This morning I woke up with a pit in my stomach and a heaviness in my chest that I just couldn’t shake. It took me a bit to figure out why, until I looked at the date: January 3. Eight years ago this day, I lost an adopted son that kicked off the most traumatic and difficult year of my life.
For those who don’t know my story, here is the short version: I was set to become a mother to a baby due at the end of 2015. His birth mother went into labor late at night on January 2, 2016. He was born a few short hours later but never took a breath in this world, an umbilical cord wrapped so tightly around his neck that he suffocated in the womb. That was Joel - I never met him, but I loved him deeply, which I couldn’t explain if I tried.
A few months later, another potential birth mother fabricated a story about being pregnant, led me on to believe I would be a mother, then about 8 weeks later lied again, saying she had miscarried. I had no idea, of course, that she was making up every part of it for the purpose of convincing her ex-boyfriend to marry her.
A few months after that, another potential birth mother changed her mind a few short days after her son was born, a son who she had given me the privilege to name because I thought, again, that I would become a mother.
It was only August and three children had been ripped from my heart in three very different and heartbreaking ways, and years later it still hurts to the point of tears to re-live it all each year on January 3.
A lot of people told me that I got my happily-ever-after when Willow was born. In some ways, that is true. She is my daughter, through and through. I love that little girl with all of my heart, and she brought me so much healing…and yet, nobody could erase the hurt of 2016, and I would never put that burden on another human being. I am incredibly grateful that I have her in my life and I continue to grieve Joel’s death and the subsequent losses.
At the time, I wrote some beautiful blogs about my trust in God through all the trauma. I meant what I wrote. I believed that good would come of it, that God had a purpose, that I could trust His goodness, and that I should not blame Him for the bad that came. I had faith beyond faith that the pain I experienced was not in vain, and that even if I could not understand why all this had happened, I could know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was for my own good.
Eight years later, It’s hard to even write those sentences knowing that I bought into them so deeply. The more I walk through life, the more I experience the both/and nature of it that so many people have experienced. Life is both beautiful and difficult. Life can be incredibly hard and incredibly good. People can have good intentions and do evil things because of it. I can believe in God for a time and realize that those beliefs no longer hold up in my heart and mind.
In 2016 I was brought lower than I imagined, and I have no earthly clue why. So many people go through extreme trauma and never have a purpose for their pain, and I am not prideful enough to think an explanation is necessarily owed to me and not the others.
But there is a difference between a trusting relationship and an abusive one. I can trust that when I was a child, my father disciplined me for my own good, even if I didn’t understand or like it at the time. I did not love his consequences, but I always knew his reasons for them - because he explained them to me in the midst of my punishment. Now as a I look back, I can see that even the punishments I disagree with were done out of love and good intentions, because he explained them to me. Had he walked up to me without explanation, hit me across the face, then walked away, not only would this be unkind, unloving, and unproductive, it would be abusive. Please note: this never happened in my childhood - bear with the analogy here in the next paragraph.
If God is the ultimate father, if He loves us the way I believed for so long, then when I look at Joel’s death or one of a thousand other things that have happened, the relationship between Him and I was abusive, not loving. He did the equivalent of the above - slapping my face and walking away without a word - over and over again. And before someone points out that God does not cause evil but only allows it, then imagine a father allowing a stranger to do that to his daughter. Is that any better?
Eight years later, so many things in my life have changed. There has been a lot of good and some things I wish never happened. Eight years later, I ache when I think about the night Joel slipped from life to death, in the blink of an eye, never having a chance to live. Eight years later, I wonder if one purpose of his tragedy was to open my eyes so I could see what I could not when I was so bought into a faith that ended up not holding water when push came to shove.
Eight years later, I remember Joel and I hope you do, too, because the best part of him will always and only be a memory. And for that, I grieve.
