I'm Bethany.
I'm a wife, a mother, a homeschooler. I love to cook healthy food for my family...but I hate washing the dishes afterwords. I'm really good at keeping the laundry clean...just not so good at keeping it folded. I love to create...when I have the time. I love the idea of going out and being social...but when it comes down to it, nothing ever sounds quite so good as an evening in with my hubby, some decaf, and Netflix.
I'm not an amazing chef who will revolutionize cooking forever. I'm not a fantastic crafter who can take toilet paper rolls and some string and create a family heirloom. I can't help you organize your life in three easy steps...or five, or 1,000, because life is messy and unpredictable, and frankly if you can organize it that easily it's probably boring.
So why am I writing a blog?
At the time of this writing, my husband and I are in the middle of an adoption. This fall, if all goes as planned, we will be bringing home a baby boy, who has Down syndrome.
The reason I want to write a blog about this experience is that I feel that adoption, and adoptive families, need demystifying. I have had many conversations about adoption over the past couple years as we have made our plans known to friends and acquaintances, and I've noticed a pattern in how people respond. It's typically one of three ways:
One: They say that we are angels, "good people", or generally mentally place us up on some high pedestal, unreachable by common humans.
Two: They say they would love to adopt...BUT...it costs too much, life is just too crazy right now, or they feel like their kids aren't well behaved and surely they need to get their own kids in order before adopting...again putting our family on some high pedestal, as if only families with perfect children and perfectly managed lives could ever adopt.
Three: This one can go two ways: they ask us "why". Why are we adopting? Why are we adopting a child with Down Syndrome? Why are we adopting NOW?
This same question can be asked with two very different attitudes, and I've heard both. One reads: "Why would you do this to yourself when you already have four beautiful children?", and when I get a question like that, I try to use it as an opportunity to explain adoption lovingly to someone who may not have had any positive experiences associated with it.
The second attitude reads "How did you know it was time, and how did you know what adoption path to choose?", and of all the questions we get regarding our adoption, this is by far my favorite. I can see the wheels turning when people ask like this, I can see that adoption is something already on their heart, and they are searching for their own answers. I can recognize this so easily because not long ago I was there: asking questions, learning to think outside the mental box that wants to put adoptive families up on that pedestal: admirable, but safely out of reach.
I am writing this blog to challenge everyone's thinking of adoptive families. I'm going to show how messy my life is, how we are so, SO far from having "arrived", how I'm not some superhuman "good person", but rather someone who fails hard and desperately needs Jesus' strength and forgiveness each and every day. I'm going to share how tough adoption is, mentally, physically, emotionally, but that with God all things are truly possible, even for crazy disorganized families like mine. My hope is that maybe, just maybe, someone will read this blog looking for their own "why", looking for their own "how", and that my honest representation of my life and my path can take them one step closer to demystifying adoptive families, and start to chip away at that stupid pedestal.
