The other day I saw something circling on Facebook.  It was a post of a girl who had been adopted, and now as a young adult, she was using Facebook to try to find her biological parents. She shared how she knows none of her medical background because she has no link to her biological parents through the closed adoption her parents chose for her.  My heart broke for her, as I thought about our baby girl in the future growing into an adult, and having all those natural questions that I know will come with her adoption, though in our situation we have chosen an open adoption and my hope is that through it, she will never be left in angst wanting to know more about her genetics.  I said a prayer for the girl in the Facebook post and prayed that God would fill her heart with peace as she journeyed on to find the missing link in her life.

Before I continue, please know, with what I’m about to share of our experience with open adoption, this is in no way a bash on closed adoptions.  I know every adoption situation, open or closed, is different and complex and delicate. This is simply my perspective of why I’m glad my hubby and I chose to pursue an open adoption for our baby girl on the way, and I also know, even with this choice, we have a closer bond than the norm with our own birth parents who chose us. Their story and love behind their choice to place a baby for adoption is their own story to tell, but this is Stephen and I’s story from our own perspective (and we were given permission by the birth parents to share this blog and photo below publicly).

We’re only 20 weeks into our own journey with adoption and our birth mom, Kassie’s, pregnancy, and I have to admit, it took me a while to get to a place of understanding the open adoption route when we first began researching adoption options. And I’m so glad we chose this route because getting to know our birth parents and their family has become the most unexpected beautiful part of our journey. I was recently sharing with a close adopted friend’s mom about getting to know Kassie and her family in the process, and my friend’s mom was so stunned to hear we actually had a relationship with our birth mom.  “I had no information or any kind of ties to our birth mom 35 years ago,” my mom’s friend said. “It sure has changed a lot since my day.” And I was almost as stunned back, because, at this point in our journey, I can’t imagine not having a relationship with this beautiful brave soul carrying our child, and the loving friendship that has developed with Kassie through all of this.  I’m not trying to say one way is better than the other, but for us, it has become the perfect way in this unique story God is writing in all of our lives.

But when we first were considering our agency knowing they only did open adoptions, I carried around those natural fears and questions. “Does that mean I’ll be sharing my child? Won’t that confuse the child to know both moms? Is it good or bad for the child to know possible biological siblings?”  But ultimately, I knew this entire journey was a faith journey, and I needed to let my faith trump my fears. I knew God would reveal the light for each step I took on this journey He was calling me to.

Then… that first Facetime happened with our birth parents when they were considering choosing us to parent their child.  Then our first dinner after we were chosen.  Then my first car ride to the doctor’s appointment with Kassie.  Then the first heartbeat.  Then the first ultrasound.  Then the gender reveal.  Then the holidays celebrating together.  And appointment by appointment, meal after meal together, and car ride after car ride, those fears slowly melted away and our hearts began to merge with our birth parents.  I began to see, it’s not about “sharing” a child, it’s about merging a new kind of family.

There’s this unexplainable bond that Kassie and I share as the birth mom and adoptive mom. It’s this mutual love for the same child, and for each other, in what we are each able to provide in love for the child. I naturally, behind the scenes, started calling her my Baby Momma, to then find out, she was calling me that as well.  So now that’s pretty much how we address each text message to each other.  I love getting to know Kassie and what makes her “her”, so that as Baby Girl gets older, I can know what traits she will get from her by nature, vs what traits she will get from me by nurture.  I love that I will get to tell Baby Girl how her birth mom and I share a love of all things pink and cheetah, and big glam earrings and cute winter boots.  I love that I will get to tell her that she’s so much like her biological sister or brother in this and that because I’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know them through this journey, and every ounce of me hopes Baby Girl will grow up to be just as precious and cuddly as her big sister. Because it’s not just her birth mom that has my heart, Baby Girl’s sister does too, so much that I’m naming her middle name after her big sister.

And Stephen has developed a fun friendship with the birth dad.  They discovered they were pretty much brothers from another mother when they realized they were both counting down the minutes until Star Wars premiered.  They’ve been tight ever since and even went and saw the movie together on opening night. And on Christmas Eve, their whole family joined us at our church to all come together celebrating the reason for the season, our precious Baby Jesus being brought into the world and the gift He was sent as to this world.  Something about this year, I suddenly understood even more the magnificence of that miracle.

