We didn’t have a clue.

As we blissfully stood posing for pictures following our wedding ceremony, we had no idea how God would write our family’s story, the twists and turns our story would take, the struggles we would face.

We were completely clueless.

Had you asked me I would have told you that we would soon work on having a couple biological children and would later adopt.  Although I wouldn’t have known to reveal it, if you had seen my plans, my version of our story, the story would unfold very “normally” on a very “normal” schedule with me being the primary person in control of its unfolding.  God would be there, for sure, but if I were to be honest, He would fill the role of blessing my plans.

We didn’t have a clue that getting pregnant would not come easily.  No clue that fertility specialists would soon be part of our future, specialists who would tell us that we were delusional to think we could get pregnant.  No clue that the God I imagined cheering my plans for a family on would become the God who held me together in heartache as He nudged me from the driver’s seat.

We didn’t have a clue about the family God had in mind for us as we posed for this picture celebrating that we were DTC back in October 2006, seated at a local Chinese restaurant with a newly purchased panda bear in the background.

It has been four years since I first set foot in this country. Four years ago today that I held my youngest child for the first time. Four years ago Monday that my oldest son completely ripped my heart from my chest, and a burning passion was lit inside of me for children who have had their childhood stolen from them. Four years since I left my blonde little babies an ocean away and in turn radically changed the life they once knew. Four years since this country captured my heart and beckoned me here. Everything changed in those first moments. Little did I know that four years ago 31 year old me was about to have her world completely turned upside down. I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I am glad because I am mostly a coward. God knew that, so He kept me in the dark until I was too far smitten to do anything but follow the wild path He set my feet upon.

Looking back, it all started rather simplistically. We wanted another baby, but my pregnancies were rough, so that led to tender hearts toward adoption. Ethiopia had what appeared to be a crisis at the time- a crisis of orphaned children needing families. We were a family. We wanted another child. It made sense. So we said yes to adoption and to Ethiopia, and then to our special, sweet Jamesy, and then to Habtamu, and all the while our world tilted off axis and lines, that we had once drawn, blurred. And in it all I held my breath waiting for everything to right once again and return to normal. I waited for friends to return, for the American Dream to take hold again, for our family to blend back in, for life to return to the easy pleasantness that it once held, for Jesus to stop asking us to do crazy, wild things. Our yes was over, and it was time to get back to normal.

But normal never showed back up, and a new normal took its place. Sometimes in my most honest moments I grieve the loss of that normal, but mostly I embrace this adventure that my Jesus has so lovingly invited me into. I feel as if I am one of the lucky ones, as I get to look back to a specific moment in time, four years ago exactly, when everything changed.

I now live this one, wild life back in the country where it all began. There are late nights with no power and cold showers and spiders and dust everywhere. And there is laughter and life and love. I cannot walk outside the safety of our gate without being surrounded by children. Some of them are teeny tiny and some are bigger than my own big boy. Some dirty and tattered – so dirty that to touch them makes me stink with them. And some not as much. My hands are always grabbed and smiles are abundant, as are hugs and kisses. My hair is touched, my clothes yanked on, and always a silly grin is plastered across my face in a contented happiness I have never before known. My heart is continually stretched, and I so desire to pick up the life of Jesus here – to make every person that I encounter feel as if they matter – because they do. I have been making this my goal every time I walk out my gates. It is simple and yet I believe it is exactly what Jesus did. I cannot help everyone who comes to me, there are just too many. How can I pick and choose the countless street children that I encounter? The magnitude of the needs just outside my door are surreal. The number of starving children and half grown men addicted to chat and young mamas begging on the corners overwhelms me. How do I choose who to help? Most days, unless the Spirit clearly prompts me, I can’t choose. But I can look every person in the eye and acknowledge them as another human being. I can love in big ways just by giving a dirty street child a hug and a squeeze – just by noticing them when everyone else hurries on by. I can imitate Jesus just by seeing them. I am learning this and putting it into practice every day, and it is changing everything. It is changing me.

