Our Family Story

In this week's episode of Living With Joy Renewed, I'm going to be sharing stories from our experiences as a family, from some of the highs where we were up in the mountain and celebrating success to the pits and the lows of the really hard days. Today, I want to share with you the story of our family.

Our adoption stories start out a little easier than some and maybe a little bit more difficult than others. But it's our story, and we look back on it with thankfulness because it's shaped who we are today, not just as a family, but myself and my husband. We're different people than we would have been if we had not gone through this experience, and we are so thankful for it.

Our story starts 30 years ago when my husband and I got married at a very young age. We wanted to have a family. That was our main goal, to raise children. After being married for a few years and trying to have children, we realized this was not going to be as easy as what other people made it look. We started some fertility treatments, talked to some fertility doctors, and we were told that we had a one in a million chance of ever getting pregnant naturally.

We did go through one fertility treatment, but it was not a pleasant experience for us, and it didn't work. Looking back, I realized we had so much peace still about what our family was going to look like. We never panicked. We just had a piece that things were going to work the way they were supposed to work out at the time.

We were involved with our church, and one of the youth members came to youth group one night and just shared that his family had just picked up their first foster child. It wasn't so much of adoption, maybe we should think about adoption. It was more. Hmm, I want to meet that baby.

We eventually became licensed as foster parents and got our oldest adopted daughter into our home as a foster child. And by the time she was 10 months old, she was adopted. That was our introduction to foster care and adoption.

We found out about a year and a half later that we were pregnant naturally, and our son came along two years after our adopted daughter was born. We kept our home open for foster care over this time, but we were only doing respite care, emergency placements, and respite care for other foster families in the area.

Then one day, about two years after our son was born, we got a call from the county that our daughter had been adopted from. They said that there was a little boy that had been born, and he was a birth sibling to our daughter. We considered taking him in as a foster child, and he was eventually adopted by us.

We moved about 500 miles away when our children were young and lived in another state for about eight years. While we were there, we were next door to a wonderful family whose grandparents were raising their four granddaughters, and one of the daughters became best friends with my daughter. When we moved back to our hometown, this young girl asked her grandparents if she could come live with us and go to school where we were going to be. She's been with us ever since, and she is our fifth child.

She's actually the oldest of all of them. By a year older than our first adopted daughter. She's still connected with her family, she sees her sisters often goes down and visits her grandparents. But we are so blessed to have her as part of our family too.

So when we introduce our family, we say that we have three adopted children, one biological child, and one acquired child, which makes her laugh. But that's how we got started. That's where our family originated from. It's how it evolved to become who we are.

I say that we are one great big loving, mess some days. A beautiful mess, though. Just trying to figure out who each other is all coming from such different stories. It's beautiful and difficult all at the same time. And I'm sure all of you who are listening to this who are adoptive parents understand exactly what I mean when I say that. But we wouldn't change it for the world, we would not change the way our family came together and evolved for anything. They've taught us so much, our children, I'm really a different person than I would have been if my story had looked different.

There are things I wish I had known in their childhood years that I know now. And that's why we're together now on these podcasts. And that's why Joy renewed as a foundation was formed. I want to share with you what I've learned some of the mistakes I've made some of the successes that have come out of pure instinct and intuition than anything else.

I want you to be renewed to be an organization that walks alongside parents equips them, helps them with relevant day to day information. As you raise these beautiful adopted children. We offer life groups for adoptive parents that offer support and encouragement from other adoptive parents, often in the same situations. My husband and I often felt like we were alone, out there that no one really understood our world. Because of that, we often actually felt judged.

When we began to understand that we couldn't really parent our children to traditionally according to everybody else's expectations. We felt the judgments. We felt, I mean, we've even had very close friends. In later years, apologize, saying I did judge you. And we did make a lot of mistakes. Don't get me wrong, we do as parents, we're human, we all make mistakes. But I am thankful that we did learn some things about what it looks like to not parent, traditionally, because we had to understand our adopted children in a different way than other parents have to understand their biological children. And that's okay. We just need to be able to have the knowledge to be able to do that.

And that's where we are today here with joy renewed. We also offer family relationship coaching, we want to help families, increase positive communication, increase their knowledge, increase their understanding of one another. We don't really focus on particular behaviors or problems like that we really want to help families be equipped to create a home environment that is a safe haven for their children as they navigate their world and what it means to be an adoptee in this world.

We also offer parent trainings to equip adoptive parents with the right tools when they need them to get through tough times. And we're available for speaking engagements. I love to go out and share my stories to help groups gain understanding of what it looks like to support and adoptive family. I'd also like to offer encouragement to groups of adoptive families. Because we all need each other. We all have to share with one another what works, what didn't work, what we've learned, and what we wish we knew in order to be able to help each other through this.