Prior to being chosen by our birth parents, as I first started considering whether we should pursue open or closed adoption, I thought about what I would want if I was in our child’s shoes and had found out I was adopted.  Would I want to know where I came from, or would I be content with only knowing the parents who raised me, as my adopted friend above is at peace at in her life.  My friend once told me that if anything, she wanted to write her birth mom a thank you letter for the choice she made to place her for adoption, because she loved the life she grew up with in the family that God chose for her. But when my friend went to go to the mailbox to mail the letter, she stopped, and realized, she didn’t need to send the letter.  She loved the parents that raised her, and for her that was enough.  Before we got matched, as I thought about the future of our child learning about their adoption, I knew, even if our child was at peace at not needing to know their biological parents as my friend chose, I didn’t want to take that choice away from them.  If they wanted to ask questions and know their heritage or biological medical history (as a child of two parents with cancer, I place high value on the openness of this information), I wanted that to be their choice to pursue it or not, not our choice for them. Not just legally when they were 18, but at whatever point.  If during their growing up, that it would one day help them to be more confident in learning who they were as genetically theirs and adopted ours, to save them from the angst of the unknown, then why hold back that gift from them?

And now, being chosen by our birth parents, through this open adoption, there will be visits and photos exchanged often, and our child will pretty much always know they are adopted, which I like that there will be no shock value in her future or hidden secrets. It will just be her normal. I’ve been thinking as this journey has progressed and my friendship with Kassie has blossomed, how much more blessed will our baby girl be to know not one mom who loves her with all their heart and soul, but two moms, both in unique and different ways? While some not as familiar with the concept might confuse open adoption as a shared custody, what it IS instead, as with any adoption, is a shared love of one woman who carried a child under her heart, and another woman who carried the child in her heart. And for us, together, those two random hearts across the city from each other found their way into each other’s lives to promise to both love sacrificially this God created child… to first give life to this baby girl and place her into open arms that promise to then give the best life possible to this doubly loved child. Two mothers, one child, three hearts knitted together by a promise of love.

When I chose who I wanted to spend my Christmas birthday with this year, I chose our birth family. Just two years ago, my heart spilled out tears in disappointment of another birthday God had not yet answered my prayer to become a mother.  And last year, I spilled out tears just two days before my birthday as it belated hit me that our fertility treatment the month before didn’t work.  Now this year’s birthday, my heart was so full of joy because of Kassie’s courage to also choose an open adoption. There is never any way possible to tell her thank you in words for choosing life for Baby Girl and choosing me of everyone in the world to love and raise her, but I know with each hug I give Kassie, and each hug she gives me, always so tight and lingering, we feel the same gratitude for each other through those hugs that we can’t quite possibly ever express in words. It’s an unspoken gratefulness for each other, and for our loving Heavenly Father that brought us together through His son and our daughter.

Here’s a photo of Kassie and her precious 4-year-old daughter and I celebrating my Christmas birthday at my all time favorite glam candy shop, Sweet Pete’s! I love that all us FOUR girls are in one photo (though you can hardly see Baby Girl’s growing bump!) holding hands together on this journey.  That wasn’t planned for the pose, but looking at the photo afterward, it didn’t surprise me how naturally beautiful our hands came together that night.

All my pink dreams have officially come true!  We found out last week, we have a baby GIRL on the way arriving in May!  And I couldn’t be more excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A few weeks ago, I opened up about how Stephen and I are in the adoption process with an open adoption, so if you missed that blog entry, check it out here.

But now that we know it’s a BABY GIRL who our amazing birthmom is carrying for us, I want you to know even more of the back story of why finding out the gender is so significant to me beyond a typical gender reveal.  Yes, you all know I’m obsessed with all things pink, but it’s goes so much deeper than that.

The day we found out last week that our birthmom was expecting a girl, I sobbed in the moment.  And sobbed on the car ride home.  And later that day sobbed some more as I stood in the empty room in our home I had been saving for “her” nursery one day. Though the room has been empty, her closet has been full of adorable pink tutus and frilly onesies I’ve been buying in faith all these years.

