Beauty from Ashes (Part 2)

I wish I could say that this positive pregnancy test calmed all my fears, but no, they just morphed into a new, hormonally-charged worry. This time I felt much more pregnant than I had with the two we lost but we decided to do some hormone testing to be sure everything was looking okay. When my progesterone levels were headed in the wrong direction, we decided to supplement. I filled my progesterone prescription and began the supplements, preparing myself for about four weeks of this, since I could stop once my placenta had formed around 14 weeks. I was ten weeks along and my crazy hormonal anxiety was a daily struggle so we decided to have an ultrasound for some peace of mind. We celebrated as we heard a good strong heart beat but wondered why baby was much smaller than a normal ten week old baby in utero. Baby was only about eight weeks and four days old, based on measurements, but doing well. Long story short, we moved my due date a couple weeks later and praised the Lord that I had already started supplementing my progesterone when baby needed it most! While these were all good signs, I am ever the skeptic. I wavered back and forth between trusting God with whatever outcome He had planned for our family, and worrying that I couldn’t handle losing another baby. Every morning I would wake praying for the baby and every night I’d fall asleep praying for the baby. I tried to remind myself that the Lord alone sustains life and He wants me to pray for the desires of my heart. It was for this reason that we shared the news with a few people so they too could join us in praying. I prayed more consistently for one thing than I ever have: God, please preserve the life of this little one!

Three weeks passed and I needed to refill my progesterone prescription since the due date adjustment had thrown it off. I had slowly stopped regularly reminding myself about God’s trustworthiness and became increasingly fearful that I didn’t need this prescription refilled because baby was already gone. Sure, I had absolutely NO basis for the fear, but hormones! Not coincidentally, the week before my prescription was going to run out was the week that my husband was sermonizing (preparing to preach) for Sunday. During one particularly difficult day, I texted him asking for prayer and he responded that the passage he was studying said the phrase “fear not” three times. Lots of tears. How could I fear not when I had no guarantee of the outcome?? Oh, right, that’s kind of the whole point… Could I rest in perfect peace because I trust the God who wrote this story long before I was born? Did I believe He would be with me if we lost another baby? Did I believe He is still good if we had to say another premature goodbye? I called to schedule another ultrasound for the following Tuesday. When my husband preached that week, I had to fight hard to keep my shoulders still as I wept… IN CHURCH (gasp!)!! But I couldn’t hold it in. I knew God was telling ME not to fear. I could trust Him and His plans for me and this baby and I could make it to Tuesday before we got to actually see how baby was doing. This time the tears flowed when we heard that swishing, fast heart beat and watched our little peanut wiggle all over. We needed the refill! Baby was still alive and kicking and I was still an emotional mess of a hormonal pregnant mama.

After this ultrasound we decided it was time to tell the girls, which meant I needed to be ready for EVERYONE to know. But it would explain to our very observant Emma why mama’s belly seemed to be getting bigger (because let’s be real, baby #3 at nearly 12 weeks is hard to hide). These pictures are the girls’ reactions to the news (photo cred: Stephanie P).

All along I’d been convincing myself not to get my hopes up that we would have another biological child, but it was becoming harder and harder. I was starting to get excited. I was starting to think this might really happen. Talk about emotional roller coaster. My husband has dealt with so much of my up and down, back and forth, trust and fear, faithfully praying for me and our little one. He’s a keeper. In the weeks following this ultrasound, more people were made aware of our coming addition and were SO very excited. Honestly, I had a hard time dealing with the excitement of other people because all I could think every time someone beamed another “congratulations” at me was that it would be one more person who would have to deal with another loss, if that happened. Obviously this is connected to when we lost Josiah. Our whole church mourned and wept with us and came alongside us so well, but one of the biggest lessons I had to learn through that was to be willing to be the recipient of help and prayer and love. NOT my natural tendency. I’m a strong, smart, capable woman and I’VE GOT THIS. Psh. This time around I’ve been so hesitant to be excited that I think I’ve missed out on so much of the joy. I’m thankful that others have been excited from the day they found out, even if I was still fighting to believe it could really happen.

