Requirements to be a Mother?

You don't expect to walk out of a church service on Mother's Day feeling defensive and ready to write an email to the pastor.  That's exactly what happened yesterday.  It was all very well intentioned, however I felt ON FIRE for my fellow adoptive mamas.

It started out by the pastor asking fun questions to the audience of probably at least 200 church goers.  "Who gave birth to the largest baby?" he asked, which was followed by multiple mothers in the audience raising their hands and sharing the weight of their very large babies, the winner got a flower from the worship leader.  "Who was in labor the longest?" was the next question followed by the same result.  The rest of the moms in my eye line seemed to be enjoying this little competition and hearing these horror stories of birth.  The final question was geared toward grandmothers.  Those were the three questions that they used to encompass all mothers.

How do you think that made the woman feel who has had 4 miscarriages and has been unable to carry her babies full term?  How did that make those mothers feel who have adopted children after years of infertility.  Those woman who would have given anything to give birth to that 11lb baby after 76 hours of labor.  This tells all adoptive/foster mothers that being in labor and giving birth is a requirement for being a mother.  Obviously this is not the case.

 Even though I didn't experience the heart wrenching struggle of infertility or miscarriages, my heart broke in pieces for those in the congregation who certainly have felt that pain and heartache.  I wasn't offended as much as I felt fiercely protective of my tribe of other adoptive moms.  It's not about getting that elusive flower on mother's day for winning the competition, it's about being included and having society consider them just as much of a mother as if they had given birth to their children.  I know I can speak for all adoptive mothers when I say that I couldn't love my children more if I had given birth to them.  They are my world.  They are my greatest gifts from God and I thank Him for them every day.

All mothers should be revered, respected and honored, no matter how we became mothers.  Although we didn't go through hours of painful labor, you better believe we went through MANY more hours of paperwork, interviews, inspections and then waiting.  We wanted to be mothers just as much as anyone else and we worked very hard for it.  So, please, when you find out we are mothers via adoption,  just treat us like you would any other mother.  We are no better or no less than any other, we just want to be seen as equal.

10th Birthday Surprise

Hello again!  I haven't posted since September and for that I apologize.  This thing called life got in the way.  Something happened this evening, however, that I had to get down into words.

Tomorrow is the twins' 10th birthday.  We decided to let them open a couple of gfits tonight (from the grandmas) since they were things they would want to wear to school tomorrow.  (Also, because they got new shoes and Celia has to use a shoe box to make a Valentine's box that's due tomorrow, so we needed the box, LOL)  So, after the FaceTime calls to grandmas so they could see the girls opening their gifts, they both went upstairs to their room.  They came down to the basement to find me riffling through my scrapbook stuff (with cobwebs all over it) to try to find some heartsy things for Celia to use to decorate her box.

"Here", they said as they handed me a pencil zipper pouch.  "What's this?" I asked.  "We've been saving up our money since Christmas, and with the birthday money we just got, we now have $100 to go toward our trip to Ethiopia."  Insert shocked face here.  They've shocked us in the past with their generosity (you can read about that here), but this was a whole other level.

As I've stated in a previous post we have been working with an investigator for nearly a year who found the twins' birthmother.  Our plan is to go visit her and the twins' sisters in Ethiopia for their 12th birthday.  We have had an ongoing relationship with their family through our investigator and our Ethiopian friends here in the states who can call their birthmother's phone and translate for us.  The girls know they are now our extended family and our families and friends united in the fall to send the funds over to pay for tuition for their sisters at the school of their mother's choice.  You can read about that more here.  It's been incredibly healing for all of us.

But, they are kids and that is some pretty heavy stuff to process.  I've given them time and space to process it and tried not to nag about how they feel about it all.  They tell me in small ways.  They all three sleep with photo albums of their birth families in their beds, and on a recent trip to Ohio for the holidays, they even packed them in their suitcase with no prodding by me.  I still wasn't sure how they felt about our plans to go to Ethiopia in two years.  Now I know.