These past almost 5 years, I’ve done a lot of crying as we struggled to expand our family, and the day we found out it’s a girl, my crying was now out of simply praising God for a promise fulfilled that I struggled so much to believe He would… and could. I wish I could say my faith had been unwavering, and while my faith was the foundation that carried me through the storms of infertility, on the surface, it cracked and bended and broke into a million pieces and had to be rebuilt each step of this journey to motherhood. Just like Jacob in the bible wrestled with God, this journey has too been a huge wrestle with Him myself as I strived to keep believing that no matter, He was good, and had good plans for us and the future of our family we longed to have.

You see, when we first found out early on that we were going to possibly never be able to create our own biological child, I had a slight major meltdown.  I rushed to the place where I always connect with God the most, the ocean, and sat on a quiet Florida beach crying my eyes out freaking out about hearing all my dreams were shattered that I might never get to become a mom.  I screamed cried out to God in the midst of my panic attack for some kind of hope in that tear-filled prayerful moment and… He spoke. Loudly. Y’all, Jesus still speaks today! There have only been a few times in my lifetime that I can claim I actually heard Him speak, and this was one, and it’s always when I’m in an absolute place of surrender. In that moment, Jesus gave me a promise that He would create a baby girl for us, and gave me a specific name to name her (those details to come once she arrives!).  It was a name so different than what I would have chosen myself for a daughter, but this vision was so clear and I wrote it down immediately in my prayer journal so I wouldn’t forget it.  The only thing He didn’t make clear at the time was if that baby girl would come naturally, or through adoption.  Or a timeframe.  You know, cliffhanger style.

Though I didn’t know all the details of what was yet to come, at least He gave me hope. I finally took a deep breath telling God, “Ok, I am trusting You.  This is all nuts, but I’m trusting You and will move forward with this piece of hope.”

And let me tell you, for the past almost 5 years, I have felt like a crazy woman clinging to this promise.  I only told a few select people over the years who would “get” that kind of faith it requires to truly walk… by… faith… each step of our journey.  It’s not exactly the easiest thing to tell people, “So yeah, I know all odds are against us, but God says it’s gonna happen, so that’s what I’m believing.”  Yes, I had days of big faith, but I also fought days of big doubt. Because, some most days, I had all those natural human doubts, and I struggled in my faith for all the reasons that, well, the very definition of faith is believing in what you can not see as He showed me that day in Hebrews 11:1.  And yet, even though I had this promise, it also became my greatest source of frustration with each new path we tried to have children.  As each path failed each year of our marriage, and each month after month of disappointment, I continued to question God, “Why would you give me this promise and continually not fulfill it?”  I always thought of Abraham and Sarah in the bible, and I don’t know how they held on for like 90 years to their promise for a child, because the 4 years I held on were about to make me lose my mind patience.

I had so many moments of anger with God, doubting Him, trying to control our circumstance, losing my faith altogether, fasting, praying, crying out with desperate pleas for some kind of update.  And in the years that followed, He was silent.  For the most part.  Some days it just all felt so cruel and unfair as I watched everyone around me get pregnant so easily.  I was so tired of being in that season where anything baby related (on TV, on my FB newsfeed, passing by that cutesy baby area in Target) felt like a twisting of the knife in my heart of my greatest desire.

But even in the midst of His silence, every now and then though, He gave me a whisper of hope.  I remember, in the midst of our infertility treatments, one day in the doctor’s office as I waited for a nurse to come do an ultrasound to measure my eggs, I laid on the patient table waiting and God gave me a vision of an ultrasound with the technician saying “It’s a girl!” That was great and all, but when I didn’t pregnant during that expensive wish there was a refund policy fertility treatment cycle, I was just more confused at the point of that whisper.

Then earlier this year, Stephen was sick and sleeping in the guestroom, and he woke up one morning and ran in our room telling me he had a dream where God handed us a baby girl we were adopting and told us to name her the name He had already told me.  Granted, Stephen already knew her name at this point, and I wasn’t quite ready to try adoption again at that point, but for him to see that in a dream, we don’t take prophetic dreams lightly in our home.