Once I made it to fourteen weeks and five days (the age Josiah was when he stopped growing), it felt like I was watching every second of the day tick by. My next midwife appointment wasn’t until I was sixteen weeks so I just had to wait and pray and hope and trust (like women have been doing for centuries!) that it would go well. I still had the image in my mind of the midwife searching for Josiah’s heartbeat on the Doppler when I was eighteen weeks along with him. She never found it and that was the start of me realizing that all the weird little things about his pregnancy were indicators that it wasn’t going well. This time the midwife searched briefly, found that heartbeat, and let me listen. To her, it was routine. To me, it was a miracle. This baby made it past Josiah’s age. This baby might actually live. I might start feeling this baby moving soon!

After this appointment, we could set up an ultrasound to find out the gender of our little one. Again, bad memories and difficult images were etched in my mind as we planned and went for this ultrasound. I’d been telling myself for months that I was probably having another girl because I probably can’t have boys. I’d even started telling my husband and others that I thought we were having another girl. I’d begun looking at baby girl names because we’ve had a whole list of boy names forever, but girl names always seemed hard for us to agree on. Imagine my shock when baby happily cooperated with the ultrasound technician and revealed a VERY different ultrasound than we’d previously seen! Before the tech revealed the gender both my husband and I looking at the ultrasound thought to ourselves “Wait a minute….. is that….. a…..?” BOY!!!!! Holy moly. That’s definitely a boy! We’re having another son!

I still can’t describe how I felt in that moment. Shocked? Amazed? Excited? All the emotions all at once? Alice and Emma both said they wanted a baby sister. They’d had Little Dude as their baby brother for 8 months now and were apparently ready for a change. Uh, sorry girls? We decided to buy some boy onesies for our July baby BOY and let the girls unwrap them to reveal his gender. I sort of expected Emma to say “NO!” and start wailing, but they were ridiculously sweet. They are SO excited to have a baby brother and just want him to hurry up and get here.

July is still four months away, so I don’t even know the end of this story yet! I feel like every day the Lord is challenging and convicting me and teaching me to relax and trust Him. The emotional roller coaster seems to be evening out (ish) and I’m feeling our little man wiggling around inside me every day. Sleep is getting harder as my body adjusts to this big belly, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. All these things mean my boy is growing. We will meet him soon and it will be hard, but so so worth it.

One of my fears has been that I would put a son in the place of God. After praying that God would give us a son, being afraid to even want a son and then finding out we were going to have a son, another Isaiah sermon brought Isaiah 43:6 to my attention: “Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.” In context, this verse is God speaking to the people of Israel, but the Sunday that we read it in church it hit me: God loves ME. He really, truly loves ME and has gone to great lengths to show me that He loves ME. I’ve been a Christian since I was sixteen and I’ve “known” this a long time, but over the years came to believe more in a God who wanted to judge me for my sins (which are many). As a sinner who deserves nothing, God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross for my sins and then conquered Satan, sin and death by rising from the grave three days later. I’ve told myself for years that I don’t deserve any good thing in my life, but I think I missed a very essential aspect of God’s character in the meantime. The God I serve loves me enough to bring me through losing two babies, hear my heart’s desire when I was afraid to utter it to Him, and grant me that desire at the moment I least expected it. He spent YEARS patiently orchestrating events to teach me that He loves me and wants to give good gifts to me, as His child. In the weeks following this sermon, the Lord has continued reminding me that He loves me and that He has given me what I need for today to trust Him and love those around me. I still don’t know what the future holds, but I do know Who holds the future and I know He is faithful and good and trustworthy and He hears and knows and loves me. What more have I to fear? He has been my salvation and I cannot wait for the day when I see Jesus face to face in heaven. Oh what a day that will be!

