It all started with a walk.

I wish it was deeper or more romantic than that, but this all started with a walk after Thanksgiving dinner. I walked out the screen door of my mother-in-law’s back porch and eased my way down the hill to meet my husband by his father’s shop. I was only going to check in with him to see how our 4-year old was behaving post dinner and 3 pieces of pie later, and to my surprise he was…for a lack of a better word, chill. My husband smiled at me and said, “We were just about to go walk the land. Do you wanna come?”

Be ready for rejection. It is best served quick and to your face. It’s nothing personal, though sometimes it is actually personal, and we just tell ourselves it’s not so we can simply survive the blow. This rejection will find you in the form of a job, relationship, friendship, dinner invite, getting fired, being forgotten—or even sometimes from yourself. Being rejected by your own self is one of the quickest ways to grow that extra layer of skin that makes it thick enough to survive your twenties. Rejection, while it is tough, is essential, and it will sting the worst when those you love extend it to you. However, do not let rejection have the last word. You take hold of it, mold it, examine it up close, and find the cracks in its form. You’ll learn to identify the worst parts of rejection and apply the balm needed for repair to your heart or ego and promptly move on.

I’m not telling you what to do. You should know that before you go any further. And I’m not one of those people who thinks that every stranger is a “Stranger Danger” or a pervert, but as someone who prayed and prayed for years on the chance to be a mom, I want to explain why I’m just as shocked as the next person to not see images of my miracle baby on my feed. Trust me, he is just as gorgeous as you think he is.

I’ve daydreamed for years on what my post would look like once I had kids of my own.

Isn’t that so stupid to say?

But I know that I’m not the only one who operates this way now. When we anticipate our future, our images have shifted from experience and three-dimensional daydreams of real life and “What will this be like and feel like” to “What will this look like on my feed?”

And maybe even assume what the foot traffic will be like on your platforms. The likes, the shares, and comments.

Gross, gross, gross. But that is just how it is.

And let me go ahead and interrupt myself to say that our kids do not think that way. Children, as they should, absolutely look forward to their futures based on experience, not how they will look in a tiny square.

You can bet that I’ve wasted minutes (hours) of days that I won’t get back on preplanning what our announcement photos would look like, holiday hashtags, vacation stories, and now “photo dumps”. All including the beautiful images of my baby boy’s face—or so I thought.

And as I began to think about this article, I realized my opinions began to slightly change before our son even came home.

Do you remember that election in 2016? Of course you do. Whew, what a time that was. Families were separated by candidate and party, spouses put several different political signs in the yard to make sure neighbors knew they were a house divided, and even me and my own mother had a few heated discussions on who should win the White House. Everyone, even your grandmother, had severely polarizing opinions online. And that is when the shift began.

I would peruse a nasty comment section where complete strangers would dog each other based on belief, education, socio-economic status, and voting history—and I began to notice a trend.

Grandmothers, soccer dads, mid-western housewives, and even your local tattoo aficionados who would engage in vitriolic Facebook debates, all had beautiful innocent children as their profile images. Yikes.

It takes a village, and trust me I have an incredible village. But each one of us has our own battle to face because someone, somewhere didn’t do their job to the fullest extent.

Because someone let them down and it’s been a domino effect of dissociation ever since.

We advocate for our homes, children, lives, and futures because we want to, because we have to, but certainly because someone forced us to. And when we are exhausted from emailing everyone we can think of to ask for help, we pick up our phones and doom scroll just long enough until we feel like burnt rubber—forgetting to text our friends back and check in on them because this time of year sucks for her, too.

If you feel like a bad mother the week before Christmas, I can assure you that you’re not alone. If you totally forgot to pack the goody bags for the school Christmas party I promise, no one noticed. If you’re skipping all holiday events because you’ve been through two rounds of IVF this year and you just can’t face your in-laws, you’re not alone.

And if you are ending 2022 so burnout that you did indeed forget to brush your teeth today, you can come sit by me. I have gum.

How often do we forget who we are speaking to when we are in prayer to God?

I think I forget a lot in so many ways. Begging him to see what we see, He does. Praying over and over and over again for grace, take a hint. Suggesting how we will be happiest in the outcome of whatever we are praying for, ya know, just so God knows how we will feel about His answers.

I’ve prayed many irreverent, disrespectful prayers over the years. I’ve prayed for healing when I was bitter to be praying over my body in the first place. I’ve prayed for a miracle not fulling believing He would provide one, and I’ve certainly prayed from a place of desperation—as if God’s Kingdom was a last resort and not the first point of contact. I forget in my assorted prayers who God is, and I love, love, love that the Father has reached me more through my own child lately—I love that He has shown me who He is as a parent through my own parenthood.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t think I would have to explain our decisions to open others eyes. I didn’t dream that after answering years of thoughtless questions about the quality of my eggs, uterus, and our sexual positions—that I would now have to defend the love I have for my child. I didn’t think people would actually ask me if I love him—my miracle boy—my baby.

