**We are applying for a grant and the organization has asked us for our adoption testimony. Here is what I wrote:
Our Adoption Testimony
Our journey with growing our family through adoption
started many, many years ago. I, Maile, taught 2nd grade in the public
school system for 4 years. During my years as a teacher, I got to see all kinds
of families and fall in love with all kinds of kids. I’ve always loved kids and
this is true for my husband as well. My first year of teaching a little boy
named Zachary was placed in my classroom. He was a foster child and had been
through horrific, horrific abuse. Zachary became my favorite human that year. I
begged my husband every day to let us adopt Zachary. I called his CPS worker, I
learned about him through his foster mom, and I prayed over him daily while he
was in my class. I was 22 years old, had never parented, and certainly had no experience
with a traumatized child. My efforts to “adopt” him never worked out. However,
I learned a lot from that experience. It opened my eyes to the world of foster
care and adoption.
Fast forward four years to when I gave birth to my
first child. I had loved hundreds of children, but none like him. I loved him
so much that I quit my teaching job and decided to stay home with him full
time. During that time I got to see that life at home with children was exactly
the life God had created me for. I was good at it. My husband was good at it. I
liked it. My husband liked it. So when our son was 1 year old we starting
talking about foster care. We liked our home and wanted to share it with
others. The problem was we didn’t know any one who did foster care who also had
small children at home. The only people we knew who fostered were people whose
kids had grown up and moved away or people who for some reason couldn’t have
biological children.
In the spring of 2010, I was invited to an event
hosted by Buckner Child and Family Services and while there I met a family who
had 3 bio kids ages 3, 5, and 7 and 3 foster kids ages 1, 3, and 4. I know
without a doubt that God had me meet this family for a reason because it was
right then and there that I knew we could do this. I went home that night, told
my husband, called Buckner the next day, and 6 months later I had our first
foster baby in my arms.
We have fostered 4 babies. We have said “hello” to
four traumatized babies. We have fed them, rocked them, bathed them, changed
them, taken them to countless doctor appointments, worked with them through
hundreds of hours of therapies, escorted them to many family visits, sat in on
court hearings, scrapbooked life books, filled out thousands of pages of
paperwork, and ultimately said good bye to four healthy babies. We loved our babies. We died a little inside when
our babies left. But we know, that we know, that we know, that we loved those
babies well. Those babies changed us.
With every foster baby we have hoped to keep them.
Sure we’ve supported their bio families. We’ve encouraged them around every
turn, but deep in our hearts we wanted to keep them forever. We learned through
fostering that we could love any child. Any child.
In June of 2012, my friend called me and wanted to
talk about a boy that she knew. His name was Terrance and he was about to turn
12. Terrance had been in foster care for 2 years and his adoptive placement had
just fallen through. She knew of him because on the day he was removed from his
home there were four other children removed as well. One of whom she had
adopted. Because of that adoption she had kept up with Terrance and his older
brother Keishun and had invited them over for every family event: Thanksgiving,
Christmas, birthdays, etc. She had spent the last two years getting to know him
and was devestated that his adoption wasn’t going to work out. His caseworker
had called her to let her know that both he and Keishun would now be available
for adoption and would she like to take them both. She already had 4 kids, but
decided that yes, they would take Keishun, who was 15. My friend wanted me to
help her find a home for Terrance. I quizzed her briefly about him, I had heard
her talk about him for years so I knew a little bit already, and I told her
that I would draft a letter to our church and see if anyone there would be
interested. Once I hung up the phone with her I couldn’t stop thinking about
him. The weaknesses that he had were our strengths. The strengths that he had
lined up with our values. He seemed like a perfect fit for our family. So I
told my husband. And my husband said, “Let’s do it”. One month later, Terrance
moved in to our home and changed our lives for the better.
I had never, ever, ever thought about adopting an
older child. Never had it ever crossed my mind. I’m actually glad I had never
thought about it because I might would have talked myself out of it. But when I
met him for the first time my heart said, “that’s my boy”. He has been my boy
for 4 years and for 4 years I have delighted in him. Remember how I said that
those foster babies changed me. Well, Terrance has changed me. He changed me so
deeply that my husband and I made a commitment to only grow our family through
adoption from this day forward. We took surgical efforts to assure this would
be so.
So now it is 2016. We have three sons: 2 bio and 1
adopted. There is a piece to our story that has yet to have been discussed and
that is the piece that includes Hannah. Hannah is a child that my husband and I
have talked about since before we were even parents. Hannah is an idea. She
doesn not yet exist. At least I don’t think so. Hannah has always been our
hoped for daughter who has a special need that we are deeply attracted to. The “Hannah”
in our minds has Down syndrome. We both love people who have Down syndrome. I
don’t know why we love them so much. We don’t have a person in our family with
Down syndrome. Neither of us have ever had a close friend that has Down
syndrome, but we love people with Down syndrome and because of that we want to
raise one. We want a daughter who has Down syndrome. God placed this desire in
my heart a decade ago and I have talked about her for as long as I can
remember. All of our friends know about our desire for Hannah. We’ve talked
about Hannah with everyone we know. We’ve always known that we would have a
Hannah “some day” and that “some day” has arrived.
We are actively seeking to adopt a daughter who has
been diagnosed with Down syndrome. I have been asking the Lord to break my
heart for what breaks His for the past 5 years and my heart is broken for
people who abort their babies and for babies who are aborted. We want her
because the world says she is not fit to live. In fact, that belief is so
strong that over 90% of babies who get the Down syndrome diagnosis get aborted.
Let that fact sink in. Over 90% get aborted! They never get their chance at
life on earth. And we as a people group never get the chance to know them. The
world says people with Down syndrome are a burden, but I believe children are a
blessing from the Lord and that the highest calling on my life is to have a
quiver full of them. Hannah is worthy of life and I can prove that because God
is going to create her. He will knit her together in her mother’s womb and she
will be perfect.
So your question was, “How has God led you to adopt?”
and my answer is that He has placed a very specific desire in my heart and I
have carried that desire around for 10 years and now my heart is just about to
explode with the waiting of that desire to be fulfilled.
