Dear Birth Parent

     One of the things we have to do is write a letter to the birth parent(s) to be placed on our agencies website. Parents can look through those and read a little about families and then inquire with the agency for more info.
     So, I started to read through some of the other letters to try and get an idea of what in the world I could possibly write. This has been the most challenging thing I have had to do so far. How do you talk to someone you don't know, who is considering giving you their CHILD?
     As I was reading through them for ideas, I mostly figured out what I didn't want to say. Many, many of them talk about God bringing them to this and being thankful and so on. While I believe those things to be true, and also feel them about where WE are at, I am 100% sure the birth mother does NOT. If I write how thankful I am God brought her to us, what does that tell her about God? That he did this to her? That this hard, possibly horrible, time in her life was all planned out by God? Even though I believe God has a plan, even through tough times, it is SO hard to see in the  moment. I have no idea if she is a believer and I don't want to give her the wrong impression of our great God. So I tried my best to be real with her, to empathize with her. Here is what I came up with.

Dear Birth Parent,

            Life doesn’t always go as planned does it? We’ve experienced it and I bet you are feeling that way right now. We have felt that way many times and questioned the decisions we have made. But we have come to realize they weren’t wrong decisions, just decisions that had a difficult outcome that we had to work through. And as we look back, we did the best we could.

            You are doing the best you can right now. You are trying to get the best outcome from a difficult time.  We believe that God helped us through those difficult times and that he provided us with what we needed even though it wasn’t always evident while we were going through it.

            We have been trying to have another baby for seven years. We went through fertility treatments and two miscarriages. Those times were awful. But it lead us to this place.  Now we know that this is where we are supposed to be. Adopting a baby is where all of our decisions have lead us. Hindsight allows us to be grateful for the difficult times and we pray that when this difficult time is in your past, you will be grateful for the decision that you make.

Then I wrote a little about each of us and closed with
  
    

There is a song that says “Down in the valley, dying of thirst; Now down in the valley, it seems that I'm at my worst; My consolation is that You baptize this Earth; I'm down in the valley, valleys fill first”. This song always makes me remember that the valleys bloom before the mountaintops. While we feel like we are at our lowest, God can create beauty in the valley.

             Thank you for reading about us. We pray you can see the beauty during this time.


     I pray that as we all go through the daily struggles of life that, eventually,  we can all see the beauty and the meaning.