Ep 1: Our Adoption Story; Part 1

Show Notes Episode 1: Our Adoption Story; Part 1 In this Episode Heather discusses: Our adoption story; the long journey to adoption Agency, domestic adoption The Steven Curtis Chapman concert that changed everything Show Hope adoption grant Deciding against international adoption Open adoption Affording adoption Links Mentioned: Home - For The Love of Adoption https://fortheloveofadoption.com/ Resource Library Landing Page (ck.page) https://for-the-love-of-adoption.ck.page/resource-library Heather Marshall (@fortheloveofadoption) • Instagram photos and videos https://www.instagram.com/fortheloveofadoption/ Home — Show Hope https://showhope.org/ Don't have time to listen? No worries! Here's the episode typed out. Adoption. It's surrounded with so much confusion and misinformation. And how many people never move forward with adoption because of this. Hi, I'm Heather. I'm not an adoption coach or consultant, and I'm not within adoption agency. I'm a mom to two amazing kids I've been blessed with through adoption. And on this journey, I've learned and continue to learn a lot. Most of all, I believe that if God has put adoption on your heart, it's there for a reason. And you shouldn't let all the stuff keep you from jumping in. I'm here to offer you hope and encouragement, and to talk about everything from types of adoption, things to know before you adopt, funding your adoption including grants, the home study process, making the most of your adoption wait, talking to your kids about adoption, and so much more. Adoption can be hard, but many of the best things in life often are. You know what, though? It can also be amazing! I'm here to share what I've learned. I hope hearing from someone that's gone this road before you encourages and motivates you to take a step of faith and see where it leads. I'm doing this all for the love of adoption. Let's dive in. Oh, my goodness, friends. Hello! Episode 1 is finally here. I'm so excited to be here chatting with you today. For those of you that already know me, thank you so much for being on this ride with me and hanging in there and coming here to listen to my first episode of many. And for those that don't know me yet, I'm so excited to share what I hope will be encouragement and hope with you, as well as many practical steps, and really help you in your adoption journey. So today, I am going to be talking about our beginning, the beginning of our story. And I just want to share this so you know where I'm coming from, and just why I'm even starting this podcast to begin with. So I grew up in a dysfunctional home. And I heard things as a young child that really affected me, one specifically was from a parent… "don't have kids, it will mess up your life." And that stuck with me. I was a young kid, and it really made an impression. So I believed that having kids made life… not good. You know, I grew into a young woman just convinced that kids were not going to be a part of my story. Before I got married, I told my husband-to-be that I did not want kids and I knew he kind of did. And I was like, you know you need to choose here. You either need to not marry me. Or, be okay with not having kids. I wanted to be upfront because I knew it was a big deal for him. I could just tell it was a big deal for him. So he wanted to get married anyway. So we get married and we start living our life. And there were times here and there where he would say something that implied he had hoped I would change my mind. And I would basically say I have not changed my mind. I do not feel differently. I love you. But I told you how I felt and I still feel the same. And so we went on with our life like that. About 10 years into our marriage, we went to a concert, a Steven Curtis Chapman concert. And they were highlighting an organization called Show Hope. And if you're not familiar with this organization, you should check them out. They're amazing. But they're all about breaking down barriers to adoption. This was the first time adoption ever caught my attention. And it caught my attention hard. Something about it was beyond just picking up a packet of information. It was like God took hold of me and said…look at this. This is going to be your legacy. It was crazy. It was literally like a switch where I was convinced kids weren't for us and God told me after this, I am showing you this because this is going to be how you're going to build your family. So I looked through the packet of information and I did start to feel a pull on my heart toward adoption, and specifically in this case, international adoption from China. But it seemed like not the kind of thing that people like us would do. It seemed too much to figure out…too expensive. We just weren't the kind of people that would do this was really what I had in my head. We weren't those people. So even though I had this tug on my heart toward adoption, it was really put on a back burner. I would kind of look up things and research here and there. But I wasn't getting truly serious about it. But I kept feeling like God was telling me, I told you, this is something and this is how you're going to build your family. And I couldn't let that go. It's like He would not let me let that go. So eventually, I would say, goodness…so