Beauty from Ashes (Part 1)

It’s hard to know where to begin writing about something that has been in process for years, but since I process better through writing, I finally decided to write this all out. My purpose isn’t to glorify myself or our circumstances, but to point others to the Lord. He has so patiently met me and taught me in my weakest moments and revealed to me more and more of His character in this process. There’s some pretty raw stuff in here as I've sought to be open, but please understand that I am not glorifying my sin, or seeking approval from others. I’ve been talking more and more with other women and new moms lately, sharing parts of this story at times, and have felt convinced that I should share how God has worked in my life and what He has patiently taught me so others can love and serve Him better and know they aren't alone in their struggles. For those who take the time to read this (as it will likely be quite long), I hope it encourages you to seek the Lord and never give up asking Him for the desires of your heart. I hope it challenges you to lean on Him each and every day, knowing He is good and he never leaves or forsakes His children. I hope it reminds you that He is worthy of ALL of your trust and that it is good to fight to believe He is trustworthy. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I hope this gets you thinking and wondering about the God I serve, the God of the Bible, Maker of Heaven and Earth and YOU and ME. He is not far off or distant and wants us to run to Him and know Him through His Word.

The story starts long before this, but I’ll begin with the birth of my first daughter: Alice. I had a very hard time bonding with her. I didn’t feel the immediate adoration that I’d heard of and thought I’d seen again and again in other moms. I felt lost, confused… pressure. I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t just “fall in love” with my daughter. I figured something must be wrong with ME for feeling this way and was too scared and prideful to let anyone into my whirlwind of a world. I pushed my church family away because I felt ashamed that I didn’t simply “get” motherhood. I pushed my husband away because he didn’t know how to help. I pushed God away for “making” me go back to work full-time when I clearly needed to figure out what I was doing. It was a rough start to parenting.

By the time Alice’s first birthday rolled around, I knew I was pregnant before I took the test. We were excited. I was scared. It felt like Emma’s first year of life I was constantly asking myself “WHAT DID I DO?!?” While bonding with Emma came a bit easier, largely due to feeling less guilty since I was home with our two girls, it certainly wasn’t easy having her plugged into the wall for the first week of her life as her tiny body fought jaundice. Those lights (baby spatulas, as we came to call them) were incredibly frustrating and disheartening and I wondered if I could really do this whole thing again when I already felt like a failure of a mother. Clearly I lacked something really motherly-important because these two beautiful girls God had entrusted to me felt like more of an inconvenience or disruption than a blessing or gift from Him. I just wanted to sleep! I just wanted my body back! I just wanted some quiet! Once again, I pushed God away and tried to muster up all the motherliness I possibly could.

Not surprisingly, I became the kind of mom I never wanted to be: easily frustrated, unhappy and often losing my temper and yelling at little people who had expectations placed on them that were beyond unrealistic. So when I found out I was pregnant for the third time, just after Emma’s second birthday, I wasn’t excited at all. I dreaded “how I could do this” and prayed that God would somehow work out all the obstacles that I saw in our lives before we could have three children. He answered my prayer, but certainly not the way I’d hoped or expected. Josiah Nathanael, our first son, quietly slipped away and met Jesus face to face long before we said goodbye. I watched my husband process by reading God’s Word so often that I wondered if he was really actually “processing” the grief. But I realized that he didn’t know what else to do, just like me, so he clung to the Lord. Blissfully aware of my bias, I’m sure my husband is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, but he’s not God. It hit me that I’d been putting God-sized expectations on my husband, when that was clearly never his role. So, he led me by quiet example and I quietly followed. Those days and weeks were a blur of tears and guilt and hiding myself under the shadow of the wings of my Great Comforter. I became determined not to push God away after loss when I had pushed Him away after blessings. Since I had no clue what to do with this “determination,” I read and listened to God’s Word a whole stinking lot. I focused on the promises that He hadn’t left me, He comforts and He gives us a future hope. I memorized and frequently recited to myself a handful of bible passages and prayed earnestly for another son. I so badly wanted to see the kind of little boy we would have and watch the man I adore raise a son to be just like him. Yet I saw myself as the “weak link” in our family. My husband loved our girls so well, right from the start, and here I was, ruining them. I also began thinking more and more about foster care, though wasn’t fully convinced I could do it.

