Friday, May 29, 2009

"I'm going to marry the first man who asks me to go fishing..."

...and I did. So the story goes that the first time I had my heart broken (I was 22 ... remember, I'm a late joiner) I asked the boy who broke it, "Why do you want to break up?" His answer was that we didn't have anything much in common, that I didn't like to do the same things he liked to do. "Such as what?!" I asked. He answered, "You don't like to fish". (You can see this was a deep relationship). So I said to him, "You've never even asked me to go fishing!" But alas, that was the end of that, and I eventually moved on but I never forgot the unfairness of it all (a girl in her twenties has a long and unforgiving memory). So the joke became that I would marry the first man to ask me to go fishing with him. 

Fast-forward 16 or so years, I meet W. and he is an avid fisherman. You can guess the rest. 

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

The beginning, from the middle.

Had I the least little bit of techno savviness I might have begun this blog at the beginning of our story, instead of in the middle. But alas, I'm a late joiner so I'll fill in the earlier details of our adoption journey and our choice of China, in another post a little later. (Our Log In Date (LID) is March 28, 2007 so we've already been waiting for 26 months.)

Speaking of being a late joiner, I was 39 when I married W. in October of 2005. From the beginning we understood that getting pregnant might be difficult, so the discussion of adoption came up early in our dating.  But it was never really a hard thing for me to imagine, I believe now that the idea had been planted in my heart long before I knew it was there, long before I met W. In fact, when I began the research it just felt so right and ... here's the strange part ... familiar.  

Even when getting pregnant still seemed like more of a possibility than it does now, W. and I made the decision to start an adoption. Our feeling was that it didn't have to be one or the other, it could be both. We would love any child God sent our way, no matter its path to us.

Since then the journey towards motherhood has been filled with lots of ups and downs and in betweens, but mostly waiting. Waiting for doctor appointments, waiting for test results, waiting for tears to dry, waiting for paperwork, waiting for a log-in date, and waiting, waiting, waiting for our daughter.

While I simultaneously celebrate the adoption and grieve for a pregnancy that may never happen, I determinedly cling to that last grain of hope (as the unknown author penned, "Hope is the last to die") and continue to pray for a family of my own. 

As I begin this blog, I'm not 100% sure what I'll do with it. I will most likely use it to journal for awhile before I am brave enough to open the permissions and allow people in. But I'm here for my daughter and myself, so that someday we can read her this story so she can see how desperately we prayed, and waited, and loved her before we even knew her.