When you’re a child, it’s hard to fathom just how much your parents do for you. You wake up in the morning from your warm bed, get ready for school in clothes that are clean, eat breakfast, and then head out for your day ahead. Things just happen because it’s expected that they do. Your parents take care of you because that’s what parents do.
I grew up in a house that was filled with love. It wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized that not every family tells one another, “I love you.” My family did and still does, even if it’s just through a text message. Sometimes that love may have worn thin for a moment, but there was never a hole left where love should have been. I was lucky and I didn’t even know it.
Sometimes as an adult, things don’t always go as planned for us. Maybe we had a different view of where we would end up. Perhaps we settle for things because it’s the adult thing to do. For me, I feel as though I predetermined my own life a long time ago. Maybe I didn’t know that I wanted to be a teacher at a young age, but when I tried it in college, I knew it was the right fit. My life has always seemed to circulate around children. I worked as a babysitter for a while when I was a teenager. Maybe I was good at it, maybe I wasn’t (I guess you’d have to ask the families I babysat for and the children I babysat), but I loved it. I had known from a young age that at some point in my life, I would have children, I just wasn’t sure when.
You never hear about a male’s biological clock ticking away. Women, sure, even though it’s a ridiculous notion, this biological clock. Maybe it wasn’t so much a ticking that I heard this past year, but more of a feeling that I was ready. My career was going well, and for the most part, I loved what I did (though anyone close to me could tell you how dangerously close to jumping from the edge of my profession I came in the past few months). I bought my first home and really started to feel like an adult, as long as that “adult” feeling meant that you felt you were drowning financially and second-guessing all of your purchases. I’m told that this, indeed, is the feeling of being an adult. So with that, I decided this past July that it was time to begin my journey to becoming a parent. I was responsible, stable, and I dealt with children in my career daily. Surely this would be something that would come easily, right?
Wrong.
Luckily for me, I had known that I would go the route of fostering and adopting for a long time. In fact, many people close to me have known for years and years that this was my intention. I did my research, and I knew how long the process would be. What I didn’t realize was how grueling it would end up, and the toll that it would take on me emotionally.
Now, here I am five months later after the trainings are finished and I have only a home study between me and certification. A lot has happened in those five months, and a lot more will happen in the future. I realize more and more every day how big of a step this is for me to take on, but I know at the end of the day that it’s the right step. This is the beginning of a long and hopefully happy journey…an adventure. So let it begin.
P.S. Yes, that’s a photo of me standing in front of a Miller truck. My parents have always had a sense of humor, and of course, at that age, I had no idea what that was. I was just living the High Life.