It’s A Vertical Life

My life as a mother has been a seemingly jagged path weaving a better story than I could ever have written.
College lays the whole world at your feet and no one tells you that you’re not invincible.  So, when your prince charming runs off to law school and finds someone cuter and smarter, leaving you crying in your beer, it’s hard to see the harm in finding a surrogate for just one night.  I didn’t intend for anything significant to happen, just a little comfort to remind me of my worth.  Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to ask me what I wanted and because of my penchant for using alcohol to numb the pain, I wasn’t even conscious for most of what did happen.  I know what it’s called and no one should have to say that’s how it was their “first time.”

So, what do you do when you’re a pregnant, pro-life, 19 year-old, college sophomore with no one who can really help you?  I was fortunate enough to have some close friends in college who stumbled through as my support system the best way they knew how.  They were gracious and, after getting over the shock of the pregnancy and the additional shock that I chose to carry the baby, they were non-judgmental and overlooked the frequent hormonal outbursts.  Everyone should have the gift of such friends who, incidentally, are still my friends to this day.  However, 19 year-olds rarely make good life coaches so I needed a little extra help.

After some counseling, I chose to make an adoption plan with an agency that would do all of the legwork for me (including all contact with the birthfather).  I also chose an adoptive family that looked a lot like what I thought my child deserved.  Nine months later, at a hospital in my hometown, with my mom by my side, I placed my beautiful 9 lb. 3 oz. bundle of perfection into the arms of total strangers and walked out into the noonday sun to….get back to normal life?  The tears streaming down my cheeks as I got into my mom’s car had very little to do with questioning my decision and everything to do with how much I thought the whole situation just plain sucked.

For a while, being a birthmom defined me.  Whenever I had to do one of those get-to-know-me exercises for work or school or church functions, I would disclose that fact about myself.  A few people would ask more about it but most would simply say, “Wow” and move on.  I’m not sure what I expected since Emily Post never felt the need to write the Etiquette for Birthmoms book.  Eventually, though, my definition of myself began a quiet metamorphosis and soon I was surprised when I would casually mention my experience and people were shocked because, apparently, I had failed to mention it to them.  Strangely, it didn’t cause me as much angst as I thought it should to realize that I wasn’t thinking about my child every day.  The memories were there but they no longer consumed me.  Regularly, I would open my mailbox to find pictures, update letters and videos of my sweet and happy child and each correspondence was a package full of comfort and acceptance, softening the pain and replacing it with hope, gratitude and affirmation.

Upon finding and snagging my real Prince Charming, we began to discuss adoption, mine and ours.  It wasn’t that we couldn’t have children naturally; we hadn’t even tried.   Rather, we both felt a desire, a compulsion to adopt and, seeing such a need in the U.S. foster care system, we couldn’t fathom getting pregnant while there were children out there who needed parents.  We were almost done with our training and application process to adopt from the foster care system when we found ourselves staring down at a little pink plus sign.  How’s that for a divine sense of humor?

Three more plus signs later and we are back on the adoption train.  The desire to adopt has never really gone away.  All of those years after our first time through the process, I would peruse the Waiting Child lists on adoption websites and yearn to bring those children home, particularly the teenagers.  Now, please believe me when I say that I am not naturally drawn to children in general.  I’m not the crafty, touchy-feely, make-my-own-baby-food, good-time mom.  Babysitting was not my favorite job and I am never the first to sign up for nursery duty.  I can still recall breaking out into a cold sweat when we were visiting a church in the south.  Their large congregation was supporting our smaller church as we got on our feet and they had assigned me, as the visiting “missionary”, to teach a kindergarten class on Sunday morning. Fortunately, my guitar-toting, kid-loving, former-teacher husband jumped in to save the day, giving me time to remove my head from that paper bag.

While I have always wanted to have children I never thought of myself with more than two or, possibly, three but its funny how our dreams can change.  Now that we have four homemade kids and we’re back in the foster-to-adopt training game, we are looking at the “unadoptable” kids.  Did you know there was such a thing?  It makes me throw up a little every time I hear it.  They are the children who aren’t cute little, healthy, white girls.  They are the kids who come with more than one sibling.  They are the kids who have been sexually abused in horrific ways and might act out on another child (but there’s really no way of knowing until they do it).  They are the ones slapped with the label RAD or FASD who have no idea how to love and trust because no one met their needs at all in the first few years of life.  They are the teenagers who, simply by virtue of their age, are “too much of a risk” and will most likely age-out to a life on their own…can you imagine having nowhere to go at Christmas and no one to call for moral support when life gives you the proverbial body slam?  They are the teenage mothers who were taken away from their parents and who will probably lose their own babies without parenting mentors.  These are some of the kids that we want.  These are the ones who did nothing to deserve their fate in the broken labyrinth of political agendas and double-speak that we refer to as Child “Protective” Services.  The overworked, underpaid, under-appreciated, caught between Hell and Purgatory social workers and foster parents are doing the best they can with what they are given but all we see are the small percentage of the profession who use and abuse because the vast majority, the ones who don’t, are too busy actually working for the kids to be bothered with correcting misperceptions.  These are the things that make people walk away, that make them say, “This is just too stinkin’ hard.  I don’t have time for this.”  If our family can get just a few of those kids out of that hell, then that’s worth all of the nonsense we’re going through.

Are we naïve?  Perhaps.  But, our agency is doing an excellent job of laying it all out there – the good, the bad and the RAD.  We are going into this with our eyes wide-open, as much as we can be, with very few guarantees but the alternative is much less appealing.  I can no longer go back to my comfy, American dream and ignore the fact that there are kids who need me, whether they know it or not.  In just a few short weeks, we will be finished with all of the paperwork and classes and paperwork and interviews and paperwork and we’ll be handed a stack of photos with the faces of our potential children.  It’s a second chance.  I wasn’t able to raise my firstborn but I was fortunate enough to find amazing people who could and now I’m blessed with the opportunity to do the same for someone else.  This time around, I think I’m ready.

Kim is the wife of one rockin’ Worship Pastor, full-time mom to four crazy and beautiful kids and Editorial Manager for ATFM. Toss in another part-time job, housework, training to adopt from foster care and what passes for a social life these days and she’s still wondering how she fits 32 hours into a 24 hour day. You can follow Kim’s adoption journey on her newest blog, It’s a Vertical Life.