One of our favorite people in the world is Amsale, my Ethiopian mama in Akron.  I spoke with her and asked if she would call the twins' mother soon to check in and see how they're doing.  She had the idea of calling her on the twins' birthday!  After the twins handed me the money, and I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I told them that Amsale was calling her tomorrow and I wanted Amsale to tell their mother about this.  Their smiles lit up the room.  I saw their love for this woman in their eyes.  A woman they feel so guilty for not remembering now.  A woman who stirs up some very complicated feeling for them.  But I saw the healing tonight in their eyes.  God is healing them through this incredible story he's using us in.

So this week we will go to the bank and open a new account.  Mike and I also got a good chunk of change as a Christmas gift from my parents to get this account started.  I recently started working full time so that we would have the extra money to sock away.  I also am starting on a journey of selling this nutritional drink that is helping my own health, with all of the income I make from that going straight into this savings account for our trip.  Our girls are aware of this goal we are working towards and they've decided to join us.

 The timing of this was critical for me.  They're kids, and as such they can be pretty big a-holes a lot of the time.  The twins are also getting close to that snotty, snarky age, which I have no patience for.  Every day I am shutting it down.  It's exhausting, and most days I wonder if they're going to turn out to be jerks.  It's rare that I have the energy, patience and grace to deal with the attitudes in a loving and teaching way.  I just shut it down and send them to their room until they're ready to be nice.  But, tonight I feel good.  Tonight I know that they are learning selflessness.  Tonight they are healing and value us working as a family towards a common goal.  Tonight I not only love them, but I like them and I am cherishing them.

A Very Different Kind of "Back to School" Post

My heart is overflowing with joy.  As I sit here the past two days on Facebook reading everyone's complaints and woes, I am struck at our country's lack of perspective and gratitude.  How spoiled and self-righteous are we as a nation when we complain about our "first world problems" whilst people around the world fight for their right to simply live.

On Wednesday we, as a family, watched a documentary on Netflix called "On the Way to School".  It follows the lives of four different children in four different countries and documents their journey to school every day.  None of the kids in the film walked less than an hour each way to school daily.  One child had to watch out for elephant stampedes, while another pushed their brother, who was in a wheelchair, through very rugged terrain for over an hour.  Yet we complain.  After the film I was struck when the first words out of Charlotte's mouth was "When are we sending the money to send my sisters to school?".  Little did she know that I had been working on this very task over the past few days with our friend Workineh in Ethiopia.

I want to preface this post with the fact that Mike and I are no saints.  This story is of God and only possible through God.  We are simply following God's call on our lives.  He is the one making all of this possible, so please join us in praising Him and not us.

As many of you already know we hired an investigator back in May and were able to locate both birth mothers of our girls.  You can read ore about that story here.  We knew the twins had two sisters, one is now 7 and the other is 12.  In the interest of their privacy I will refer to them as K and N.  Once we found them I had a strong desire to make sure these girls were in a good school.  Since May I have been working with Workineh (our investigator turned friend) as well as our Ethiopian friend here in the states to determine what the best way to go about this would be.  Mike and I wanted to make sure we weren't trying to swoop in and be all "white savior" about the way we wanted to help.

This summer, while visiting family in Ohio, we were able to call the twins' birthmother, Abinet, ON THE PHONE!!!!  Our friend, and Godsend, Amsale in Ohio had her phone number from when the investigator told us that Abinet did have a phone.  Amsale happened to be in Ethiopia visiting her family in May when Workineh found Abinet, so she was able to talk with her on the phone 2 times while she was there.  We were sitting up in a bedroom in Amsale's house.  Our main goal of the phone call was to let Abinet know how we would like to help and find out what kind of school she would like the girls to go to. 

An interesting side note is the twins' response to our phone call to Abinet.  One girl wanted to stand in the room to just listen, but did not want to say anything.  The other wanted nothing to do with the call.  I mention this to emphasize that these are BIG and COMPLICATED feelings that they are sorting through.  They each sleep with a scarf tied around their waist that Amsale brought back for them from Ethiopia that she told them was from Abinet.  They love their first mother, but yet, there's so many feelings!  Mike and I are very intentional about letting them lead as far as how much, and what, involvement they want in this whole process. 

