9 months

We didn't have to do a 9 month adoption report, but it's definitely a milestone that has caused me to reflect on our journey nonetheless. To step to the next stage of healing from mourning the painful realities that that led to our adopting Taye, and to celebrate the richness and joy our mix of six is.

We've been home with Taye for 9 months. We are probably more exhausted than we've ever been. Parenting 4 kids, the youngest of whom came to us fully functioning, mobile, and oozing with about 20 times more needy-ness than a newborn has sought to test and tax us to our limits. And then stretched us some more. We thought we were pretty good people, until Taye exposed us to the fact that we still have quite a long way to go. So thankful for his mirror because I don't want to be content in who I am. I want to be more.

Often I ask God why He chose this child and this path for me, for us, for our family. And I am constantly reminded that God will not give me more than I can handle. Once I re-set my mind to that realization, take a minute to bask in the fact that He made me stronger and more able to handle a calling that most people would never be able to manage, I have a little more wind in my sails. Knowing the original adoptive parent is my model and encouragement makes me able to head right back at it with confidence I would not otherwise have.

We have friends in various stages of their adoption processes--thinking about it, praying about it, being educated, filling out paperwork, waiting for a referral, travelling to pick up their little one, newly home from the hospital with their gift baby etc. and I'm guardedly excited while silently in dread for them because I know both sids of what is headed their direction. Rollercoaster seems like a tame metaphor for what actually happens in the real post-adoption days, weeks, months and (I've heard) years.

Growing your family is never without joy and never without pain. I've just never experienced this particular flavor of either before, so it's all a new experience to me.

A fellow ministry wife asked me, "would you recommend that everyone adopt?" I tried to respond graciously with, "it's definitely a calling, and not everyone has the same calling." On the inside I was screaming "adoption is NOT to be taken lightly and done on a whim without full consent and support of the entire family!" In our experience growing our family biologically, while challenging due to increasingly horrendous bouts of PPD with each successive child, was a thousand times more natural and "easy" (and less expensive) of a transition than the adoption process has been. But this was our first time. And I think we've done pretty darn good with all that was thrown at us.

Two words that typify our family are love and change. They are both constants in our lives. And I thank God that for us, each catalyzes the other rather than opposes the other. That being said, when our oldest child prays at dinnertime that maybe we can adopt a child from Kenya next, we are not shocked, but relieved that our kids don't seem to be fazed by the craziness we've thrown into their lives, but actually thinking about and anticipating the possibility of taking part in it again. (breathe, Jenna, breathe...it's *just* a possibility...)

I am amazed by each of my children. They are currently having a screaming/dance party in my eldest son's bedroom. There are not 4 kids who enjoy being with each other more than my gang. I'm most intrigued by Taye because he literally doesn't know me from the inside-out like my other 3 have, and my not knowing his origins or the first few years of his life have set me at a huge disadvantage for understanding him and knowing how to react, respond to, and mother him.

But we are making progress every day. It's getting easier. I thank God that it feels like he's always been with us--he's just missing in a bunch of our old photographs and digital pics because he was halfway around the globe. It's just getting him all caught up on us and building history with him that we can't rush and have to bide our time as it happens. I have a feeling that by summer next year, when he's been with us as long as he hasn't, we'll be in a very different place than we are right now. And although I'm looking forward to it, I'm trying not to rush and looking for essences to savor in these everydays that we have to get through before we get "there".

Life is a journey, not a destination.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would contend that LOVE is too. A journey, not a destination.

Lord, help me to journey well.