My story of becoming a Mom isn’t epic or intense, but as I look back on it, I cannot believe how much becoming a Mom has changed and transformed me into the person that I am today.
We got married at a very fresh 21 years of age (literally I had just turned 21 4 days before our wedding). We knew we wanted to be debt free before we had kids, so spent about two years throwing every single penny we had at my student loan debts. We also decided that we wanted to run a full 26.2 marathon before having kids. We accomplished both of those goals within 2 years of our wedding, and couldn’t think of any other reason to wait to become parents.
…and so we did. We found out we were pregnant with Tera on Thanksgiving Day 2013. She was born in August of 2014, when I was just 23 years old. And so began my motherhood journey.
I always tell people that transitioning from 0 kids to 1 kid was by far the hardest for me. I thought I would be a GREAT Mom, that it would be so fun and easy, and that I would finally be fully fulfilled in life. Well..imagine my surprise when I wasn’t a great Mom, it was super hard, and I seriously doubted that we had even made the right decision. Looking back, I clearly had postpartum depression, but at the time I had no clue that I was even going through that.
Before we had Tera, Theo and I had actually talked extensively about becoming foster parents. We even started the paperwork and began the home study before she was born (while we were pregnant). After she was born, all of that kind of fell off our radar. We got a call when she was about 9 months old that our homestudy was going to expire, so would we like to finish the process and get our license? We said yes and completed our foster license in July or August of 2015. On September 1st, 2015, we got a call that a baby girl had been born and would we be interested in fostering her? We said yes almost immediately. Abby spent two weeks in the NICU and we visited her every day, then brought her home on September 14, 2015. If you are keeping track, I had a 13 month old and a newborn at that point 🙂
Four months later, on Valentines Day, we found out we were pregnant with our Kiah. So now I had a 15 month old, a 4 month old and I was pregnant. That was fun, as you can imagine!
Abigail lived with us for nine months and then was placed out of state with a relative of hers. She still lives there and we still have contact with her. She has grown into an amazing girl and is about to go into 3rd grade!
It was weird going from two kids (and a pregnancy) to one kid, and then having a second kid, even though I was already used to having two kids. We had about 4 months with just Tera after Abby left and before Kiah was born. Kiah was born on October 14, 2016. After he was born he had a lot of difficulty eating and gaining weight. I went through a severe bought of postpartum anxiety and struggled greatly for about six months.
When Kiah was around 6 months old (on Mother’s Day 2017), we got a call for anther foster placement. This time the placement was 10 years old, and we were promised that it would be 6 weeks maximum (for the summer, basically). Well, Luna came to live with us and turned 11 shortly after she arrived. She ended up living with us for 13 months before she went to live with another foster family. It was WILD having two toddlers and a pre-teen.
And then finding out that I was (completely unexpectedly) pregnant again. This time, I was so sick I could hardly function and it made it incredibly challenging to have three kids with a huge age span and one with a lot of trauma to work through.
In July of 2018, Luna moved out of our house and I went through many of the stages of grief, while also juggling two small children and a very difficult pregnancy.
Ezra John was born in November of 2018 and was 9 pds 3 oz of pure joy added to our family. His postpartum was amazing and I handled it SO SO much better than the other two. Still, his pregnancy had been so hard that I wasn’t even able to think about having another baby for four years. During those four years, we moved five times, went through a pandemic, started school for our kids, and I went back to work. After adding to our family in 2014 (Tera), 2015 (Abby), 2016 (Kiah), 2017 (Luna), and 2018 (Ezra), we took a long break from having more people join our family! For a long time it was just the three kids and we even reached a stage where no one napped, no one needed diapers during the day, and we didn’t even need a stroller when we went anywhere!
At the beginning of 2022, I finally realized that if we wanted to add another baby to our family we should work on that sooner rather than later. And in July of 2022 I found out I was pregnant again. This time the pregnancy was AWFUL as well. I was basically bedridden and lost a lot of weight. I had nausea and vomiting all 40 weeks and absolutely slipped into a horrible season of pre-natal depression.
On March 16, 2023 our Orion Daniel was born and completed our little family. He’s the best and most wonderful baby. He’s only three months old but we have adored almost every day of those past three months. As hard as my body takes pregnancy, it makes the postpartum season seem amazing because I’m finally able to do all the things (like eat and sleep lol) that I couldn’t do when I was pregnant.
And that is the long story of how I became a Mom! I know that not everyone’s story is so “straightforward”, but even as I look back on the way that I became a mother four times over with two bonus additions, I see that God has had his hand in it all from beginning to end. My story may look so different from anyone else’s story, but that is just the beauty of it. I am so thankful to be Mom to these four goobers, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of the two beautiful and precious girls that we also got to foster. I don’t know if we will ever foster and/or adopt again in the future, but right now the door has not been opened to that.
If you want to read the birth stories of all four of my biological babes, you can read them here:
If you want to read more about our fostering journey and learn about foster care, I actually wrote a book about it and self-published it on Amazon. You can find that here.
I think that’s a huge part of what fascinates me about all these birth/pregnancy/ adoption stories– no two ever seem to be exactly the same! Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.