The Day Our Hearts Said Yes
Matt and I got married in 2006 and moved into our tiny little apartment. I still had two years left of college, and he was just beginning his career as a firefighter. In addition, we were both working two part-time jobs. By God’s grace, we made it through those first two tough years of marriage. I graduated and got a full-time job, and we purchased our first home. We were thrilled about our next step - starting a family. We tried to conceive for about a year with no success, and right as we began to worry that something might be wrong, we finally saw the two pink lines we’d been praying so hard for.
We waited until Mother’s Day in May of 2009 to tell our families. We invited both families over to our house for a Mother’s Day lunch and shared the big news. As expected, everyone was so overjoyed with the announcement, and we spent the day celebrating and soaking up the sweetness of that moment. Life was good. Everything was going according to plan. After two years of hard work to gain financial stability and a year of infertility struggles, this new season felt full of joy, anticipation, and gratitude. Unfortunately, that season was short-lived.
Just a couple of weeks after our big announcement on Mother’s Day, I received a call from my grandmother with devastating news. It wasn’t anything new; I had received this same news again and again throughout my life, but this time it was different. My mom struggled with an addiction to prescription pain medication for pretty much my whole life. She went to desperate (illegal) lengths to obtain these drugs. She was also involved in numerous financial fraud and theft cases. She was arrested ten times from the time I was born to the time I was 23 years old. She was in and out of jail and rehab programs most of my life up to this point. My grandmother’s call that day was to tell me that she had again been arrested. Because this was the tenth time, I knew it would be her longest imprisonment yet. My emotions were everywhere - anger, sorrow, hurt, fear, numbness. Little did I know, this would actually lead to one of the biggest blessings of my life.
The darkness did not end there. A couple of weeks after my mom’s arrest, we went to the doctor for our 12-week check-up and discovered our sweet little baby no longer had a heartbeat. This was the first of many major losses that Matt and I would endure throughout our marriage. There are no words to describe the devastation we felt. Up until that point, we had not known grief and sorrow at that level. We had not yet found out the baby's gender, but we both felt very strongly that it was a boy, and we named him Hunter. We felt very alone. However, over the years, we have met so many people who have also suffered miscarriages, so I am sure several of you reading this now know exactly the pain we were feeling during this time.
The months that followed were tough. We did our best to carry on with normal day-to-day life. I eventually started accepting my mom’s calls from jail, and around October, she shared with me that she had met a pregnant woman who was in jail with her. This was this woman’s third baby, and she did not have custody of the other two. She would still be in jail for several more months after her baby was born, so she needed someone to take her baby for her; otherwise, the baby would go to DFCS. None of her family members were willing to take the baby for her, and she did not want her baby to go to family services. So, she asked my mom to ask Matt and me, if we would keep her baby for her until she got out of jail. We pretty much instantly said no. We knew our hearts were too fragile to bring a baby into our home and love her and care for her for several months, and then have to give her back. So fresh off our loss, this just wasn’t something we could do.
A week later, my mom said that this woman was desperate for her baby to have a good home, so she now wanted us to adopt her baby as our own. Matt and I had never discussed adoption much. At the time, we didn’t know anyone who had adopted before. We viewed adoption as a final chance to become a parent if traditional routes failed, and while we had been through a year of infertility and one miscarriage, we did not think we needed to pursue adoption just yet. However, God put this heavy on our hearts as something we could not push aside. We talked with family and friends for wisdom and prayed without ceasing. About six weeks before the baby girl was due to be born, Matt was spending time in God’s word, and God led him to Mark 9:37, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.” So we said yes.
Those six weeks were spent preparing to become parents, making a nursery for our baby girl, and figuring out the legal side of this unique adoption situation. We did not have the type of community around us at the time that we could invite into this, so we mostly tackled it all alone with the help of a few select family members. Between buying all the baby items and paying all the legal and procedural fees associated with this sudden and overwhelming task, the financial burden that was laid before us was huge. “But God, being rich in mercy,” already had that worked out. A year prior, Matt was in a really bad car accident in which he was not at fault. Because insurance and legal matters associated with the accident took a long time to resolve, it took a year for us to receive reimbursements for medical treatments and settlement funds. This large sum of money arrived at just the right moment and covered everything needed to bring this baby into our family.
Everything fell into place. God had perfectly planned it all. This little girl was meant to be ours, and we were meant to be hers. And on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009, Kayleigh Grace Callahan was born. This was our “gift” baby, and we were so in love from day one.