I also want to share a little of my heart with you today.
We’re getting very close to bringing Hazel into our lives, and the notorious pre-travel anxiety/grief is showing it’s face once again. I hate it, but I’m realizing it’s just part of this journey, for everyone who embarks on it.
There are days when suddenly the weight of everything just stares at me, right in the eyes, and I start feeling really sad. It’s like I’ve been in denial all this time, and all of a sudden the reality is right there, saying, “Look! Wake up now. You’re about to make your life hard.” It’s totally obvious that it’s Satan just trying to paralyze me with fear. But it doesn’t make it any easier knowing that.
The other night, I was thinking about things and all I could do is cry. I thought about how our adoption journey began, and how we were planning to adopt a healthy, typically-developing little girl from Ethiopia. I look at my sister’s family, how her four adopted children are already speaking perfect, clear English and how much all of our extended family members have bonded with them because they can look at them in the eyes and have a conversation with them, and how Anya just makes a funny face or annoying sound when people talk with her. It’s just hard sometimes. I love her so much and know without a doubt that there is nowhere else she or Hazel are supposed to be than right here with us. It’s just hard. Raising a child with a disability is very humbling.
Honestly, I’m learning that the hardest part is just feeling frustrated with her not fitting society’s ideas of what’s normal. If it really didn’t matter to the world how smart someone was or how they acted, then I wouldn’t care and there would be so much less pressure. Why is it so difficult for me to truly embrace Anya for who she is and not wish for her to fit better into the “normal” mold? This is something that’s taking time. I’m getting it…very slowly, but surely, I believe. I have to remind myself almost daily that NONE of this is about me.
I was lamenting to one of my best friends yesterday, telling her how I wish sometimes that we had chosen an easier path, and she reminded me that we didn’t “chose” this. That our Heavenly Father did, long before we were born. How right she is.
*Post-edit clarification: We don't believe in "predestination." When I agreed with my friend that God chose this, I knew what she meant...he didn't make this decision for us, but he did call us (through feelings from the Holy Spirit) to adopt these girls and, because He knows all of His children so perfectly, He knew that we would make the choice to obey His call.
This is His plan for our Anya and Hazel and all of the rest of us. They would have spent their entire earthly existence locked up like crazies in a mental institution if we hadn’t followed our hearts to get them out. They would have had their basic needs met, but that’s about it. And something that Jeremy reminds me of all the time is that this whole thing isn’t even all about them. It’s about the things that God wants us to learn. Our family and everyone else who will know them throughout their lives.
God tucks that extra copy of chromosome 21 into some of his babies for a reason. It’s not for their benefit. It’s for ours. They are valiant spirits, sent here to teach us things that we could never learn any other way.
Now, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s always hard, or that we are any less happy since Anya joined our family because that is so not the case. Every one of us think of her immediately when we start counting our blessings. For every hard thing, there has been at least ten-fold the amount of rewards. I know this sounds so cliché, but I can’t describe the joy that comes from seeing a child blossom right before your eyes, and knowing that it would have never happened if if weren’t for you. Well, you and Heavenly Father working as a team.
He loves her.
And he loves her.
Oh, how he must love them.
I think of that, and I know that everything is going to work out just fine.
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