Hi, friend. Ideally, we should be sharing a cup of hot coffee or tea and have an afternoon spread out in front of us to get to know one another. I’m a story girl at heart. I don’t like surface relationships. I want to know you and what the pages of your story have looked like-the hard, the easy, the beautiful, the brutal, where you lost hope and where Hope found you. So if you are reading this, my hope is one day, you will share your own story with me. But for now, allow me to introduce myself.
I’m Kellie, wife of 16.5 years to my husband, Shannan, and mama to four darling kiddos. At first glance, it must seem we are living the American dream…happy marriage with a house full of kiddos…two dogs in the backyard and laughter bouncing around the walls of our home. What you may not know is the journey of building of our family has been laden with grief and loss. It’s been full of questions for which we have no answers.
Shannan and I met in college and knew very early on in our dating relationship that forever would be our story. We got married the summer after our junior year, approaching our life together with excitement and optimism. We had laid our YES before the Lord, having no idea how it would play out and what all He would do. Being lovers of deep conversation and not much for small talk, you should know that our conversations even before engagement involved what our family dreams looked like. We shared a common heart for adoption and dreamed of building a family through both biological and adopted kiddos. What we didn’t know is the journey He called us to would also be the same journey that wounded us most deeply.
A year after our oldest child was born, we both felt God stir our hearts that our plan to ‘someday’ adopt had come. We were to begin the process. Many interviews, a lot of paperwork stacks, appointments, and dollars later, we laid a YES down before the Lord and pursued adopting African-American triplets. Three weeks into the process and after having made NICU our home for most of it, we found ourselves in a small ‘family room’ at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, holding our daughter, Ella, for our final goodbye. It was the last time before we handed her back to her birth mother and then lingered a few minutes in NICU saying goodbye to our other daughters, Hadley and Lilly. The birth mom had changed course and decided to give our babies to the birth father’s brother. This man, who hadn’t been in the picture the entire pregnancy or the three weeks the girls had been in NICU, was walking away with our babies and subsequently, our hearts. You might imagine that day ushered us straight into a long season of grief and anger at God and to this day leaves with countless unanswered questions. We left Philadelphia with shattered hearts and walked into our home with empty arms.
The birth mom called almost a year later. “I made a mistake and I want you and Shannan to adopt the girls.” We found out in the same conversation the uncle had dropped them off on her doorstep a couple of months or so after he took custody initially. Compelled to return because of God’s prompting and not based on the reliability of the birth mom, we went back. And waited a week staring at travel cribs, carseats, stacks of diapers, bottles, pacifiers, clothes and toys, in the short term rental in which we were staying. And then we made the two day drive home with three empty carseats. Once again, we walked into our home and into a bedroom with soft raspberry pink walls and three empty cribs, to a closet of matching clothes … Most words had left us and the only prayer we could say was …”Are you SERIOUS God? TWICE you have done this to us. We DO NOT deserve this.”
After our second loss, I remained confident God had called us to adoption, but I had no idea how those pieces would come together. We were broken, we were out of money and frankly wondering when God planned to show up and rescue us from the mess that He had led us to. We felt like He had wronged us.
Through a series of events, we ended up being asked by close friends at the time to adopt, “C”, a 15 month old African-American baby boy in foster care. God provided an agency that agreed to license us for the purpose of adopting only him. Unexpectedly, his court case was extended and in the end, the same family who had asked us to adopt him ended up welcoming him into their own family. The details of how that came together were hurtful and left us feeling very betrayed. The amazing grace of God in that season was that two weeks before we lost C, God placed in our home our first foster child who today is our son.
October 1, 2009, my husband and I eagerly opened our front door and greeted several social workers. We gathered in our dining room and signed our paperwork. A few final instructions later, we closed the door on CPS, and I stood and sobbed. I held this tiny bundle tightly, staring at him, and knew my heart was 100 percent his. The call to adopt had been years long and so full of losing child after child. You see, after losing our triplets, we walked through a miscarriage and other failed adoptions. But finally, in my arms was who we had been waiting for … for many years. This beautiful baby boy was mine, at least for a season, and we had the privilege of loving him and taking care of him.
The first night he slept in our home, we laid him down in his crib about 10 pm. Shortly after we, too, went to bed, but the anxiety that settled onto my heart was so strong, I felt like I was suffocating. I was absolutely terrified of losing him. I couldn’t sleep and I was shaking. Covered by the darkness of the night, I laid my heart bare before God. “If you take this one, too, I CANNOT survive it. I can’t do it again. Please, please don’t take him.”
