Adoption Update: Love Beyond Measure

I was recently looking at Evan and thought, wow, look at this life we created.

He is so perfect. He is such an angel. And he’s all ours.

It was such a pure, innocent moment, and one where my thoughts took me off guard.

He’s what makes our family complete.

Yet those delicious little fingers, perfect round cheeks and piercing blue eyes didn’t grow in my belly.

They grew in my heart.

It’s been three and a half years since Evan was born, three and a half years since I watched his birth mother have a c-section to bring him into this world.

It was the most beautiful moment I have, and likely will ever, experience.

Being able to watch your baby being born, particularly after the heartache it took to get there, was such a gift and blessing.

I feel that even more now in hindsight than I could have possibly appreciated in that moment.

There were so many times leading up to that day, and more than one or two times after, that I prayed we were making the right decision.

I even prayed I would love him as much as he deserves.

Adoption is a beautiful thing. For the birth mother, it’s an insanely selfless, and I’m sure painfully difficult decision that I candidly could never imagine making.

For me, adoption was simply never in my life plan.

When you’re young you assume that if and when you’re ready for having kids, you’ll get pregnant and make it happen.

With age, comes wisdom… and reality. We know it’s not that easy.

I’m sharing this update, the first in two years because more and more recently I’ve seen some friends struggle with trying to get pregnant and decide to quietly contemplate if adoption will be part of their revised family journey.  I realize that I now can’t imagine life without this selfless act of love that brought Evan into our world.

I find myself kissing his cheeks with fervor. I live for the moments our insanely active little boy pauses, letting me soak him in and all who he is. His laugh is so good and sweet and incredible that I swear it would go viral if I put it on YouTube. And his smile radiates with such happiness you can’t help but feel lifted in his presence.

I am OK to admit that I struggled with our revised family reality as it was coming to fruition a few years ago. Parts of it felt so formal, like a business transaction and not knowing if it will fall through (we had one that did), really guards your heart. It takes a long time to break those walls. At least it did for me.

Over time though, my heart has opened beyond even what I thought was possible. While don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of “average parent” problems with thrown food, insane temper tantrums, and our current love of the word “poop” (seriously, every song has been replaced by the word poop) where I just want to hide in a locked bathroom!, it literally feels like my heart can burst thinking about my love for him; tears… a current physical manifestation of how much my insides love him.

There’s so much about my health diagnosis that doesn’t seem fair — but one thing is for sure — without it, Evan wouldn’t be ours.

And that’s a life this mom can’t imagine.