All the Years of my Life

to the years that become decades that mark us and remake us

Infertility interrupted our marriage before it even started. I was only 19 when a doctor told me my body carried with it the “leading cause of infertility” and it would turn out that was just a small fraction of the ways it wouldn’t corporate with bearing children.

By the time I married several years later, I was dancing between hope that the ways I had worked at healing were successful and the practical knowledge that building a family with my husband wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

I struggled hard—fighting depression and sadness when all my self-discipline and preventive measures didn’t yield the outcome I had hoped. And then I settled into a spiritual place of surrender and trust that God saw me and knew me and had plans that I couldn’t yet understand. (This journey is outlined in my first book, Pain Redeemed.)

In the years that followed this surrender, we turned our focus to other places. Adoption wasn’t a “fix” for infertility for us, but we wondered if we had something to offer because we didn’t have children. And we did. Adopting older children into a home with younger kids is not always an option and definitely not always a safe option. But we didn’t have any—so we asked God if there was a child out in the world who needed our exact home.

I often refer to the year we brought our oldest daughter home as the year of redemption.

Redemption, in my book anyway, is the act of taking all these lifeless pieces and putting them together in a way that creates value and, well, life, where there had only been brokenness.

It’s not fixing them or saying the brokenness is okay or “good”—but rather it’s saying there is something bigger and stronger at work in this world than just the brokenness.

As our story unfolded and this beautiful, precious daughter came into our lives, it was redemption in action. All kinds of things were redeemed—from certain dates to the fact that our home had been empty for so many years. (You can read some of them in this post: Redemption is for all, even me.)

God didn’t cause our loss, or shrug off the pain from it like it didn’t matter, but he was greater than it.

---

The year we adopted our second child, I like to call the year of coming home.

We had lost a baby the year before, our little Annie that we planned to adopt who had died in the NICU before we even had all the paperwork signed. We had also been living away from the farm because our tiny house on the hill didn’t have enough bedroom space for Annie’s adoption.

And there we were, without a baby and without a home that felt like our own.

It seemed like our family had a gaping hole in it and we weren’t sure how it was supposed to be filled. Our adoption profile was still active though and it wasn’t long before we were matched with our son. He was eight years old and the moment I saw his photo it was like my heart caught a bit in my chest. Was he my family? Were we his?

Then he was there, calling me mom, and we built a new house on the farm that was big enough—stretching out the tent pegs of our home (Isaiah 54:2)—and the kids wrote their names in the fresh cement on the floors of their brand new bedrooms in the place that was big enough for all of us to be home together.

I would write that story in another book, Counting Grains of Sand, and there was a completion in my whole self that year—like my family was finally together at last.

---

It turned out that God had another child for us though. A surprise biological baby that ushered in the year of Christmas morning.

She was the gift that didn’t have to be, but oh, the excitement she brought. It was like our family was waking up every morning to find out Christmas had arrived overnight.

We laughed more that year than I thought possible.

The pregnancy. The first year of her life. It was all this beautiful mash-up of excitement and joy. Watching the big kids attach to her and delight in her made every motherly part of my heart rejoice.

It was a bit like the peace before a storm hits, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that this body that had once been too damaged to nurture life, had grown a little girl whose unconditional love for her parents and siblings helped heal all of us a little more.

But things were still broken, even though there was love.

Isn’t that the hard reality of life here on this earth? Love doesn’t fix everything, no matter how much we wish it would.

---

By the third miscarriage that followed our surprise baby, we had officially stepped into the grief years.

I wrote in my journal as that third momentary life slipped away, “In the end, trust without reservation is my best bet. Lord, you know. My family is yours to build.”

But then for the next two years it felt like my family was being torn apart at the seams.

By my sixth miscarriage, I wasn’t sure I trusted God at all, let alone trusting him without reservation.

By the seventh, I felt numb.

The miscarriages weren’t really the whole source of those emotions, but they were a singular part of the story that I could talk about without crossing into telling someone else’s story along with mine in the middle of everything.

Now I can say, still cautiously and gently, that all the trauma of adopting older children permanently altered our home and family as our children grew. And no matter how much preemptive work we tried to do to help or alter the future for our kids, we still didn’t know what we were doing (to be clear, nobody really does) and it turns out, just having enough love doesn’t fix things.

It’s important. It’s necessary. It matters.

But it doesn’t take away each person’s choice of the way they will deal with their own life experiences.