In Ethiopia a boarding school is the most prestigious school.  In my gut, I didn't think she would want to send them to a boarding school.  She already had to part with two of her kids due to terrible circumstances and I felt that she wouldn't want the other two out of her house.  I was correct.  She was so moved by our offer and asked why we wanted to help her.  All of us were crying.  We told her, through Amsale's translation, that she is now a part of our family and we help our family.  We conveyed to her how much we loved her and her other daughters and how we wish to come to visit her in three years.  At one point in the phone call she said "God made these girls (the twins) for you."  My response was "No, he made them for you, but we are so blessed to help."

She chose the school she wanted and let Workineh know how much tuition, the entrance fee, uniforms and school supplies would be.  The total for BOTH girls was...$310 for the entire year.  We are blessed with an incredible group of friends and family who all waned to participate in helping our new family members, which allowed us to send some extra money for school clothes, shoes, etc.

I sent the money to Workineh through Western Union on Wednesday and he traveled to their town on Thursday.  He sent me some pictures.  God is so good guys!

 Here are K & N modeling their new school clothes, shoes and backpacks.

 These are some of their new school books.

 This is the fabric that has been taken to a tailor to be made into their school uniforms.  School starts on September 18th.

 N, Abninet and K showing the photo album I made back in May for them of pictures of the twins from the entire time they've been with us.  Workineh delivered it to them on this trip.  

Here are the girls standing outside the school compound.

I need to express to you that through this entire process we have been very transparent and open with the twins.  They know everything, every detail we discovered about their birthfamily.  Some of it wasn't ideal, obviously.  This has brought the twins so much healing and helped them bond with us on a whole other level.  Their trust in us has grown exponentially.  They see our love for them shown through our love for their first family.  It helps that they no longer need to worry about what ever happened to their first family, especially their sisters.  We will always keep in touch and make sure they're ok, as much as is possible.

In no way has this discovery made me feel any "less" their mother.  I have not felt threatened in any way.  I feel closer to them knowing their history.  It has made me love their first family like they're my own.  It has opened my eyes and broken my heart for what breaks God's.  It has brought me closer to God.  He has been in every small detail of this whole experience.  I pray for Abinet everyday.  I wear a bracelet that says "enat" {mother in Amharic} to remind me to pray for her.  

I sleep better at night knowing I am doing all I can to help them.  It has brought our whole family here, and friends, together for such an amazing reason.  Our family has made us feel so loved, and again it shows the twins that they can trust all of us.  I sleep better knowing that this woman halfway around the world knows she's not forgotten.  She knows her babies are loved and cherished.  She knows that God has heard her prayers and is using us to help answer some of them.  That is an incredible honor.

The Twins' Adoption Story (part one)

In the fall of 2009 I felt very angry with God, in fact I was giving him the  silent treatment. After abruptly losing my job, we had a sudden death in the family and then my dear friend Geeta lost her battle with breast cancer.

I proceeded to spend the next few months wallowing in self pity.  Finally one day I felt my friend Geeta with me. I felt her saying to me “Get off of your butt and stop being sad. It’s time to make your own happiness!” Before she passed away we had had many conversations about international adoption since she and her husband had adopted from Guatemala. So I just keep feeling her nagging me to start looking into it. I had the time, so I researched different agencies and countries and made a nice organized spreadsheet.

I presented all of this to Mike who was definitely on board, but concerned. You see, it definitely did NOT make any sense for us to do this now. I had lost my job (still on unemployment) and he was serving tables at the Olive Garden trying to finish up his PhD. We lived in a small 2 bedroom apartment with not a whole lot of extra income at the end of the month, let alone extra thousands of dollars lying around to be able to afford this! We knew we wanted to adopt eventually because we both have some serious genetic health issues on both sides of our families that we didn’t want to risk passing onto our children. But now? My brain knew it didn’t make sense but my heart wasn’t listening!

Not long after I began my research I got a call from my cousin Kimberly.  We had become closer since the sudden passing of her mother.  She offered me a full time job working for her!  Looking back I see that as soon as I was blindly following God's call for my life, he was providing for our needs.