At home my lap is constantly full, sometimes with my blonde babies, sometimes with brown-eyed babies, and even still sometimes with my teenage boy who even after two years of security still questions whether this mama can really love him. Our house is seldom quiet. Languages collide and shouts and giggles echo off the walls. Currently I answer to “Mom” from seven people, and my head swims to keep up with who needs what from me. And every day, although most would see this as mundane, I fall more and more in love with this life. For me this is what my heart has ached, longed and cried out for. Four years ago, the moment my feet hit the dust here in Addis I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t possibly understand what it was that was missing. But now I know. It was the African sunrises, and Habesha food, and cold showers, and grubby hands reaching for me, and grown women, who missed out on childhood, calling me mom, and a spunky little two year old who is too precocious for her own good. It is watching my belly babies love in ways I did not know they were capable of, and seeing my brown-eyed boys back in their home country and finally healing from wounds that should have never been. It is catching my husband’s eye across our crowded and crazy living room, as children twirl and dance, and adults laugh and sip buna and nibble popcorn, and in that single glance a thousand words pass between us, all resting on the knowing that this is what we sacrificed for. It’s roosters crowing and dogs yapping and the low growl of hyenas. It’s seeing Jesus in the dirty street children or the young man who finally realizes that life is worth living. It’s opening my home to strangers and witnessing the miracle of how quickly love crashes in making us a weird, jumbled-up family. This was all missing in my former life, and while nothing looks the same as it once did, I wouldn’t change this new normal for all the white picket fenced houses in the world.

I know that I am here because God has put me here. In some little way I know that He is using me to change the world. He is using me in simple ways, and I want to give my life away right here. There is no place else I’d rather be than right here.

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Tiffany has been married to Jim for almost 13 years. They have four children, two from birth and two from Ethiopia. Since landing in Ethiopia to adopt their youngest son, with special needs, and at the same time meeting their oldest son, who was a former street child, they have been on a wild journey. God has been writing a unique story for their family, and after years of prayer and pursuit, they are now living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and are passionate about family reunification, redemption, street children, and living their lives in a way that intentionally mimics the way Jesus lived out His life. Sometimes that means feeding a large group of people in their home, sometimes that means taking midnight emergency hospital trips, and sometimes it means just stopping to hug a lonely child on the street and really taking the time to notice him. No two days are alike.Tiffany blogs at amomentcherished.com and you can read more about their family’s non-profit and their life in Ethiopia at mercybranch.com or look for them on facebook at Mercy branch Inc.

Some time last week, we celebrated Silas’s “Gotcha Day”. It’s the twenty-something of March and that’s all I can tell you for sure. Oh, and we didn’t really celebrate it at all, only due in part to the fact that I was lying limp and ragged near death’s door.

Gotcha Days are a bit elusive around here. For one thing, Ruby’s Gotcha Day is also her birth day, and it seems unfair for the boys to get two days to her one. For another thing, we were in the hospital ushering Ruby into the world during Calvin’s first Gotcha Day and then Silas’s Gotcha Day falls right around Calvin’s birthday. Mostly, we’re just too busy celebrating regular life with our regular family to specifically honor that one day that they came.

I can hear all of the adoptive Mamas of the world sucking in a collective gasp of air and indignation over my confessed sacrilege of one of Adoption’s holiest days. While they’re already fainting in the aisles, I’ll go ahead and admit that I do not know Ruby’s precise birth weight (even though I was there) and we do not regularly celebrate the Korean New Year. Or Kwanza.

I have struggled, over the years, to cut my groove in this adoption thing and the reason is really simple: I don’t see myself as an “adoptive mom”. I’m just a mom. I’m a big, bad, don’t-dare-mess-with-them-or-you’ll-answer-to-me Mom. They are all I’ve known.They made me a mommy. I’m theirs and they’re mine. I tell them eight thousand times a week how much I love being their Mommy and how thankful I am that we are a family. But that might be over-simplifying a few things.

Silas’s Gotcha Day was hands-down the most traumatic day of my entire life. If I were a method actress and I had to shoot a scene where something terribly emotional was happening, I would conjure up that day in March and shut the set down. I would find myself in a tiny room full of plastic toys that sang songs I couldn’t place. I go there, and it’s hard for me to recover. I see it all again. I can’t forget a thing. I hear it all. I feel once more the fingernail drag of bone-deep pain down the front of my soul. So much happened in that little room. So much that I was not prepared for.