this concert was probably about 15 years ago, that we went to the concert, it was probably another five years, it was a long time, that we went to an informational meeting at an adoption agency. And we went to the international informational meeting to learn more about international adoption. And we left that meeting feeling heavy, especially my husband, that something about international adoption just wasn't right for us. It just didn't feel right. And we had, we felt burdened, and it just didn't feel like it was right. But we didn't want to forget this dream that God was starting to put in our hearts just because it felt too hard. So I don't remember how much time passed, but a little bit of time passed. And then we went to another meeting. And it was about domestic adoption. Now, I was not very interested, and frankly, a little bit terrified of domestic adoption, because of the often open adoption aspect of it, where the birth parents may have some involvement in your lives. I was very uneducated on open adoption. And it just seemed scary to me. Like, to be completely honest, it just seemed scary. And I didn't think that was what was going to be right for us. But as I learned more, we went to this meeting, we got some information, started to learn more, we started to feel like maybe we would be okay with semi open adoption, where there were some amount of communication. We started to open our minds to that and think, okay, maybe that would be okay. But there was still so much to learn. And it was so very overwhelming. How are we going to afford this? We did not have the money. It was 1000s of dollars, 1000s and 1000s of dollars to do an agency adoption. And there were so many things that concerned me like what birth mom or birth parents are going to choose me with not having a great family history, you know, not seeing that the grandparents on my side are going to be great grandparents to this child. It was just so many things in my head that made me think we're not the people for this, it's not going to work, there was a lot of doubt feeling like it wouldn't really happen. But again, we couldn't shake it. It was a strong pull, that this was something that we were supposed to pursue. So domestic adoption for us did feel more aligned, my husband felt more at peace with it. And we started to feel like okay, maybe this is the route we take, maybe this is what we really dive into and see where it leads. And so we did, we started to get everything going. Well, it took us years because we were learning this all from scratch. And we had no one that we knew that had gone through this process that we could kind of learn from. So we were just doing it all on our own and trying to figure out. Our big thing was financially, how do we fund this because it was not in our budget. So it took us a long time to get all of our money together because we need to basically be able to tell where all of the funding was coming from before we could be on the waitlist. So that took us quite a while. But once we got everything figured out. And, we had our home study done, which we actually ended up having to update a second time because it timed out. So we had two home studies. We had pretty much figured out most of the funding, not all of it, but we kind of had the gist of where the money was coming from. After spending a lot of time figuring that out. And we were at the agency we were a waiting family. So what that meant was, we had done all the things we needed to do to be on the list for them to be showing our profile book to expectant birth parents or expectant moms when it fit. So we were in that stage and we were being shown and it really started to feel like time was just passing. And it started to feel like this is not going to happen. It was a part of us that like had this faith. At least I did and I'm pretty sure my husband did too, that we were called to adoption and somehow, someway, it was going to work out. But there was also this like voice like, it's not going to happen, this is not going to happen for you. Look how long you've been waiting. This is not going to be how you build your family, you're not going to build a family this way. But we would receive notices every now and then from the agency that our profile book was being shown. And then nothing would happen. So that was kind of a feeling of defeat, like, Okay, I wonder why whoever seeing our book isn't picking us. I wonder what it is that you know, is causing them to not choose to want to meet us. But we just kind of, you know, kept on living our lives and started to feel like it was going to be a long time longer than we thought. Well, it had been about three years, it was about three years. And this was back in 2016. And, we received a call from the adoption agency. And they were calling to tell us that a birth mom had seen our profile book, and wanted to meet us. And oh, by the way, she's already had the baby. And that was like, whoa. Because we thought that when this happened, we would be hearing from the agency saying that a mom was, you know, pregnant and was considering us and that we would have some months to prepare. But this was like a call on a Tuesday, and she wants to meet you want Thursday. So we were like, Okay, let's do this. Let's jump in. So we went to