I’m very excited to announce my very first guest post. I am honored that the writer of this post is none other than my beautiful wife, Mindi. She wanted to share part of her heart with everyone. Those of you who have been following along know that we are very open about our family in order to help others. We also like to do things a little differently. With that in mind my wife wanted to do a gender reveal for our twins that is a little unique. She wanted to take the opportunity to share part of her story. So, without further ado, here’s my wife:
Mindi
I love this picture:
Actually, I think it’s perfect. But the picture is a lot more complicated than it seems.
What the picture doesn’t show are the millions of tears that were shed, the countless cries out to God, the dark cloud of depression and desperation, and the agonizing torture of having to call everything I believed I was as a woman into question.
Five years ago, when John and I met, it was like two magnets that were drawn to each other and couldn’t be separated. It was a connecton I still can’t find the right words for. The best I can say about it is that it overwhelms me. It’s the kind of love that makes you want to be the best version of yourself because that’s who your partner deserves.
One thing we bonded on immediately was our desire to build a family through adoption, in addition to having biological kids. Right after we got married we made the choice to start foster-to-adopt classes so we could get those out of the way and be ready when the time was right to adopt. We figured we would enjoy the first year of our marriage without kids. We would travel and bask in the complete bliss of being joined together as husband and wife. Then, when the time was right, we would have a biological kid and then we would adopt.
We were so naïve. We were so idealistic and we were so wrong. We weren’t getting ready for a happily ever after. We were getting ready to fight a war that neither of us saw coming.
The whole story is so long and, honestly, still a little too raw to dive too deeply into, but here’s what I will say: about 6 or 7 months into our marriage I went to the doctor on instinct to see if everything was ok with my fertility. I wasn’t that worried because I figured I was young and healthy and we weren’t even ready for a kid. But there was something telling me to go. That was the beginning of a nightmare. We went to several doctors and got opinions ranging from “there is nothing wrong with you,” to “you have three months to do something or you will never have biological children.”
We tried everything. Five specialists, three surgeries, three failed IUI’s. We spent thousands of dollars. Tried every lotion, potion and herb you can name. Acupuncture, countless (and I mean countless) blood tests, organic everything, standing on my head, wearing only natural deodorant, eating pineapple core, giving up every food and drink I ever loved. I read endless books, didn’t use anything with chemicals, stopped eating or drinking from plastic (which is way more complicated than it sounds). I did cleanses, prayer fasts, and at one point I was taking over 30 pills per day in supplements. If someone said eat dirt, I ate dirt. I basically did everything short of witchcraft.
I’ve called into question a lot of things about myself before, but there is a special kind of hell that comes along with calling into question whether or not you will be able to bear the kids you’ve been dreaming of. It’s helplessness, it’s self blame, it’s living your life in a 30 day cycle that always ends in a punch in the face and a bottle of wine that doesn’t last as long as your tears. It’s having dark thoughts about walking out the door and not coming back so your husband can find someone who can give him little versions of him. No matter how much John would reassure me that he couldn’t care less about having biological kids and no matter how often he told me I was enough, those are the thoughts that plagued me.
I couldn’t even walk down the pregnancy-test isle at a store without breaking into a cold sweat and utter panic. I’m 21 weeks pregnant with twins and to this day I still won’t pee on a stick.
I think one of the hardest pills to swallow through all of this was the death of our idea of when we were going to adopt. We wanted adopted kids just as much as biological kids and we wanted them to know that and never call it into question. That is the reason we wanted bio kids first and then adopted children after that. We never ever wanted the adopted children to think they were plan B because we couldn’t have kids. They weren’t. They were plan A along with our other plan A.
“Who’s going to believe adoption wasn’t plan B now that we were in this position?” was a question I asked God more than once. “What’s your plan here God? Because you’re ruining my plan!”
One thing I learned through all of this is that God doesn’t care how I would prefer to have the situation look to our family or to the world. What He did care about is having my foster daughter land safety in our arms. Right where she was supposed to be. The truth is if our plan had played out we wouldn’t have her. She would have a completely different life. And maybe our life would have looked exactly how I intended for it to look but there would be a helpless little girl out in the world, in a system that isn’t kind, without a dad who loves her or a mom who had been dreaming of her. We would have missed her completely because I thought my plan was better than God’s plan. What a fool.
And now, here we are, not what I pictured at all but with everything I could ask for. And to make it even sweeter we found out this week we are expecting a BOY and a GIRL!
So the picture above is a symbol of an untraditional victory. A blessing in disguise. And I’m sure hidden in that picture are hints of our next unexpected battle, because that’s how life goes.
I can’t write this without acknowledging that I’m sure these words will make it into the hands of another woman who’s fight isn’t over. Many stories landed in my hands during those 3 years and it was comforting to hear hope from others. It was also painful sometimes, but my hope is that my story brings you more comfort than pain.
There is a plan.
