Mother's day- if you wait until you are ready

With Mother’s day being last weekend I thought I would share a little blog about my own journey to motherhood.

We had always had plans of adopting a child… when I was older! 30 seemed to be the magical age when adoption seemed to be within our future. Not only because 30 is the legal age to be eligible to adopt in places like China, but also because 30 feels stable to me. At that magic age my husband and I will be married 9 years, he will be done with school, we will be out of debt besides student loans and the mortgage, and we will be in our house for 5 years, more than enough time to make any improvements we needed to make before we bring a child into the mix. 30 was the age I was going to be ready to be a parent! 30 was the age where we would have our lives in order. But it’s been said before, that if you wait until you are ready to have kids, if you wait until you can afford it to have kids, you’ll never have them.

During the summer of 2012, 3 months before my 28^th birthday we brought home our daughter. A beautiful brown eyed 4 year old full of energy, opposition, and just enough sweetness to make us still fall in love with her. She had been living in foster care at my parents from the age of 2 and had a pretty rough start to life. We had decided after much prayer and consideration that we would try to adopt her. We started before she was a freed child, meaning her biological mother was still in the picture, and went through a roller coaster ride of nearly 2 years before we were able to take her home. In this time we grew as a couple, grew as a family, and learned to rely on faith more than we ever had before. I have never been so stressed out, or cried so much in my entire life as at one point it looked like we were not going to be able to adopt her. We were very bonded to her, and she was very bonded to us. Every time she said “I want you to be my daddy.” To my husband, my heart broke a little bit more as we explained to her that we would have to just wait and see. I gained weight, gray hair, and more than anything else maturity as we went through this process.

This year, a week before Mother’s day we were able to finally legally adopt her! To change her name and let her know forever and ever she is ours. It was an unconventional way to build a family, but for my husband and I, it’s the only way that seemed right. This past year has been filled with building special amazing memories with our little girl, and going from being a couple who stayed up late, had tons of alone time and had little routine to thinking about this little girl first in every possible way. Like all parents we jumped in with both feet and even with knowing it would change our lives in every way, still had no idea how significantly it would change our lives. People become parents through a lot of different means, Birth, Surrogate, Adoption, Marriage, Death, and Fostering. All methods of becoming a parent are noble and good as long as the parent is willing to love their child, and work hard to set them on the right path to becoming decent human beings. For those people who every day make the choice to be the best parent they can be, they deserve honor regardless of the method they became parents. To them I gladly applaud you, on a Sunday, that isn’t a Holiday, but a day you continue to be a fantastic mother and lay down your life for your family.