On Letting Go… and Letting In

Letting go…isn’t easy. It’s hard, it hurts, and sometimes it just plain ol’ sucks.

Two and a half years ago, when I was pregnant with Eden, slowly but surely a passion began to grow in me… a passion that made me see the world differently. A passion that made me excited to have more kids. A passion that fueled our family’s efforts to raise thousands of dollars in order to expand our family after Eden. A passion that only grew with each passing day.

A passion to adopt.

Only to have that passion, that drive, that dream snuffed out of me at one glance at a positive pregnancy stick. I wept long and hard after realizing my dream, our dream to adopt was no longer in our immediate plans. I wept for feeling upset about my pregnancy when so many women/couples would do anything to carry a child within them.

Do we continue the adoption process? Do we continue the fundraising? 

Not knowing what to do, I allowed myself to (try to) stop thinking about it and just make it one day at a time. But what I didn’t realize was that I was still holding oh-so-tight to our dream and our plan to adopt. My knuckles were white with determination to not let our unexpected pregnancy stop us from adopting in the timeline we wanted.

We will adopt, I would silently tell myself over and over again.

But in my determination to do things my way and in my time, I found myself refusing to bond with the baby inside me. It hurt too much to try to love a ‘new’ baby when my heart was already completely sold on our baby-in-waiting.

One afternoon when I was weeping in my bed, I heard a voice say deep within me:

“I know how much you love your (adopted) baby. I know how much you hurt over not being able to bring your adopted baby home when you wanted to. And that’s okay to feel broken, to grieve. But this baby inside you? S/he needs to be adopted into your heart. You will still adopt… but in a new way this time. The journey will be different, but beauty will still come from it.”

Those words still make me cry. Because it’s so true. I have to adopt this baby into my heart, into my dreams, into my plans. And it’s hard. It’s hard letting go of a dream and allowing an unexpected turn of events become a new dream.

Because I don’t want to be bitter. I don’t want to be angry.

I want to be joyful. I want to be happy about this pregnancy. I want to celebrate this little child’s life. I want this baby to know s/he was loved by me long before s/he was born. And in order for that to happen, I have to let go of our first dream…

Who knows what the future may hold? How many kids will we have? How many adopted and how many biological? And I have to honestly say I.Don’t.Know. I have my (tentative) plans, my goals, and my dreams, but we live in an imperfect world where dreams are broken all the time and we have to readjust (or we don’t readjust and can let bitterness slowly consume the beauty that IS in our life).

So while I still believe we will eventually adopt, I’m learning that having 100% certainty is never possible. So what do we do when we can’t be certain about something? Heck, certain about anything?? Except eventual death??

We choose peace.

We choose hope.

We choose love. 

I love how The Message puts it in I Corinthians 13:13…

“But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”

So as you and I journey through this world full of broken dreams, may we choose to let hope, peace, and love reign deep within us. Because if this world needs anything, it’s those three things.