It’s early Saturday morning and my five year old daughter is already dressed in a sparkly gold dress with unicorns and a big tutu.  She is on her fourth listen of “Golden” as she works to choreograph a dance to perform for us.  She wants to be a dancer when she grows up.  Or sometimes “a dentist like Poppy” or a “banker like Daddy” but always added at the end is “and a mama like Mama.” 

Her younger brother sits at the kitchen table eating pancakes as quickly as my husband can make them.  Breakfast is his favorite meal of the day, so much so he asks for breakfast for dinner daily. 

Our fiercely independent third comes down fully dressed in the “love heart sweater” she asked Santa for.  She loves anything with hearts on it which she calls “love hearts”.  I hope she always does.

The youngest of the family crawls around getting into everything and climbing on anything he can.  Each of his siblings claims him as their own, as “my Matthew” and he is by far the most hugged, kissed, cuddled in the family. 

It is a typical Saturday morning. Busy, loud, messy. Full of music and joy and love. And none of it would exist if two brave women had not said yes to life. These beloved children who fill our house with love and laughter, whose lives brim with wonder and possibility, would not be here if their first mothers had not chosen life for them. If they had not chosen to nourish, protect and nurture their children for as long as they could, and as best as they could, and then chosen us to continue that in their place. Despite hard circumstances, their first mothers chose to carry, labor, and deliver a baby they would entrust to another out of a love so big it literally changes the world. Their yes to life brought four precious little ones into the world to love and be loved. To learn and grow and to be whatever and whoever God knit them in their wombs to be.

To be witness to, and recipient of, that sacrificial love, has formed and shaped my motherhood. The knowledge that the gift of these children entrusted to us comes with profound pain, grief, and loss for all involved deepens my appreciation for the immense responsibility before us. My husband and I consider it our privilege and our mission that our children, despite the physical separation, know this love.  We want them to know, as much as they possibly can, the love from which they came. 

I can no more explain to my children why adoption is part of their story as I can why infertility was part of ours, but I can tell them that that broken, blessed, beautiful road led us to each other.  That no detail of their story or mine or their birth mother’s was an accident or mistake.  It is the work of an infinitely good and loving Father who knows exactly what we need and can, and will, draw good out of any suffering we experience.  That, amidst the very suffering and trauma that comes with adoption, love prevails–God’s, their birth mother’s, and ours. 

We know there will understandably be difficult conversations and wrestling with identity and grief as they grow in awareness of their unique story, but we hope and pray they always come back to the truth that their lives started with love.  That there was never a moment they were not wanted and loved.  That they were chosen–by God who created them, by their birth mothers who willed their existence and gave them the gift of life, and by us, who prayed and longed and waited for them.   

In a perfect world without sin and suffering, there would be no need for adoption.  But God bless these women who despite the hardships and pain they face do not add to the brokenness by ending the life created and given to them, but transform it by their yes.  Who turn an inconceivable loss into an unimaginable gift.  

When we embarked on the long and complicated adoption process, I did not worry about loving another woman’s child as my own.  I knew in my bones without any doubt that I would.  What I could not have anticipated was how much my heart would love and cherish and honor their birth mothers.  How often I would think of them and pray for them, or be overcome with gratitude for them and their yes.  They made me a mother, fulfilling a deep longing of my heart, and in doing so, gifted not only my husband and me, but the world, the sweetest, most joyful little souls–each with a future full of hope and possibility.  I know they are as proud of them as we are.  

Thousands will rightly march in defense of the unborn today at the March for Life.  I encourage you also to include in your prayers and hearts the brave women like our children’s birth mothers who embody what it means to be pro-life.  Pray and march for these courageous birth mothers who put their children before themselves in a radical, literally life-saving, life-giving way.  I believe in our support of the pro-life cause; and to truly foster a culture of life, we must love, celebrate and uplift them both.  And I pray for women who are faced with the same decision they were. That they would know the opportunity before them to give life and love to the child in their womb. I pray that they would choose life.   

Katie and her husband live in Virginia and are the proud parents of four children all welcomed through the gift of adoption. Their first child was born on Easter Monday, the day after she wrote her Easter Prayer.