As the year drew to a close, we did begin to seriously pray about fostering and started an initial application, only to find out weeks later that I was pregnant again, which brought foster certification to a screeching halt. After losing Josiah and having never “felt” pregnant with him, I was very sensitive to the lack of pregnancy symptoms this time around. I never felt sure this baby would live and was less surprised when my intuition proved correct. Baby #4 never got a name from us and never grew past six weeks. While this loss was less unexpected for me, it was much harder in some ways. Not many knew of this loss, so I felt more compelled to plaster a smile on my face and pretend everything was fine. I became convinced that our second loss was also a boy and maybe I couldn’t have boys. Maybe there really was something more “wrong” with me than I thought and I needed to focus on thanking God for the healthy girls He already gave me and pursue becoming a foster mom. As we processed through our grief and attempted to help our girls do the same, we talked and prayed more and more about fostering. It seemed like the question that constantly entered my mind was “why SHOULDN’T we foster?” instead of my previous “why SHOULD we foster?” Up to this point I’d thought we needed to have a special draw towards it, or have always wanted to do it. As we prayed and waited, the Lord was patiently teaching me that I wasn’t the “weak link” because He had already made me new through Jesus. God had provided a three-bedroom condo for us to rent at a price well below market value (with my very own WASHER AND DRYER!) and provided a minivan for us. He had plans and they weren’t finished. He continued growing me in my relationships with my girls and even now keeps reminding me that He gives me what I need each day, each hour, each minute… if I just ASK!

We pursued foster certification even as I wrestled with feeling as though I had somehow failed my husband by not giving him a son. And then I would feel guilty like somehow my girls were a consolation prize. How awful. Meanwhile those two girls were (and still are!) growing into caring, considerate, fun-loving, beautiful young ladies. I can’t imagine our family without my best little “helpers.” Yet, I still wrestled back and forth between feeling a failure and the guilt but was too afraid to continue asking God to give us a son. I thought maybe I could have another daughter, but we just needed to be content and thankful without a son. In hindsight, I think I was too afraid to ask God for a son because I didn’t believe He could be THAT good or THAT loving. After all, I’d known plenty of women who had struggled with infertility and prayed for years (some are still praying) for healing and a child. Here I was with two healthy girls, struggling to love them well, and discontent with the blessings God had given me. I believed God loved me, but didn’t owe me a single answered prayer, least of all for a son I would likely ruin!

After the summer, our foster certification process really began and we accepted our first short-term placement of a sibling set in April. It was NOT pretty. I realized then that we weren’t in a place to foster a sibling set, so we changed our profile to singletons. Our second placement only lasted eight days, but our third placement began just a few hours after #2 was reunified with his parents. Little Dude came to us June 15, 2016, one month before his first birthday and weighing in at 27 pounds. He had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen and was a pretty easy-going baby from the start. However, his easy-going temperament didn’t change the wrestling in my heart. I found myself resenting him for being born. How ridiculous I feel just writing that! He and I have gone up and down on this roller coaster of grief and foster care unknowns. There were days, sometimes weeks, when getting through a day with him felt only barely possible.

During this time we began studying the book of Isaiah at church. It felt like every week we were talking about trusting God and every week I would cry and beg God to help me truly trust Him: most especially for our family and the number of children we would have, biological or adopted. Little Dude and I would have some good days and some bad days, but we were getting used to each other. Part of God’s working through the Isaiah series was regarding my attempt to control the timing of another possible pregnancy. The Lord kept challenging me that He was the one in control all along, no matter what I did that made me feel like I had set my plans in motion. So we stopped preventing pregnancy. Having gotten pregnant four times before without any issues or delays, I anticipated a positive test the very next month. How little I had learned about Who was really in control! Several months went by and each month, with every new sermon in Isaiah, I cried and prayed that I would trust God in the waiting and remember that He alone is the Author and Sustainer of life. Isaiah 26:3 grabbed my heart during this time: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” Oh, how I longed for that perfect peace! Yet here I was, anxious and wishing somehow I could just know what was ahead. Will I ever have another biological child? Will I be a failure of a wife that couldn’t have the four children we hoped and planned for?

Then October came. October has historically been a difficult month since I moved to California as I miss my formerly treasured autumns in New England, but now I mourn the loss of Josiah and his little brother or sister because they weren’t born that month. Coupled with the Isaiah series and a handful of other (perfectly orchestrated) events, I was so glad to finally enter November and put the emotional mess behind me. But that’s when we saw the positive test!