Meant to Be
I lost count of the pregnancy tests when the count exceeded my age… that was around the time that the anxious anticipation which buoyed my first years of hoping turned into desperation and masochism. I knew the outcome, but a plastic stick offered irrefutable evidence.
For seven years, we tried to start a family. After two years of marriage, my husband and I decided to pursue adoption through foster care. As we started the paperwork, Glenn wrote that “fostering felt like a natural extension of our work as educators.” I loved that explanation, and I clung to it like a lifeline until the reality of our circumstance broke it. We fostered our son with the intention of adoption for nine months before he was removed and eventually returned to his biological parents. I wish I had prepared myself for the grief that is inextricably tangled within the foster care system and within adoption itself.
It took time, but we eventually re-routed. Instead of adoption, I submitted my body to the fluorescent lights, prescription hormones, and a thousand other IVF indignities sheathed by an ill-fitting hospital gown. It is frightening how quickly indecencies are normalized when longing becomes desperation… Yet, I paid for it over and over again. Thousands of dollars paid to defile what I once held as sacred. Any romanticized notions of life’s conception were shed with the undergarments that I neatly folded and hid beneath my purse. Six failed mock trials, and I still could not hold my dreams.
When the fifth mock cycle failed because of a precipitous drop in my iron levels, I started to cave inward. I lost trust in my body, and I eventually lost trust in my mind and my God.
We spent our spring break that year exploring the coastline between Savannah and Myrtle Beach, and we happened to stop in Beaufort one afternoon. As we walked along the waterfront, I started to cry. I told Glenn that it felt like we had stumbled upon yet another “not right now”– a beautiful place for a potential someday that would never come. Glenn encouraged me to look into teaching jobs.
Two weeks later, I received a job offer at a coveted school in Beaufort. The day after receiving the offer, I had an appointment with my fertility specialist. When the nurse retrieved me from the waiting room, she congratulated me on my pregnancy, and told me that the doctor would be with me momentarily for the ultrasound. I was confused. The doctors had recommended embryo adoption, and we had scheduled and rescheduled the embryo transfer multiple times because of the pandemic, my anemia, getting Covid, and failed mock cycles. I politely tried correcting the nurse who was adamant that she looked at my chart and the bloodwork indicated I was in fact pregnant.
After several awkward minutes of waiting, she came back and apologized profusely for looking at someone else’s chart– I was correct about the purpose for my visit… a blood draw before the prescription of daily hormone injections to replace the oral hormones I had been taking.
Driving home from the appointment, I made the call to accept the teaching position in Beaufort.
While the move from Virginia to South Carolina was abrupt, I was the one who invited this interruption to our plans, rather than being told by doctors or betrayed by my body. With the sale of our home in Virginia, we put aside the money necessary for private adoption. I busied myself for months with the move and then with the home study. The work provided a welcome distraction from my cavernous grief… until I ran out of tasks, and we were told that it could be two years before we were selected by a birth mom.
The precipice of hope crumbled beneath me. Vicious lies echoed as my mind sought to rationalize my grief, rather than feel it. God must know that I would inevitably fail as a mother. God must see something ugly in me. I must be unfit to parent a child. I must be unfit to be around children. The lies spiraled into crippling anxiety. I started having multiple panic attacks each day, and I struggled to leave the house. I took a leave of absence from work.
For nearly three months, I relied on the borrowed faith of my husband and the inherited faith from my parents, as they took turns combatting the lies with the truth of their love for me. After a ten-week leave from work, I was able to return to my classroom. God made himself evident in His provision of grace and understanding through people who barely knew me.
The worship leader at our church invited me to join her in singing praise, and I encountered the love of Christ in dozens of refrains and harmonies. God met with me over and over and over again, as I prayed and processed my grief and my unmet desire to be a mom.
As I started sharing my experience and the ongoing ache more openly, I could feel the prayers of others shifting the ground within and under me.
On a Thursday morning in June, my husband’s phone rang.
Seven days later, I held my daughter for the first time.
Suddenly the ache and grief were transformed by the beauty of the promise that this is what God intended– I was made to be Espy Grace’s mother, and she was always meant to be mine.
Austen