After Christmas we really began finalizing our choices as far as agency and country. We chose our agency because it was the same one that Geeta had gone through and we chose Ethiopia because the kids were healthy, they were being hyped as not having attachment issues (HA!), and they were beautiful! It was a new program so there was less red tape and less of a wait time.

Now came the issue of financing this. We starting some fundraisers that yielded small profits but realized we were going to have to come up with a better plan. I am blessed enough to have very generous and well off grandparents, so we wrote up a business plan of how we would pay them back and presented it to them. This was a very big chunk of change we were asking to borrow but luckily for us they said yes and we were on our way!

We started our homestudy in mid-February 2010. When our social worker came out to our home, one of the many times, she asked about the possibility of us adopting 2 children. After talking it over we decided that we never wanted only one child so why not go ahead and get 2 at the same time, preferably biological siblings! We figured at least if they are going to look nothing like us, they can at least look like each other! So we got approved for 2 children and when we said we didn’t want to request a gender, we were informed that we would probably get 2 boys then, because most people have been requesting girls. At this information my husband, who grew up with no sisters, says “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got twin girls!”. I said “No! You have no idea the kind of drama that would come along with that! Two prom dresses, two weddings, and let’s not forget the hormones!!”

There were a few road blocks that we ran into during our homestudy process.  For one, when we were married I chose to change my middle name to my maiden name.  I was told at the Social Security office that I could do that and was not informed that any other legal action needed to be taken.  Well, it turns out that I needed to go to probate court to officially change it legally.  Due to strange rules I was going to have to wait an entire year before I'd be allowed to go to probate court for this which was going to set us back an entire year!  My doctors were also NOT fond of me going to a third world country in Africa since I was on so many immune-suppressant medications.  There were some vaccines that were recommended that were live viruses, which I was told I was not allowed to have because of the meds I was taking.  Many tears were shed over these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

During this process our agency connected us with another family who was local and also adopting from Ethiopia through the same agency. We became Facebook friends and had sent a couple of emails back and forth. When they made their trip in late March to pick up their children, I found myself glued to my computer! I just kept looking at their pictures. I was amazed with the scenery, and the culture and of course, the children. I showed her pictures to everyone I knew. When my
mom saw the pictures of the children this family was bringing home, she gasped and said “Oh Sarah, can’t you just have them? They’re beautiful!!”. My response, of course, was that I was pretty sure it didn’t work like that!

We were moving into my grandparents former house that spring.  On April 30th everything changed. All of our things were in boxes as we were moving the following day. Our phone rang at about 8pm. Our adoption agency was on the other end, asking us how we would feel about adopting twin 4 year old girls. We were in shock! Our homestudy wasn't even finished yet! When we ask when, her response is just “soon, very soon”!  We asked them to give us the night to pray about it.
From their description of the girls’ ages I knew it was the same 2 little girls I had been looking at pictures of over the last 2 weeks. So we logged onto our computer and looked at their pictures again…and wept. These were our daughters!!

Read part two for the rest of the story!

Blessed By Birthmothers Across the Globe

Last week we hired an investigator halfway around the world in Ethiopia and this week we have pictures and information about all of our daughters' birth mothers.  MIND BLOWN.

It has literally been a million times easier to find these women in rural Ethiopia, living in mud huts, than it has to get my license plates switched over from Ohio to Pennsylvania, which still has not happened and we've lived here nearly a year.

Mike and I have been saying for the past 4 years that as soon as we got our 2011 tax refund, which includes our adoption tax credit, that we would hire an investigator to look into the twins' birth family.  Because this tax refund took a whopping FOUR YEARS to get straightened out, this has seemed like an elusive goal, something out of our reach.  Thanks to my superhero tax attorney Uncle Mike we were able to finally get the refund and not 2 weeks later I saw a question on an Ethiopian Adoption Support Group page I follow on Facebook.  There was a woman asking for a recommendation for an investigator and it just so happened that my friend Scott commented.  I sent Scott a message to ask more about this man he was recommending and his response was that this man was like a part of his family, a Christian and one of Scott's best friends.  SOLD.

