This is Our Story

I have had several people e-mail me since I posted the Journey to Australia story asking if I would consider telling our personal story of how we came to adopt. So here is the first installment of our story. I will post our journey to Naomi later in the week. I will warn you it is very long.

Greg and I started trying to add to our family in the spring of 2001. We got pregnant after a few months and everything seemed to be ok. In January of 2002, at 13 weeks, we miscarried. After this miscarriage I went through a period of depression. I was angry with God, but learned to cling to His Psalms. I carried scraps of paper in my pockets with a verse from Psalms written out, so that I would be reminded of those thoughts during the day, when I began to feel depressed.

We continued to try to have a baby and had our 2nd miscarriage in June of 2002. After some recovery time, we got pregnant again. This time I was so nervous that I insisted on an 8-week ultrasound. This ultrasound showed conjoined twins that shared a single heart. There was no chance beyond a miracle that these children would survive. Our doctor suggested that we terminate the pregnancy, but instead we prayed for a miracle. At 10 weeks we lost our twins.

At this point we knew that something had to change. We were clearly not going to have babies the traditional way. So we decided to seek the advice of a fertility specialist. We were relying on the doctors and medical research for the answers to ‘fix’ our problem. After a series of tests and procedures, our doctor was able to identify a likely cause for our recurring miscarriages. My immune system caused my body to attack a pregnancy as if it were foreign. In addition to my immune response my hormones were not at the right levels at the right times. The treatment for this type of condition was expensive, involved a lot of shots and promised far less than a certain outcome.

We decided to give treatment a try, but now things were different. I was a reluctant patient, but Greg encouraged me to make one more try before we ‘gave up.’ After all that I had been through, the thought of getting pregnant again was terrifying. For me, pregnancy did not mean a time of joyful expectation, but a time of living each day in constant dread of how the pregnancy would end.

In the mean time, I also began to research adoption. Greg was not ready to even talk about adoption; so I began the research on my own. I began to share my findings with Greg and frequently brought up adoption in conversation. Finally he asked me to put the adoption research on hold, because he did not have the time, emotional energy or money to pursue both adoption and fertility treatments.

I had been speaking about adoption with a friend and was trying to arrange a time for Greg and I to sit down with her and her husband to talk about their adoption experience. Since Greg and I agreed that we would put the adoption process on hold for a while, the next Sunday I told them that we were not going to meet with them right now. The very next day my another friend was waiting at my car when I finished work.

She knew about our difficulty having children and had quite a proposal for us. Her daughter had just taken legal guardianship for a little boy named Devan who was in a difficult home situation. She wanted to know if we would consider adopting Devan. The idea of an actual baby that might become our child was exciting. I had to call Greg and tell him what had just happened, but I didn’t know what he would say. To my surprise he said that we should look into adopting Devan. Greg said that having God drop an adoption right out of the sky was very different from some distant dinner conversation. My very next call was to our friends to re-schedule our get-together.

In the end, we did not adopt Devan; another couple that had made prior contact with Devan’s mother adopted him. This was not really a disappointment for us, because everything happened so fast that we didn’t really have a chance to become attached to the idea. On the other hand, it made me see that Greg considered adoption a valid option and our meeting with Scott and Lynn opened our eyes to more details of the adoption process.

During this time we had continued with fertility treatment, and we lost our fourth pregnancy at six weeks. This was the breaking point for me. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Greg could see what the fertility treatment and repeated pregnancy loss was doing to me and we agreed to stop treatment.

Shortly after stopping treatment we went to a marriage conference in Chicago where Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife spoke about the experience of adopting their two girls from China. Both Greg and I were reminded of Steven Curtis’s concert we had been to the year before and were touched by their story. God was beginning to work in Greg’s heart. Greg was beginning to see that adoption was a very real option, but he needed some time to grieve the loss of our children and come to terms with his fears of adoption. We went to a couple of information meetings with several different agencies. The meetings helped to answer our questions and made adoption seem less intimidating.

Even though we had come to the realization that adoption was and always had been God’s plan for us Greg still needed more time. We took a vacation to South Africa and during that time Greg read a book called Adoption after Infertility. The book put into words all the things that he had been thinking and feeling, but was unable to express for himself. The book, some much needed time away from the everyday grind, and a lot of prayer really helped us with our final decision. When we got back from South Africa we started the long process of paperwork, patience and prayer.

After our application was approved and all of our background checks were completed, we started the home study process. Home study is not the most descriptive name for this process. Our social worker discussed adoption topics in greater detail and we had the opportunity to get all of our questions answered. We completed this step in February of 2004. WE received a picture of our beautiful baby boy, Josiah TaeHyung, on Sept 13, 2004 and travelled to Korea in March to bring him home. On March 21st, 2005 we boarded a plane from Korea with our son.

We believe that God prepared us to parent an adopted child. He used Devon, Steven Curtis Chapman concerts, seminars and friends to show us His plan and to prepare us uniquely for this experience.