Then two days before we found out we were matched with our birth parents in October, we were enjoying our last days in San Diego visiting family, and we walked out of a restaurant and I saw, not once, but TWICE, our baby girl’s name repeated in a sign for another near by restaurant.  And granted, her name is rare, and I’ve never seen it anywhere in a casual setting like that. So I considered that a whisper. I remember telling Stephen “I think that’s God’s way of telling us she’s on the way… like real soon!” Because all along the way, as crazy as we might have sounded, we still always talked about “her,” calling her by name, as we have always believed it was only a matter of time before God brought her to us in the way He knew best.

Then two days later after seeing her name twice, we get “the” phone call from our agency.  Our birth parents chose us, of all the 10 profile books they looked at, they chose us.  Only catch, the gender was unknown.  “Do you want to roll the dice and take a chance?” we were asked.  Oh gosh, this was such a defining moment in my faith because I wanted to control it, I wanted to put my foot down and say, “No, we only want a birth mom who is pregnant with a girl because, you know, God said so afterall!” Ha!  But I also knew, just like signing up with the adoption agency was a huge step in this walking by faith journey God had me on, that I needed to keep trusting Him, and say as I did when I signed up with the agency, “I’m willing.”

Of course though, as the weeks passed and we had to wait to find out the gender with our birth mom, I got really anxious. Even though He had already given me all those whispers along the way, it was still hard for me to believe, and again, not feel like a crazy person.  I asked God for another whisper and to reveal to me in a dream if our birth mom was carrying a boy or a girl. Again, we are big believers in prophetic dreams and it’s crazy how many times I’ve had dreams about friends being pregnant to tell them before they even knew to then a few weeks later confirm it.  So I was like, “Ok, God, for all those times you made me dream about other women being pregnant, I want you to reveal to me in a dream if this is a boy or a girl You have chosen for us.”  That night, I kid you not, I dreamt that my friends were working on a baby shower invite and on it, was HER NAME.  I woke up and even drew out the design of what I saw on the baby shower invite in the journal I’ve been keeping for our child.

But of course, I still kind of doubted that dream in my human nature kind of way.  Ok, that was nice to see the baby shower invite, but I knew I had to also prepare myself that maybe it was just a dream, and maybe it just might also be a boy.  I knew I would love absolutely whatever this child was who God chose for us, but for me, it was always more about, “Is this child going to be the promise fulfilled, or possibly that child might come at a later time?”

So last week when the ultrasound technician told us all “100% it’s a girl!” I screamed from all the broken places my heart had been shattered along this journey.  I cried from all the well of tears I had collected in such pain of unfulfilled dreams to now seeing this dream come true.  I jumped up and down for all the times I fell to the floor begging, praying, pleading for God to allow me the honor of becoming a mother.

At the end of the night, I stood in the empty room of her nursery where I used to once sit on the floor crying tears of pain telling God I was trying with every fiber of my being to keep believing in His promise, and that night cried tears of joy praising Him for keeping His word.  For not forgetting me.  For trusting me, though we wrestled, to hang on until He blessed us, and creating in me this deepened faith through this answered prayer that I just want to shout from the rooftops “He did it!  He actually did it! He kept His promise!”

I’m saving the reveal of her name until she’s here, and I can’t wait to share her with all of you when she arrives.  My constant prayer since the beginning of this miracle in the making has been, however she came to us, that I want her life to leave a legacy of God’s love because she was absolutely created by faith.

And the other thing I cried tears of joy about that day we found out it was “her,” was how, she’s not even here yet and she already has such a beautiful circle of love surrounding her.  Since opening up to you a few weeks ago, we have received hundreds of beautiful comments, emails, texts all sharing such excitement and prayers for our adoption journey. And I continue to be amazed at each financial blessing that has poured in so willingly to help us fund this adoption! Our baby girl has already been so blessed by you and I can’t wait for the day when I can tell her about all the random acts of kindness that brought her into this world, and into our family.

We are still fundraising, and through your giving, we have have already received 37% of our need!  If you would like to partner alongside us with a Christmas gift for our baby girl, please email me at hello@scarlettlillian.com or FB message me for the adoption fund link.  I would post the link publicly to make it easier on everyone, but due to agency rules, I must keep it private!

Thank you for celebrating with us in this beautiful time in our lives!  God is so good.

Here’s a photo of us with my mom and our beautiful birthmom Kassie!  And below, a special video of the moment of joy and tears when we found out it was “her” we had been waiting for for so long.