I reached out to this man on Facebook, who lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  I gave him all of the information I have from the paperwork from their adoptions.  I've had a few friends go through this process and find out that most, if not all, of the information that was in their adoption paperwork was a lie, so there was no guaranteeing this information I was giving him was factual.  I figured we'd wait a couple of months to find anything out.

Imagine my surprise when only a couple of days later he was in the village that the twins were born in.  He had information.  Mike and I held our breaths when opening the email and reading his report.  

We hardly knew anything about the twins' story, beside what they could remember and verbalize to us in their broken English when they were four.  They talked about a mom figure, but called her by her first name.  This mom was on the paperwork once as their mother and yet on another set of paperwork she was listed as a guardian.  We weren't certain if she was the mom or an eldest sister.  They also spoke of an older sister and a baby sister.  Charlotte named all of her baby dolls after this baby sister and missed her dearly in that first year with us.  Even after being with us for nearly 3 years I remember a night where she broke down and wept because she was worried about her baby sister in Ethiopia.  My heart broke not being able to give her those answers she was craving.

Now we had the information in our lap and we prayed that it was good news that would be healing.  We opened the report and read it together before sharing it with the girls.  It turns out it was their mother and she is well, living with the other two daughters.  While the paperwork said that their father died, it turns out he just up and left once the baby sister was born, leaving their mother with no way to support her family.  She was in an impossible situation.  She relinquished custody of the twins when they were 3 (6 years ago) and had not heard a word about their whereabouts since.  She was so happy to see the pictures of the girls that we sent with our investigator.  She wept over them for a long time, he told us, and she had a hard time speaking.  I cannot even imagine not knowing where your children were and if they were ok for SIX YEARS.  The girls' sisters are also well, looking to be about 13 and 6 years old.  The younger one looks like a crazy awesome combination of the twins. 

When we showed the twins the pictures and shared the information they were beaming from ear to ear!  They loved seeing someone who actually looked like them!  They no longer have any conscious memories of their life back then, but I could see how healing it was going to be for them to have this treasure of information.  Seeing their first mother crying tears of joy when looking at their pictures.  She LOVES them, she MISSES them, they were wanted.  She made a selfless and impossible decision to give the girls a chance at a better life.  

A couple of days later we got word that our investigator was in Celia's family's village as he sent us pictures and a report.  Her birth mother is very young and very poor living in a home made of branches and sticks.  Once again the story of Celia's birth father being deceased proved to be untrue.  He also disappeared once Celia was born.  Her birth mother was so poor she was unable to feed herself enough to be able to produce milk to feed her baby.  Celia was very malnourished when she came to the orphanage.  She is now remarried and just recently had another baby, a boy.

Celia is only 5 right now so this information is a bit much for her to be able to process.  We told her about her baby brother in Ethiopia and her response was "I know, I remember him."  Umm yeah chica you left the country before you were one year old and he was just born, so no, you don't remember him, but whatever!  I feel good that as she gets older and does have questions that I will have some of the answers she is seeking.

As I look at the pictures of these beautiful women on the other side of the world I realize how incredible it is to be able to love someone this much without ever even meeting them.  I love these women.  I feel like our family has grown.  I never thought that we would have the opportunity to have any form of an open adoption when we adopted children from another country, but God has now opened that door.  Through our investigator I can now send letters, more pictures and other items he thinks might be helpful for them.  Mike and I are also looking into what it would take to pay for the twins' sisters to attend a good school.  We are praying about what we do next now that we have all of this information.  We feel a responsibility to help our new family members in any way we can.  While I set out to do this for the girls, I have realized it was just as much for me.  I needed to know that these mothers knew that their babies were well, loved and had a family that would never let them forget where they came from.  I feel lighter somehow.

We do plan on making a trip over there once the girls are older and when we go we will most definitely spend time with their first mothers.  I can't wait to hold them, cry with them, laugh with them, pray with them, cook with them and thank them for the gift they gave us and our girls.  These girls are going to do BIG things, and that began with their mothers making a very brave and scary choice of giving their children life.

God's timing is pretty amazing.  All of this happened just in time for mother's day.  Best gift ever.