We move in one week. I'm up to my eyeballs in boxes and more than anything else all I want to do is mop my floors.
Not kidding. They're disgusting and the only reason I haven't busted out my mop & glow is that I know in a matter of hours there will be graham cracker crumbs and dust bunnies dislodged from underneath the abyss that is called my refrigerator. Not to mention muddy dog paws that seem to reappear after every potty break taken in the back yard. All this is progress- boxes mean moving. I hate it. Chaos, even necessary chaos drives me absolutely insane.
So should it really surprise me that during all this necessary chaos we should get another phone call asking if we're interested in adopting again? It shouldn't surprise me 'cause apparently that's how things get rolling in our family.
These past few months have been very interesting. Who am I kidding? My life is always.........interesting. I don't think I'll be able to operate in the mundane, as refreshing as it might sound. After meeting with our fertility specialist in February, months after pursuing what we expected to be a very 'simple' treatment for our infertility issues, we walked away seriously considering something we never thought we would.
11 years of that blasted "I" word is staring us in the face come August and it's time for it to be over. We're considering in-vitro fertilization to be our last ditch effort to carry a pregnancy to term. I fight to try to figure out how much is left to me to pursue and decide and how much I need to just let go of. 11 years into it and I'm still baby steps away from square one. Do we have to pursue in-vitro so I can say we exhausted all our options? I'm still working that out, but I do know one thing: I'm ready for infertility to stop controlling my life.
I've almost let Infertility take things away from me. I say almost because God has given me a husband, who more than anything, has fought to keep ME. ME, the woman he fell in love with and married, not the woman that infertility could have changed me into. He would not allow me to lose myself to this process, would not allow me to stop fighting to salvage what was still left of that goofy 19 year-old girl he married.
I say almost because God has given me a mother who has walked it before me, has lived her own perpetual grief and yet has CLUNG to her faith, who has shown me what it looks like to stay pliable in the midst of pain.
I say almost because God has simplified the most complex of emotions into a simple statement of love for me in the form of my tulip garden.
So I'm not surprised when in the midst of making decisions about how I can end this process and choose when things get to be over, selling our house and buying one that has more bedrooms than we actually need and praying that God would fill them, that we get a phone call from a friend who has a friend who has a nephew who has 2 babies................and here we go.
God is persistent in proving to me over and over again that He's got it all worked out. The fact that it comes at the most ridiculous times for me just proves that it's Him. The MOMENT I try to take charge, no kidding, He does something absurd. Awesome, but absurd. When I titled this blog post I was thinking about how my focus has shifted from how I was going to become a mother to who I was going to mother. It's still true, but as I've been writing God's been saying, "Tiffany- your subject, Who, is ME."
I keep hmm-ing while writing this post. That's why I love it. God works on me while I write.
I keep doing that. I keep trying to figure out how I'm supposed to think, how I'm supposed to be and God keeps saying to me...........not HOW. WHO?
So I will do my best to answer in the moment.
You are God of the universe - the loving creator of everything. You, who set time and space into motion, and dreamed to fill it with man- a broken but beautiful creature you just can't help but love and consistently redeem. You are the keeper and caregiver to my babies in Heaven, who you planned and carefully tended to for the days that they were with me and who get to see your face before I do. You, who while I was in the midst of difficulty trusting, fighting you for what I wanted, set things into motion in MEXICO that eventually brought Jeremiah into my arms. You, who knows the amount of breaths I get to take and the number of hairs on my head- who takes the time to craft such beautiful tulips in my flower bed as a reminder of your faithfulness to me. You, who gently tips my chin up saying, "Not how, Tiffany...........WHO. Me."
I can't help but trust you.
