Fighting through the fog

Gather around. Pour some coffee. This is a living room chat where I tell you about how I have fought through a season of frustration, stagnation, irritation? Just…a lot. A lot of feelings. I’ve been talking to my husband a lot about how I have not done the best job of looking back at our own story in order to refresh my hope for the future of our family. As an adoption community, we’re always learning more, listening more, sharing more in hopes that our newfound knowledge will carry us forward in ways that make us stronger and more well-equipped to support one another. And I love that so very much. But if you’re anything like me, you might reach a point in time where you have a hard time consuming and ingesting more of everyone else’s stories….at least just for a second. And it’s okay to take a timeout.

I think I’ve figured out why I had to go inward (and even backwards) for a moment before I was able to step forward in my own story in peace.

The plan, the provision, the details, the absolutely unique story of my life and relationship with adoption began to feel muffled and confusing for a brief time when I wasn’t careful to guard my heart against comparison and hypothetical scenarios whilst reading about everyone else on this chaotically beautiful journey. I would ingest a story, let it take root in my heart, and begin to shape all of my experiences and expectations through this new filter of information. This is how we process. And sometimes it’s good. It’s good when we take the things we are learning and correct the places that are ignorant and uneducated.

It’s not good when we take the things we are learning and forget that each of our paths are forged through different fields, different forests, different countries, and no path will be the same. I lost sight of that. I lost sight of the details of my own story that once made me feel so solid and unshakeable. I let guilt creep in for the things I didn’t know. I let comparison creep in and tell me lies. I forgot to look back at how even years before we adopted our story was being written. From two starry-eyed college students dreaming about an adoptive family, to burying our children and struggling through the world of fertility issues, to having an agency recommended to us because of a connection with infant loss that would then lead us to our perfect son, and all the countless details, big and small, that are far too long to type.

It’s easy to read the highlight reels and stack it all up against the hard parts of our stories that only we know. But when is the last time you looked back and recounted all the details, even the messy ones, that made your journey uniquely yours and one that was written just for you? There’s so much that we can’t see. Even in the seasons that feel stagnant. I recently learned that my season of frustration was prepping my heart for growth that I couldn’t see until it arrived. I just had to fight a little bit to clear the fog. And now I’m glad for it. Give yourself some space to recap your own path, even if you can’t see the end of this part of the voyage. When we take the time to see how everything has already been woven, we can trust that the finished piece will be exactly right and exactly ours.