meet her on Thursday, at the adoption agency office that was closest to her, we had to travel less than two hours to meet her. And we had about a 45-minute meeting with her at the adoption agency. And she had a family member with her. And after speaking with her for about 45 minutes, she asked us if we wanted to go to the hospital, and meet baby girl. And we had no idea that that was going to happen this day. We didn't know… we thought we were just going to meet birth mom, we didn't expect things to progress so quickly. But she told us she said you guys are it. I know you're the ones that I want to adopt her. And, would you like to come meet her? And of course, we were like, crazy ecstatic. And we were so nervous in the meeting. And it was it was all just insane. I'll talk about that in another episode. But she invited us to the hospital. So we went to the hospital. And she stayed, birth mom stayed for maybe, I don't know, 20 or 30 minutes. And then after that she left and she had already told us you guys are it. She left us to bond with the baby. And it was crazy. It was crazy. This little girl was placed in our arms. And my husband just had the biggest tears in his eyes. And we knew that this was her. This was a little girl we were meant to wait for and we were so happy. I mean completely deer in the headlights but so happy knowing that God called us to this. This is the little girl that was meant to be ours and all of this waiting and all of the even years. I mean, when you really look at the time, it's about 15 years ago, since we first started considering adoption, like as of right now, it was about 15 years ago, guys, my daughter's five. So for us in many ways, it was a 10 year journey. Now, I'm not saying that, that a lot of that isn't our fault, because it is. We drug our feet where we didn't have to in many in a lot of those years. But for us it was about a 10-year journey from the time adoption was put on our hearts until we had her in our arms. But it was worth it. It didn't matter that it was a 10-year journey. This was the child we were meant to have. God had called us to this, and he made it happen. We took a step of faith as he showed us what steps to take. And it happened. And it did not matter that it took that long. At that point, it did not matter. So we have baby girl in our arms. We have established a semi-open adoption at this point where we will… you know arrange visits and such. Our daughter was born in July of 2016. And the next time we saw birth mom was at Christmas. So we went to visit her at the agency. We met at the Agency office and we just had a little get together. It was very special. And we just loved getting to see her again. And it was so crazy to think how we were so terrified of having that connection and how extremely meaningful it is now to have that. But yeah, so Christmas was when we when we next saw her and then for a while we did not really hear from her and we had been told that that was common. That there's so many emotions, we can never even begin to comprehend that a birth mom has to process and go through with the biggest decision of her life that she's made. So, we were just going to be there, we kept sending her pictures, we honored our commitment. We had said we would email her pictures on a regular basis and tell her how baby girl was doing. We did all of that. And we stayed consistent with that. And we just kind of let her know the door was open when she wanted to get together again, we were there. So, with all that said, we were a happy little family of three. We were so very excited that God had blessed us with this beautiful little girl after so many years of waiting and being doubtful at times and wondering God, is this really going to happen? He showed up in the biggest way? And just said, Yes. I told you, I told you this was going to happen. And even through our doubt, he came through, as he always does. So we were happy little family of three. And we stayed that way for 18 months. And then after that, things changed. And we will talk about that more in the next episode. But I hope that this has just shown you a little of our story and given you some encouragement. For those of you that are considering adoption, it is absolutely worth it. For those of you that are in the waiting stage, it is absolutely worth it. So again, I hope that this has offered you some hope and encouragement, and I look forward to sharing more of our story in the next episode. Thanks so much for listening in today. And did you know that I offer a full library of free resources to help you along on your adoption journey, and I'm always adding more. This includes downloads of grant recommendations, adoption fundraising ideas, an agency questionnaire, a hospital checklist and much more. You can find that by going to ForTheLoveOfAdoption.com and scrolling to the bottom of the homepage. And if you have an idea for something you'd love to see added to this library, please send me a message and let me know. I'm always looking for ways to help you on your adoption journey. If you enjoy Instagram, be sure to find me there @fortheloveofadoption, where I love to hang out and share live videos and plenty of adoption tips. I'm always excited to support you in your adoption journey. See you next time.