“coming out”

tonight we announced our adoption plans in church for the first time.  it seems like we’ve been sitting on this “secret” forever.  way back when we began this process, we talked about when we wanted to tell people and we decided that it would be a good idea to wait for the church announcement until all of our paperwork was done.  that way, many of our major decisions would already have been made and people would be less likely to want to offer helpful advice when we were still struggling with so many big questions ourselves.  Plus, it seems somehow more hopeful to make an announcement that now we are “just waiting” than to say, “we’re in the process of filling out a bunch of forms.” Quite a number of people had already heard about our plans either from us or from someone unknowingly spilling the beans, but there were still lots of people who had no idea.

i was surprisingly nervous and I KNEW that i would cry, so I made j do the talking.  he did a fabulous job, just touching on the last 4 years of struggle we’ve had and giving more detail about these adoption plans that are helping us to feel hopeful right now.  We had lots of people come up to us after church to give us big hugs and smiles and words of congratulation and of understanding and compassion for what we’ve been through.  I never doubted that we had a huge support group in our church family.  It’s nice to finally feel like everyone knows where we’re at.  Now we’ll just see how quickly I get tired of people asking for status updates when nothing’s happening….