I remember blubbering through tear-filled eyes to my husband, “You don’t even WANT another baby.” I remember the shock my heart felt as I tried to navigate his words and his reasoning and his logic. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what logic was before I got married. “You mean, you don’t just FEEL our baby in your HEART!?”
You guys. Men and women, we are so different. I happen to be one of those gals who married someone totally opposite from me. I’m the artsy, unorganized feeler with so many emotions. I make decisions based on intuition more often than not. He is organized, responsible, and he’d take months to make every decision if it meant he could study all of the evidence-based research available to conclude the best route to take.
It’s okay to cope differently
But I was thinking with my heart. He was thinking with his head. Both are okay. Both are really okay. I entered the world of adoption just two weeks after my second daughter died. Two weeks. It was our second experience with infant loss and I wish I could say our decision to begin our home study was one we made after we both felt completely confident and ready, but it wasn’t. The reason it wasn’t was because the door to parenthood had been shut in our faces twice now and we needed to open it back up. We needed something to hope for. We needed to know that we were doing everything in our power to bring a baby home and if that meant we would wait a year or three years we just needed to do it.
Except I use the world we loosely. You see, just as my husband and I grieved differently, we also dove into adoption differently. I would have taken a child the day after our home study interview. Chris needed more time. The tear-filled conversation I mentioned was one of many. The tears came because I didn’t understand his heart. I begged and pleaded with him to understand my pain as a grieving mother, aching for a redemptive change. Except he wasn’t trying to talk me out of adoption. Never once did he tell me it wasn’t time.
He was just coping differently. He was processing differently. He wanted to know that our finances were in order. He wanted to know that I was emotionally stable enough to care for a child so soon (can you blame him!?) and he wanted to trust in the idea that it would all just “feel” right but that was hard for him. He wasn’t wired with the maternal instincts I was. I know there are some of you out there who are waiting and some of you who have your adopted littles and I know that for most of you, you’d probably tell me without hesitation that you felt deeply connected to your child before you even knew which child it was.
Focus on honest communication
My husband did not feel this. Many husbands do not feel this. And some do. And maybe some women don’t. And others do! I know this seems like a simple concept. Maybe it seems like common sense. But to navigate these feelings during the wait can create unnecessary conflict between the two who are supposed to be on the same team together.
My point is this: perfectly aligned timeframes and perfectly unified desires and dreams and expectations are not a requirement for a successful adoption journey. You don’t have to feel all of the same things your spouse is feeling. You don’t even have to understand the reasoning, the logic, the aches, and the longing.
It was easy for me to believe from the outside that every couple was perfectly in sync and that they were responding exactly the same ways to the adoption situations that arise. Now I know that this can’t be true. The key to navigating the wait together is not forcing one another to bend to the other’s desires. It’s not forcing one another to assimilate to the other’s thought patterns. The key is realizing that honest communication is more important than perfect agreement.
As long as there are two adults making a decision together there will be some level of compromise. There will be some level of disagreement. There will be some level of heightened emotions because adoption is no joke and nobody expects you to stay calm all the time.
But there will also be a profound strength that comes when you sort through it all together. Practice unrelenting understanding by hearing one another and being slow to criticize. Practice grace with one another as you navigate the unexplainably intense rollercoaster of adoption as two different human beings with two completely different brains. The story that unfolds for your family will be worth the hard conversations and the tears and the vulnerability in sharing your fears and failures with one another.
Let me tell you a secret. To this day, my intuition has led me to the same conclusions as my husband’s logic filled decisions. Why? Because we are unified. Our hearts are for one another. We just do things differently. We feel things differently.
He may take a more logical path with a map in hand and I may wander through the flower fields on the way to the destination, but we both get there and we get there together. Instead of getting frustrated at his map, compass, and a backpack full of books, I am learning to appreciate his incredible intentions and to respect the fact that he brings strengths to the wait that I don’t possess.
So you’ve got this. Both of you. Stay on the same team. Fight for your family together. Talk about your strengths and weaknesses. It’ll be worth it in the end.
