As part of Adoption Awareness Month, I’ll be posting about our adoption on this blog on and off throughout the month of November.  If you’re here for teaching-related content, scroll on down 🙂

You can read Part I here >>> A New Beginning

You can read Part II here >>> The Journey Begins

I’m not sure what excuse we came up with the day we were to meet Grace (not her real name), but we somehow convinced my parents to keep Becks so we could leave for a few hours to meet with her and the director of our agency.  The details of that meeting are private, but in the end we came away as a “matched” family.

I remember our agency telling me that the journey through the adoption process was a roller coaster.  I don’t think she could’ve spoken truer words.

I will cut to the chase.  Rip of the proverbial bandaid.  Tell you, straight up.

That adoption didn’t happen.  Grace decided to parent her baby.

To type that is hard.

To express the emotions I had following a very upsetting phone call at 9pm on Wednesday, October 9, 2013 is even harder.  {I wrote about it briefly here.}

But, before I go any further, you have to know something: I do not fault Grace.  I never felt an ounce of anger or hatred to her.  Though I didn’t understand,  I do know that she had a very difficult choice to make and had every right to choose to be the mother to her child.  As I sit here now, trying to imagine seeing her again with her son in her arms, I probably would offer her a hug of gratitude and acceptance.  I’m grateful that somewhere in her story, you’ll find us among the pages and grateful that somewhere in our story, she is there, too.  I know that our brief encounter was beautifully orchestrated by the Master Story Teller, and that he gathered among good company that night and said, Just watch!  It’s about to get better!  The ending!  Oh, the ending!  You can’t even imagine!  Watch!!!!

Do you remember in the book series Twilight after Edward breaks up with Bella and there are blank pages listing only the names of the passing months and Bella says, Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass, it does. Even for me.

That is exactly how I remember the month of October.  It was horrifically blank.  Not really in the written sense, but in the sense that I felt and did nothing.  I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone besides my family.  I didn’t want to sit alone in our family room, on the same couch where I took the phone call.

I’m not much of a blank person – more so a person whose hypothetical pages are teeming with too many words to contain – but, there was this unfamliar feeling of nothingness that overcame me.  I didn’t feel overly sad or mad or angry or happy or motivated or much of anything. The month of October was blank.  I was numb.

But, as I started to seek, my pages began to fill again.

I hadn’t reread my journal entries from this time until the past few days, and I share them now because they reveal my internal struggles and the conversations I was having with God.

 {Some pages have been intentionally omitted to protect the privacy of the situation.}

How will you celebrate Adoption Awareness Month?