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So much has happened, where to even begin? I will just take some of it out of my journal from the end of last summer.

Journal entry. July 2019.

We have been trying to figure out if we are meant to adopt again and it has been so confusing. We felt God was speaking to us, in our hearts and even in a few dreams, that a teenage girl was coming. He said to me, make room. We started preparing a bedroom. We had our social worker out to renew our license. I felt pregnant again, the way I had with our first adoption. With another fully formed person, out there somewhere. Who was she? Where was she? When was she due? It was all so exciting, just like it was with him.

But then. Something else happened. [Our adopted son] began to unravel again. I feel as though he is made of liquid. Like he has no form of his own yet, relies so heavily on something or someone with a definite form to hold him together, help him keep his shape at all times. As soon as we step away, test out a bit more space, a bit more independence, he falls apart and we close in again, scoop him up, put him back together. He is like our infant in a six-foot body.

Things have gotten so bad, worse than ever before. Our lives have turned into damage control. Constant, never-ending responding and reacting and cleaning up the messes he is spilling out onto everything around us. It has been a nightmare. I have cried out to God for it to end. I have grieved and had so much anger. This chaos in my home, in my everyday life, makes me feel so unbalanced and balance is one of the things I crave most.

We said to our social worker, hold on. We have to step back. Now is not the time. She agreed.

I then went into a state of confused agony. Having to grieve through the resentment I felt at times that my second child was so dysfunctional that it might make it impossible for me to ever have a third. How ridiculous my conscious mind knows this is! Because I am an essentialist at heart. I would rather give my all to one, than half of me to two. I already have committed to pouring every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears I have inside my body into this one broken person, determined with a mother’s ferocity, unmatched in potency, to bring healing and balance to this one boy. He is first. There does not ever have to be a second if he must be first and last, this is part of the commitment I made to love him how he needs to be loved. To give him what he needs to make it.

I asked God, am I still pregnant with this girl you showed me in my dreams? Or is it okay to let her go? Is this, essentially, and strangely, my first miscarriage? An adoption miscarriage?

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We continued to pour ourselves out, our brains working overtime to become wise and strategic, our hearts working overtime to generate more love in the face of what wanted to become resentment at times. An exhaustion in the depths of our bones, the very deepest crevices of our hearts and minds.

We pressed on. We will not give up on you, our boy. God has said, ‘he is yours’, and we will never take those words lightly.

And then the answer came in a dream.

August 26, 2019.

I had a dream last night. I was in my house, and there was someone knocking at the door. But I was delaying answering it. I remained in a different part of the house, there was a strong hesitation in me. I knew who was at the door, I could see them on our security camera. It was a man, a social worker, and he had a child with him. I did not know what to do. I knew if I opened the door, I would be saying yes to this child. Was I supposed to open it or not? Several minutes passed. Finally I went to the door, I was going to explain to the social worker that I did not know yet, but when I opened the door, they were both already walking away. Neither one of them turned around. But when I called to him, the social worker just slowly shook his head, no, as he walked away.

I woke up. And then the last of her slipped away.

She was gone.

My first and only miscarriage, though not a physical one. My third child, slipping away. She was not meant to be. And I woke feeling like I was no longer pregnant. And I knew it was the way it was meant to be.

We do not always understand why some life slips away. But sometimes it just does.

I stopped longing for a third child after that. It was as if there had been an old longing in my heart, and God let it surface so it could pass away properly. The last ghostly whispers of desire left with that virtual miscarriage. And a very nice feeling of completeness has settled in its place. Our hands are full with our special-needs boy, and that is enough.

What you have chosen to give me, God, is enough.

I say that in my heart and in my prayers everyday. What you have given me, it is enough. Am I never meant to have a third child? I do not know. All I know is that it wasn’t that one. It wasn’t now.

I am grateful and I will not long for anything more than what he has decided I should have. This is happiness. This is peace. Loving and accepting what you have. And what you do not. In the end, this is what will bring our hearts to the place of peace that makes them thrive. In the end, this will deepen the bond we have with our creator, rather than damaging or breaking it by feeling illusions of theft and mistrust toward him. He is just. And he sees.

You see what I do not see. I tell him. You see what I do not see. God, I trust that you can see what I cannot.

What a sense of security that gives!

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