With each adoption, I clung to differing shreds of willful ignorance.

With Calvin, the possibility for trauma and attachment issues hung loose and ghost-like on the horizon. When I got to “those” sections of the book, I closed the cover and went to sleep. I did not want anyone muddying up my rosy future before I’d even seen his face. It seemed too hard and mostly, it seemed like a big waste of time, because he was just a tiny baby.

With Ruby, I read some of the sections, but only because I knew I wouldn’t need them, her being our precious, well-adjusted daughter, born of the most beautiful open adoption.

With Silas, I highlighted a few paragraphs here and there, but we’d be fine because he was in a foster home. He was not institutionalized. He had not experienced trauma. He was strongly attached to his caregiver. Plus, in the grand scheme of life, he was still really quite young.

Of course, half of me knew there was always the chance. I knew that Silas’s age would make it trickier. I knew it would be a different kind of ball game.

But I did not know that our precious son would spend two entire years (and counting) running toward us and away from us at the exact same time.

I did not know that the moment we took him in our arms and ran, the trauma would be inflicted.

I did not know that we would seek help from three different specialists in the span of a single year.

I did not know that a child, so wiry and beautiful, would so fully deplete my every emotional and physical resource on a daily basis.

There are other things I didn’t know.

I didn’t know that my 7 year old son would cry because he misses his birth mom.

I didn’t know that my daughter would be on the receiving end of racism that is clothed in “they mean no harm”.

I see a world opening its heart to the millions of orphans who desperately need a family and I feel immense hope. These kids, no matter where they’re from or what their background is, they need a new last name, a forever one. They need family traditions and trips to Dairy Queen. They need warriors to fight for them and mommies and daddies to kiss and tickle them.

They also need the freedom to feel the hurts that no one else can understand. They need the space to never have to choose between the life that they didn’t get to live and this one right here. They need a free pass from computing that the two could never be mutually exclusive.

With Silas we have had a front-row seat to the heart-busting-up trauma of being taken from all that you know. These are children, and children are smart and intuitive. They understand more than they can verbalize, and what’s left unsaid leaks out in tears, rage, and banged-up self-worth. I’m thankful to have seen it with my own eyes two years ago, because I might never have believed it otherwise. I might have looked past the fight to hold on to a history. I might have remained naive enough to hope that the two older kids did not suffer the exact same losses.

So we hold their fragile hearts with the tenderest hands. We try to anticipate the emotions that shift the weight from one side to another without warning, but we often get it wrong. We feel the slip of trust through the cracks so we reach out and grab it by the ankles. It’s not always practiced or ideal, but we promise to never let them hit the floor.

And maybe that’s what adoptive parenting is like. Maybe it’s a bit like a field day water balloon toss.

Maybe it’s less about memorizing the right answers and more about looking them square in the face during every question, every doubt, every sadness. Maybe it’s leaning in to a kind of pain that we do not know and will never understand just so that they aren’t there leaning alone.

Maybe it’s less about finding the exact right therapist to tell us what to do to fix the problem and more about promising to never tuck the child with the broken heart in at night without a kiss and a hearty sniff to the head.

The books are valuable. They are there to help, and I don’t suggest my path of willful ignorance. But at the end of the day, the bright-spot surprise days and the grim ones where it seems like it will never get better, they are ours and we are theirs.

Maybe our days never will get better. Maybe two years really can turn into forever. But that child knows he is fully loved, all the way to the top, in times of sunshine and weeks of drear, and that is the point of adoption.

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Shannan Martin believes the turns in life that look like failure are often holy gifts, a lesson she chooses to embrace after the bones of her comfy farmgirl life were shattered and rebuilt from the toes up.  Together, Shannan and her family sold their dream farmhouse, moved to a disadvantaged area in the city, and adopted a 19-year old felon.  Nothing could have prepared her for the joy she would discover as her family began to live the simple, messy, complicated life they were created to live. In walking beside the forgotten and broken and seeing first-hand the ways she so cleanly identified with both, Shannan’s faith was plucked from the mud.  She and her jail-chaplain husband now live on the wrong side of the tracks with their four children. She blogs often at Flower Patch Farmgirl.