but I'm a big believer in writing from your heart instead of writing about topics which don't interest you at all (which was the case in about 90% of the blogs I had to compose).  That's one reason.

The other reason why I haven't been blogging as much lately is because there is so much in regards to the adoption that we are not allowed to post on social media.  I'm going crazy over here.  I process everything through the words that I write.  So, I'm going to attempt to catch you up to speed on this unpredictable life without revealing anything about the baby's or birth parents' identity.  Ugh.

We are just waiting for Baby to come home.  I can't tell you when it will be here or what the gender is, although I can tell you if you ask me directly.  (In that case, you'll probably wish you hadn't asked because then I won't stop talking about it.)

***

I got the phone call that we had been chosen while I was at work one day.  Oddly, the whole situation went down exactly as I had envisioned it, yet I was still so shocked that I could hardly speak.  I remember the secretary at the front desk telling me that I had a phone call and realizing, about halfway through the conversation, what was occurring on the other end of the line.  She looked at me while I was still on the phone and then shouted to the rest of the office, "It's happening!"  Fellow teachers gathered around as I made a few more mumbled comments to our case worker.  I hung up the phone and promptly burst into tears (happy ones, of course).  My friends were in tears, too, because they have watched this journey from start to finish.  After hugs all around, people started to ask, "Is it a boy or a girl?"  I was so dumbfounded that I had forgotten to check.

In the weeks since that surreal day, we have met Baby's birth parents.  I can't disclose much more about that except that they are incredible people.  I would like to say that if I was put in their situation, I would make the same selfless choice that they are making, but I'm not sure that I would.  Abortion absolutely has its ramifications on a woman's body (emotionally and physically), but I think it is, in some ways, an easier choice. It's easier than throwing up all day every day for the first five months of a pregnancy, easier than carrying a baby for nine months and then looking it in the eye only to say goodbye when it is born, easier than knowing, for the rest of your life, that the child you birthed is calling someone else "Mommy."  I know that lots of people will disagree with me on all of that (and I pray that I don't sound demeaning to anyone reading this who has had an abortion).  I didn't really understand it either until I met these people and realized that adoption is not a choice that they made once and then it was over.  This is a choice that they're having to make again and again when they wake up every morning.  That kind of decision requires a degree of strength that I can't comprehend because I'm not sure that I possess it.

I hate the terms "accidental" and "mistake" when referring to unplanned pregnancies.  I also hate when others look at people like us, who are currently unable to give birth to biological children, and say things like, "Oh, how unfortunate."  None of this has been a mistake, and we are certainly not unfortunate (although those have not been my thoughts from the beginning).  Adoption is a beautiful example of God taking all of the seemingly broken pieces of two separate puzzles and fitting them together to create one perfect picture of grace.  There are some days when I still can't believe that this story is happening to us, and those are the days when I realize that I've never been so thankful for having all of my plans dumped upside down.