This story is very personal to me and some of you may be interested and I’m sure some of you aren’t. If you are, then buckle up because this might be a long one…
When I was younger I always dreamed of getting married and having kids. I dreamed of being pregnant and being a mom. When we first got married I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS. Essentially my ovaries are covered in small cysts and therefore I don’t ovulate. This condition can be managed and many women with PCOS have been able to successfully get pregnant and have children either via simple changes or through more extreme procedures such as in vitro. I have never felt the pull to use extreme measures to grow our family. I have just always felt that God would take care of it and let me tell you He most definitely has!
After a few years of being married and probably a year of trying to get pregnant we decided to open our home for foster care. My husband and I worked for his parent’s non-profit that has group foster care homes here in Tucson. Jason has four siblings that were adopted from foster care and to be honest I knew that someday we would become foster parents, maybe after we had kids of our own though. Well God clearly had a different plan for us! Our city was in crisis when it came to foster care; kids coming into care had no where to go and were sleeping in CPS offices while placements were searched for. Being a part of this world we would see the list of kids waiting for beds, infants waiting for a home and a family to one them. It honestly broke my heart to see this list knowing we had empty bedrooms and empty arms. So we decided it was time. Time to let go of the dreams we had for ourselves and surrender to the dreams our Creator had for us. Funny how He works things out in His time and slowly convinces us to let the reigns go because He has a better plan!
Anyways, as we said yes to opening our home we were approached by a family friend that had a niece who’s kids had been removed. She had taken the older kids into her home but felt that she couldn’t take the youngest, a 5 month old at the time of removal. She was now 18 months old and up for adoption. We were so hesitant to even think of the idea of adopting this little girl. We hadn’t even met her, we hadn’t even seen pictures, we didn’t even know her name! All we knew was that she needed a family and we were being asked to consider being that family. We prayed and discussed and prayed some more and when we saw her photo and heard her name, or more what her name meant, we were ready to say yes and let God open or close the doors. Her name was Giavanna, not a name I would have ever considered and even thought about changing, but when we saw that her name meant, “God is gracious, or gracious gift from God” we knew He was up to something. So we said yes to pursuing her. We met with her caseworker and set up our first visit to meet her.
Meeting her for the first time was so surreal. I remember the very second I saw her! She was so sweet and beautiful. We both knew that God was going to make her our daughter. From that visit we were named as her potential adoptive parents with the court. We started visits every week and started the transition to move her to our home from her foster parent’s. With each visit she became our daughter more and more and after two months of visits she moved in.
Six months after she moved in we officially adopted her. It seems like such a simple process when you write it all down but it wasn’t easy. There was so much waiting and so much paperwork! We had to take a 10 week class to receive our foster care license and she wasn’t allowed to move into our home until that process was complete. Imagine seeing your child only 1-2 times a week while you took a 3 hour class once a week! Talk about torture! Then once we were foster parents and she was finally home we had another six months of what felt like the same process all over again. The same repetitive paperwork, the same interviews, it felt like it took an eternity until we could finally say that she was ours. But it was so worth it!
I never imagined in my wildest dreams that adoption would be the way my children came to me! I am so grateful that she’s mine and so grateful to her birth mom as well. I know she was hurting and she made a brave decision to allow her children the opportunity for a better life than she could provide.
If you have questions about foster care or adoption please feel free to comment our send me a message. I would love to give you all the info and knowledge I have. I will be sharing the story of how our son came to us in my next post. Believe it or not his story is even more miraculous.