The next morning I woke up to a devotional based on John 21. It was the story of when Jesus encountered the disciples who had been fishing all night and hadn’t caught anything. He tells them to throw their nets to the other side. I’m prone to wonder if the conversation went something like this: “We’ve been here all night and you think we haven’t fished off both sides???!!!” But Jesus persisted and said, “I know…try it one more time.” That time the net was so full, they could not haul it in.
And in that moment He so clearly said to me: ”Try it one more time. I have seen what you have walked through…I ordained it. I know you are a wreck. I know how terrified you are. But try it one more time.”
6 weeks later God gifted us with another baby: a precious African-American baby girl. Again, so many unknowns and what-ifs plagued our hearts and minds. Would we love for a season and then say goodbye? Would we be asked again to do the impossible and hand her back? Over the next year, we prayed our guts out, begging him to bring their adoptions to fruition.
When your history has been loss, it feels impossible to believe God will give you a yes. We wrestled deeply with the enemy’s lie, “God just doesn’t answer this particular prayer for us…even though He has called us to it.”
Before our son and daughter’s adoptions were finalized, but once we knew they would be our forever kids, we were asked to adopt our son’s bio sister. She was in foster care in CA. Once more, we laid down our yes and spent almost a year pursuing her in the legal system in CA. At the end of her trial, we were told by the judge, “although we were a shining example of family,” he was granting custody of our son’s only full sibling to a biological distant cousin. His explanation: “She had learned lessons from her past mistakes.” To this day, we do not understand the legal system that denied our son the right to grow up with his only full biological sibling and that applauded our parenting, but denied us the gift of parenting our son’s sister.
It’s been said that time heals. I think it can ease pain to some degree, but it doesn’t erase it. Our triplets turned 10 this summer and yet in a moment’s time, I am back in that hospital every single time I wash my hands or my kids hands in a doctor’s office because the soap, oddly enough, is the same one. In a moment’s time, I’m back in a Philadelphia hotel room on a bed sobbing and then I’m boarding the plane leaving them. I remember vividly one Sunday afternoon sitting on the floor in their room sobbing as my husband took apart their cribs and returned them to the store. Later that evening, we met with our weekly small group from church and I wasn’t certain I could hold myself together as people made normal conversation and their lives went on, but my heart had been shredded that afternoon.
I think about our girls and wonder if they wish they had a daddy’s shoulders to ride on and if their mama is well enough emotionally and physically to paint their nails and cut up apples for afternoon snacks. Does anyone push them on park swings and do they chase fireflies on summer nights? I wonder if they are still in a situation in which survival instead of thriving is what marks their days. Does anyone delight in them? Are their tummies full and their bodies warm and safe? Do they know the depth and riches of God’s love and that they are made in His image even when the world screams they are less than because of their skin color?
Trips to Whole Foods and certain parks bring back memories of the year we spent visiting our son’s sister in California and taking her to beaches, parks, and for treats at Whole Foods. She loved strawberries and cheese…like our son. We had figured out how to coax her giggle and smile and how she liked to be held. We learned how to comfort her as she got confused as any baby does being jostled around in foster care and bounced around to different adults. I try to answer hard questions from our son about why she doesn’t live with us. I wonder if she’s happy. I wonder if she’s being given the tools she needs and deserves to heal from the rejection she’s experienced from some of her birth family. I wonder when she will learn of the deep love God has for her because her family is not one of faith.
And yet with each of the questions and memories, I know at the end of the day, we are called to trust the One Who ordained the lives of each of those we have lost. We have had to realize we are not the only family He can work through to draw them to Himself. Regardless of whether or not they grow up in families rooted in Jesus, He can save them. We have to trust that He will redeem all things, restore what has been broken, and use all of it for good. No, not everything in and of itself is good. But because we serve a God of redemption and of miracles, a God of limitless power, we can trust Him with all of the pieces that leave us with more questions than answers.
I could write a dissertation on what He has taught me through all of this and what He intends for us to take from our dark night of the soul. While I’m still learning the depth of what He has purposed to do within us through our story, this I do know: When He wounds, He will put us back together. Similar to a surgeon’s scalpel, the wounds actually bring deeper healing. He breathes life into worn, tired, broken hearts that don’t feel like getting out of bed anymore. He does something beautiful in pain–He brings purpose out of it and doesn’t allow destruction to be the end of our stories. Searing pain will grow and change us for better if we lay the broken pieces at His feet and allow Him access to redeem and restore all of it. At the end of the day, pain and loss reveal much about what our heart treasures most deeply–either Jesus, Himself, or what He can give us. In the end, if you have Him, you have all you really need. He’s the Master of multiplication–He gives us more and more of Himself and in the process, little by little, Light breaks into the darkness, our tired souls find Life breathed in, and we realize brokenness was never meant to be the final mark of our story.
He trades our ashes for beauty, our mourning for joy, and our despair for praise. (Isaiah 61)