So we can love with every fiber of our being and still watch the ones we love struggle with their own questions of love and self-worth. We can love with every bit of our thoughts and actions and still get them wrong or still be judged wrong anyway by the world around us.

So there I sat, in the middle of my grief years, with so many questions about family and home and God’s trustworthiness and my own failures as a woman, as a mother, and as a child of God.

I changed in those years. Changed in ways I can’t quite articulate yet.

Some ways were good—I was softened and sharp edges have been worn away.

Some ways weren’t as good—I’m still trying to recover from those.

---

I wondered for a long time if I’d ever emerge from the grief years, but in the late fall of 2024, I looked up one day and realized I had been sleeping without anxiety interrupting me. January arrived, along with my 40th birthday, and I realized I felt more like myself than I had in years. In mid-February, I was sitting with two close friends chatting about life and one of them looked at me and cocked her head a bit and said, “How are you really doing? Because you seem better.”

And I paused and thought, I’m not scared anymore.

I told them the truth in the next moments. They were the first to hear. I knew I was pregnant again, my 8^th pregnancy since our surprise baby five years before, and I expected to miscarry like I usually did. I was just waiting for the blood to start. I hadn’t even tested to confirm pregnancy, I just knew.

But I wasn’t afraid.

It was okay. I was okay.

I hadn’t been able to say that I was okay for three years.

But that day I knew I was okay, even with grief, even with loss, even with my family not looking like I had hoped and prayed it would for so many years. Even knowing that my body was going to experience loss again didn’t change it. I was still okay.

My friends looked at me with compassion and care and joy. And they believed for that baby to live when I certainly didn’t at all.

I just believed, for the first time in three years, that I was going to be okay no matter how sad I was as I walked through loss.

Grief wasn’t done. Within the next couple months I would face the most painful day of my entire life—and I say that as someone who gave birth after three days of labor and many, many hours of pushing. I birthed our surprise baby without crying or screaming, but that day I sat in our driveway and screamed and sobbed while my husband held me. Panic makes pain worse and I had a full-blown panic attack that day and the grief that followed is still something I carry gingerly with me, careful not to bump it too hard because the pain is still excruciating.

But just like grief wasn’t done, hope wasn’t either.

The baby I expected to bleed out of me, never did. It grew instead. It formed arms and legs and a tiny little face that turned toward us as the ultrasound wand passed over my stomach. That tiny little heart kept beating, never faltering no matter how many times I imagined the worst.

Thirty weeks.

That’s how long this little one has been growing inside me as I’m writing today.

I wonder how I’ll remember this year in the future. The year of hope. Or maybe, the year of beauty. Or perhaps, the year of grace.

Or, despite how long and clunky this name is, it might simply be, the year light proved once more that it is stronger than darkness no matter how oppressive the darkness may feel.

It’s the year I had the privilege to carry another baby and the year I experienced even more hurt and the year I finally knew I was going to be okay after so many years of wondering.

---

I don’t know what the years of your life have looked like. But I do know this: God sees them. He sees where love hasn’t been enough. He sees where grief has slashed wounds into you. He sees the hope and the excitement and the disappointment. He sees the dreams you’re holding and the ones you’ve had torn out of your hands.

The babies you’ve lost.

The relationships that have harmed you.

The community that brings you joy and the one that makes your heart hurt.

He sees the family you love and all your hope that is wrapped up in them being okay.

He sees the family you fear will never, ever be okay.

You’re not alone, friends. Just like I wasn’t alone on the saddest, most lonely nights of my life.

I remember sitting in the hallway at two in the morning one night, the cramping of my latest miscarriage waking me up and the worry for one of my older children keeping me up. I was sitting there on the floor, trying to pray with any kind of hope, and feeling so desperately alone. And I ended up saying, “I don’t have hope for anything good,” and I didn’t. I fell asleep on the floor, outside my child’s room and then I woke up the next morning and went about my day.

There wasn’t a lightning bolt of faith, or a whisper of hope, or a surprising word from the Lord to comfort me. But somehow, I walked through that time and then looked back and knew I was seen. It mattered that I had been sitting there alone. It mattered that my heart was hurting. And despite not feeling hope—my very actions were hope.

Hope that there is a God who sees and knows.

The end of Psalm 23 says, “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life…” and it’s true, even when you can’t feel it, and all those days turn into years eventually.

So to you, friend, wherever you are in the years of your life, my prayer for you is that you will be able to look and know you are seen and the comfort of that truth will remake your heart—like it has remade mine.