Let me explain. We met in high school and got married two and a half years later. John was a nursing student and I had dropped out of college to work full time making the big bucks to support us. Well that's what we thought at least. The honeymoon ended pretty quickly once we realized we didn't make nearly enough money to live on our own and we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. We had each other and our naive dreams and that was about it. Life was hard, but we were having a ton of fun playing house and grown ups to let it bother us too much. We didn't fully understand the impact of a good credit score, money management, savings and all the other tools that might have started our life together our a bit more smoothly. As I write this today I honestly have no idea how we made it to this place in our lives. The road was rough, but full of miraculous opportunities and advancements. I only had two thing in life that I really wanted and one was to have a baby. I had always wanted to be a mom and now that I was married I was finally allowed to pursue that dream without the backlash of being the slutty Catholic girl who embarrassed her family by getting knocked up out of wedlock.
We never used protection and low and behold we ended up pregnant just shy of two years into our marriage. We were thrilled and excited. We didn't really think about the details and finances we were just over the moon with sheer joy. Just days after finding out the glorious news, I was at work when my fallopian tube burst and I was severely hemorrhaging internally. I was having a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. I was in surgery hours later, had lost one of my fallopian tubes and the baby. I was crushed. This was the first time the road of our lives took a drastic hairpin turn. We never saw it coming and we certainly weren't equipped to handle it.
The next several years were full of doctors appointments, tests, expensive procedures, depression, drinking too much, working too much, trying too hard and exhausting ourselves trying to achieve a family. I was hell bent that we had to get pregnant. I wanted to have the experience. I didn't want someone else's throw away baby. I had such tunnel vision on this topic. I would literally get mad if someone brought up adoption. I felt useless and broken. I questioned how John could love me or want to be with me since I couldn't give him a child. He is adopted, but in my eyes it was unthinkable that we would have to go that route. In ten years we moved three times, had six or seven new jobs between us and were looking for anything to fill the huge gabbing hole that was the missing child in our lives. I'm not sure how it all came to be, but we decided that we were working so hard to pay for a house we were never at because we were working so hard. We missed each other and were so disconnected because of it. This is the next time our lives took a very, very unexpected turn down a side street of unknown adventure.
We decided that enough was enough and we needed to shake things up and simplify. We decided to move to Michigan so John could attend paramedic school and we could have a two year adventure living somewhere else. I had never ever wanted to leave my hometown and simply couldn't believe we were gonna go for it. John got a job at a local hospital and I just wanted a couple months off to clear my head and reconnect with John. We went from a four bedroom two and a half bath house to a two bedroom apartment. This is one of the examples of how we always seem to do things backwards. We had been married nearly 13 years at this time and had never lived in an apartment, so now we decide to try that out. I loved it!! Easy to clean, no responsibility and a whole new adventure of learning a new city. I new that with this move I would have time to look into adoption, but honestly still didn't want to pursue it. John worked with a lady named Sue who had already adopted five kids from Russia as a single parent. She just couldn't believe we had been married so long, wanted a baby so badly and just hadn't adopted. I knew she was right and conceded to proceed with investigating adoption. Sue decided to go through the process with us and since she was a pro, I didn't research a thing, I just followed her lead. We both ended up adopting little boys from Ukraine in the fall of 2004. I was finally a mom at 34 years old. The first year was so rough. I had become insta-mom to a traumatized two year old who didn't understand me and had been living in an orphanage all his life. He was afraid of everything and quite frankly so was I. We had beautiful moments, but a lot of not so beautiful ones as well. I constantly felt guilty and had a very hard time bonding the way I thought I was supposed to. I had nearly thirty nieces and nephews at this time and living through each one of my sisters or sister-in-laws' pregnancies was like being tortured for nine months. I struggled with jealousy, envy, anger, frustration and sometimes hate. Here I was a mom and I still didn't feel part of the club. I know now that all of that crap was just me mourning the life I thought I would have. I'm not sure if I have even still totally accepted my infertility, but I have learned to live with it. I will go to my grave feeling robbed from the experience of carrying a baby inside of me.
Buckle your seatbelt, here comes another crazy turn in the road. Just a little over two years from coming home from Ukraine with our boys, Sue fell deathly ill and landed in the hospital with a severe case of sepsis. John worked in the ER with her, the very one she was rushed to on a mid April evening in 2007. John called me from work to fill me in and when we realized the paramedics left all the kids at the house alone, we agreed that since I wasn't working, I needed to head to her house and make sure the kids were ok. It wasn't looking good and John called me throughout that night to fill me in. At some points they weren't even sure she would live through that night. She did, but just a couple months later, she succumbed to the sepsis and passed away in the very early morning of her kids last day of school. Eleven days later we were all in court and John and I became all five of the kids co-full permanent guardians. We went from one kid to six overnight. This adventure is a book in itself. We moved into a big, beautiful house in Grandville and the adventure began. We were now parents to 2 toddlers, 2 high schoolers and every age in between. The two year adventure to Michigan is coming up on it's 14 year anniversary. We truly love it here and see now that this was where God would bring us to our family.
If you haven't puked from the twists and turns of this story yet, here comes a loopdy-loop that brought delight to all of us. At a random breakfast out alone during summer break, John and I engaged in a very serious conversation. This breakfast ended resulting in John being able to get a new dog and me being able to pursue an infant adoption. I know, crazy, but true. Just three months later we were the proud parents to a baby Boston terrier named Apollo and in full pursuit of a new baby to love. In September of 2011 we were selected by an awesome gal named Grace to adopt her baby boy due that November. Matthew came into the world on a Friday morning and he has brought so much joy to our lives. We had already seen our two daughters graduate from High School, but now we were facing the scary unknown world of infancy. Another time we did things backwards. We had a unique dynamic in our family that many don't experience. John, Nick and I had our memories and habits and the other kids had their memories and stories together. The most wonderful thing about Matthew is that he was everyone's. We all got to experience his infancy together and we all share every memory of him. He is the common denominator for this family and he is deeply loved.
Matthew is five years old and we have lived in this house for ten years now. You guessed it, it's time to shake things up again. I never was much of a dreamer, but I always had two very distinct dreams floating around in my head. Matthew's birth was truly a dream come true. We enjoyed all of the challenges and experiences that having an infant brought. We would both do it all over again and can see now why some people go on to have 10 plus babies. Dream number one was in the books, so now it's time to go after dream number two. This is the journey to that dream.
Knew parts of your story, not all. Can't wait to here more!
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