*UPDATE* The post below is what I wrote the day we announced to our friends and family that we were planning to adopt. Since we've posted this, many people have asked for information regarding how the process itself is going and/or what they can do to help. This is our website about us as adoptive parents: Our Baby Adoption. Please check it out for more information, and we would love it if you would share the website with your friends and family.
I also encourage you to read the original entry below, which I shared on July 14, 2014.
This blog post is the most significant and scariest one I've written to date! I agonized over how to word this just right, to communicate just what I want to say. How do I share such big news within the context of this blog and the readers here? I've enlisted Wiley's help, and you'll see his pictures scattered throughout the post, with a significant hint hidden in each one. Some of you already know what that is, but I won't give the spoilers out just yet.
So let's start with today, July 10, 2014. 10 years since we got married. The 10th anniversary of any occasion is a milestone, and I certainly feel like being married to my husband for 10 years is a huge occasion. Our wedding was a fun day. Between the two of us, we had been in around 20 weddings by the time we were ready to walk down the aisle, and what we wanted most of all was to keep it low-key. At the end of the day I just wanted to be married to him. In the picture below I'm pretending to be a good, obedient wife. Even Wiley would say "BOL!"
Our actual wedding congregation was quite small. Maybe around 40-50 people, mostly family. We had a great dinner/reception that evening, and a few weeks later a big reception. But that day, July 10, 2004, we got to dress up, exchange vows, have fun, spend time with everyone, and make a lasting memory. And yes, he’s wearing a baseball uniform. It’s a replica of a Philadelphia Athletics jersey from the 1920s, handmade by a company in Connecticut who makes them for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. It cost less than a tuxedo rental and he still has it!
When I think about how I pictured us in ten years, how I thought our life would look, I couldn’t have possibly seen what God had in store. I thought Hubs would be a head or fulltime college baseball coach by now. Thought he loves where he is, that he doesn’t have his own program yet has shown me that the world is full of other people with different advantages, and that the most capable and talented person may get turned down for the one with better connections. That’s a lesson we all have to learn at some point, and it stinks. It's part of the perpetual life lesson that It Isn't Fair. But if he did have his own program, would he be going back to graduate school now to get his MSW? Would he be on track to be a counselor? How many lives will he reach with his new titles to come? It’s impossible to predict, but I do know he is going to be amazing, however he uses his next degree.
And as for me. . . well I don’t even know where I thought I’d be. Still teaching, yes. Still a lover of animals and travel and family. And a mom. A mother. I thought I’d be a mother. Maybe to a few kids by now. Yes, I have my beautiful furkids, Wiley and Jenny. I care for them like they are humans and I love them like crazy. But I thought I’d have children by now. I wanted to have my husband’s children. I couldn’t wait to see if they would look like him, act like him, swing a bat like him. Or would they be less athletically inclined, like me? Maybe they would be curious little bookworms. Nerdy math kids. Maybe we’d have dark haired, curly-haired, curve-ball hitting, piano-playing, Harry Potter-reading, brown-and-hazel eyed, straight A getting children, destined for great things.
Except we don’t. We can’t. Well, I can’t actually. I have Premature Ovarian Failure. It’s a story I plan to tell in greater detail for those who are interested, not to bum people out, but because for anyone else dealing with it knowing they’re not alone is essential.
So what does that mean for us? Well, for starters it means my husband has stood by me through one of the worst imaginable scenarios. It means he had to hear me say “I can’t have kids. I can never have your child.” Well, actually he had to try to make out what I was saying through the choked out sobs. This is something he had to hear 5 years into our marriage-into that lifelong commitment. So when my dream derailed, his did too.
But at that moment, he knew the right thing to say. I’ll be honest, there are many times that he, like so many other people, doesn’t know what to say in troublesome situations. This was not one of those times. Instead, after a pause, he said “Well, there has to be a child out there who needs the Dercks as parents. We’ll adopt.” I thank God all the time, and it still isn’t often enough, for providing me with someone who shared my new and improved dream, to become a parent, period. Curly hair, dark hair, no hair. Baseball, reading, music, or none of the above. Who knows what our child will be like? Even biological parents have no idea what their children will be like. Maybe someday I’ll have to learn all the rules of tennis, or Dungeons and Dragons, or French, or economics, because that’s what our child will want to pursue. I know one thing, though. We are ready to be parents.
So it is with great joy that I share the news that we have been legally approved via the Home Study process to become adoptive parents!!!!!
Our dream is back on track, and we pray that with our network of friends, family, and acquaintances, people will just keep sharing our story until someone out there knows of a baby who needs us. We both have learned, time and again, that we have a powerful capacity for love regardless of biology, from our furry family to our dysfunctional non-biological family God has blessed us with, from our own relatives to our former students and players, we have seen that we can love deeply and powerfully, devotedly and thoroughly. We are now ready for a baby to call our own, and we pray that you can help support us in this journey.
I will be putting together some information about the process, particularly if we continue to go through the agency we have started with, rather than finding a match through word of mouth. They are an excellent agency, but I can tell you the cost for domestic infant adoption can be obscenely high. You may have questions about why we are choosing this type of adoption, or why exactly it costs so much, and I hope to answer those over the next few weeks as well. We will be starting a fund to help raise money, and will likely be doing fundraisers as well. Many of our friends and family have asked how they can help, and for now the best thing to do is spread the word. If you can picture us as capable and loving parents please tell others. The more people who know, the better the chances of a scared, reluctant, but very brave birth mother hearing about us and our desire to have a bigger family.
Wiley knows how important adoption is, and so do you Gentle Readers. It's something I have considered since childhood, always keeping it as an option, never realizing how important it would one day become to me. We would have started the process a long time ago, were it not for the daunting price and a series of very traumatic other events we were dealing with, briefly covered in Wiley's Rescue Story. Now it is our hope that you will support us in this most important endeavor. God is saving us for a child or children who will join our family so we can make each other whole. Please pass it on.
Email me at pabibliophile@gmail.com. Follow the blog, where I will continue to post rescue stories and fun Wiley pictures, but I will also use the site to update our process. I will keep the two separate, so if you're only hanging around for the doggie stories don't sweat it. In the meantime, make sure you follow us on Social Media.
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