Adoption. Our Story from the beginning.
Sometimes..now... 14 years later... I wake up in the night and I remember.
I remember how it felt the first time I laid eyes on her...live and in person...
She was stunning. Captivating. She was more beautiful than the pictures I had kept neatly in a box for safekeeping. She was more beautiful than I remembered her being in the dreams I had of her over the past 4 years… it had been such a long season of waiting, yet in that moment it felt as though she and I had never been apart. It felt as though she had always been mine, and not this itty bitty stranger standing in front of me. I wanted so badly to scoop her up and to run, to run as fast as I could away from the injustice we had been fighting, away from all the red tape and all the controversy. If we could just run and hide away. That would be perfect. If we could find some place where the world was right, where little girls would no longer be orphaned, and families could just… be family. I looked at her and for a brief moment I couldn’t believe we had actually made it this far. How did we end up here, on the other side of the world? And then as quickly as I forgot, the memories came flooding back. This had been war, and we had not been left unscathed, in fact our fight was only beginning.
I play this day over and over again in my mind...Sierra Leone...the year 2004... it follows me even now... years and years later. It was that day that I realized my most important "YES" was going to be my hardest road up to that point in my life.
You see our adoption case had been deemed fraudulent. Our "agency" had taken all of our money and left us with bogus documents and no path to get our daughter home. We traveled for the first time... scared...broke...and determined to find her... and that we did.
But it was only the beginning... the first step of a journey I am still on today. Saying YES to a road with blinders on. Saying YES to a journey where no happy ending was promised. Saying yes to HARD when I wanted to run the other way. Saying yes to placing myself in situations where my safety was at risk... where my family would be sacrificed... a YES.... that came with a great cost....
But on the other side of that YES... was HOPE.
HOPE.
The reason for every YES under the sun.