Do I love him?

So much so that I can’t think of it directly. I can barely make it through the day now, but if I narrow in on the love that takes shape around our son, I don’t think I could handle the smallest daily task. Like staring into the sun, or holding my breath too long, I’d become blind and dizzy for this kid whose giggles makes me forget how hard it was to find him.

In the days after our adoption was final, I kept beating myself up because I thought there was supposed to be this visible change in me. This noticeable difference was supposed to shine through me like a ray of freedom. “She is different now because it is finished.” But it didn’t work that way. I wasn’t lighter. I wasn’t freer. In fact, I maybe felt a bit heavier and more tired.

Like the woman who recently went viral at the finish line of the Iron Man. You would think the pure adrenaline of having accomplished such a feat would carry her past the line, but no.

She collapsed with exhaustion at what she had already achieved. How we make it to the finish line shouldn’t reflect the whole journey. She made it. Even if she finished withered and shaking, crawling on her hands and feet—she made it.

For years I’d dreamt of the weight of a child on my chest. I imagined how enormously whole I would feel rocky a baby, bouncing a toddler, and smelling their sweet breath as they slept in the crook of my neck. The epitome of motherhood is found as a woman holds a baby with ease and the child lays their head on her chest and shoulders.

And so unceremoniously, like the closing of a door, like the beginning of any other day, like the opening of a curtain—back and forth, back and forth—like the ordinary days that weave together the moments that change you forever, the hour came, and we would meet him for the first time.

But our God is a gentle Savior. He leads us so sweetly to places we fear and for me, adoption was a fear I could barely speak aloud. So the next time the dream came to me, I woke up, stepped outside and opened my heart to hear God’s plan.

“Okay,” I whispered. I’m listening.

I’ve found lately that the parallels between boyhood and motherhood are grasping, palpable.

Boyhood is falling, failing, learning, scraping knees, and being brave enough to cry and do it all over again until you understand how to run on your own.

Motherhood is the same.

The quirks and squirms, selective hearing (not sure if that ever goes away), and that constant curiosity that collides with pushing limits—let’s see what I can get away with today. Let’s see if I’m as tall and strong as I think I am, who will catch me if I misstep?

Boyhood and motherhood. We are learning together, my dear boy.

This white flower symbolizes noble purity and it only blooms from July to September after facing the harshest winters. Each winter, they are covered in feet of snow, and you’d think they would never come back. After being buried beneath snow and ice for months it would seem impossible for their July return. But they always come back.

Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow

Bloom and grow forever

That’s us, y’all. Women. We come back.

No matter the winter, the harshness of a season, the weight we are buried under for months on end, we always come back. We bloom when it’s our season, and we will always have our season.

The first annual Bloom & Grow Spring Event was a dream. One that we will bring to fruition for years to come. Because we always come back to bloom.

No one took the time to tell me that I was still a woman of value during all my other Mother’s Days past. No one looked me in the eye to tell me I was still important without having given birth. They only took the opportunity to hand me a wilted carnation and declare that by next Mother’s Day I would be happier, more fulfilled, and maybe hold more space in my new title of Mama.

This populace of women who put on brave faces to continue life through heartache has been one of the most harshly beautiful things I’ve witnessed these last few years. We hide our pain by obsessing over child-free activities when all we want is to go to Disney on Ice. We blog about our shots, search hashtags to find community, and try to lift each other up when all we want to do is throw something against the wall to watch it shatter.

Ah, yes. The satisfying urge to throw whatever we hold—and watch something else break under the weight of force, to see an object detonate into small shards of scrap, to break anything else so we don’t break ourselves.

Gifts from God, gifts in life—are best delivered in His timing. Like the most beautiful spring after the harshest winter, you look up one day and know that spring has been waiting to flirt with you for months, but it just wasn’t her time.

The gift of life is that it can change in an instant, the curse of life is that it can change in an instant.

I swear we all do this to ourselves, and I can’t for the life of me understand why. You wait to go to Paris until you’re in love, you wait to wear the swimsuit until you are beach body ready, you wait to paint until you think you’re an artist, you wait for company to come over before you pour the good wine and eat on fine china, you wait to hang gorgeous curtains until they fit a house or room the way you originally planned. We lock parts of ourselves and desires in a closet until we are given permission to open it and celebrate.

What I’m trying to say is, wouldn't you rather do something a little different than the way you’d planned, than not do it at all? Wouldn’t you rather show up for things that are intended to be good, not perfect? Wouldn’t you rather enjoy something now as opposed to waiting for the later?

If motherhood is a frontier, then you should consider me a constant explorer. I knew she would come to me in due time, but that didn’t stop me from searching for her. I felt rejected for the longest time. Attempt after attempt only resulted in heartache that begot anger, and anger begot jealousy. And so on. But I knew that eventually, if I found motherhood, I would find him, and parts of me. Parts unknown.