The Adoption Journey

We are not in control. I mean, we make plans in life and try to keep things under our purview. But when life washes out and your vision clears you see that God had this way marked all along.

Kids are expensive. We all know that. Before they’re 18 we’ll dump $250,000 on them. So, when the summer of 2007 rolled around and Karen, my wife, was convinced that God was calling us to adopt from Ethiopia, I was a tad reticent. Although I was fully open to adopting, and fully open to Ethiopia, I was struggling with how to pay for such an adoption.

It was hard. We’d had our boys Chris and Jon-Jon and knew God wanted us to have more kids in our family. But what do you do after three miscarriages? Was it all just a test? Were we to keep trying?

We are parenting damaged, traumatized children; don’t let the pictures fool you. We’re in the weeds. Every minute is on; there is no off. We’ve arrived late, cancelled altogether, hunkered down in therapy mode, missed appointments, failed to answer hundreds of emails in a timely manner, left voice-mails unlistened to, and texts unread. We’ve restructured, regrouped, replanned, reorganized. We’ve punted and called audibles. We’ve left “the bigs” on their own, hoping they are functioning well on auto-pilot after a lifetime of healthy stability. And sometimes, we put Tangled on for the eleventh time and cry in the bathroom.