I'm a person who struggles with decision-making. All the really important decisions I've made in my life were accompanied by signs to help me along. Signs led me to a particular college. Signs led me to law school, despite never previously having an interest in being a lawyer. The best sign led me to mrohkay.
It's a good story, so I hope you'll allow me a diversion from the point of this post. I'd been dating a guy for several years and it wasn't going well. But I'm a persistent person. I'd invested a lot of effort into the relationship and didn't want to give up. Eventually, mrohkay (who I'd known for awhile) became single and was apparently interested in me. I started to question whether I should keep struggling in my relationship... regardless of mrohkay, I was at a breaking point.
I prayed and prayed and prayed for a sign. I set a deadline for myself to make a decision. I might have stayed in that bad relationship forever, just to avoid making a decision. And then one Saturday morning, I walked into a tire store and God sent me my long-awaited sign. The guy I'd been dating had a flat tire. The area had, oh, eight or ten different tire stores in a five-mile radius. We walked into one of the stores, and standing at the back of the line was mrohkay. He had a flat tire that morning too, and ended up in the same store at the same time. I broke things off with the other guy the next day and never looked back.
Six years later, I'm crazy in love with mrohkay and thankful every day for his flat tire. Now we're faced with enormous and (so far) heartbreaking decisions of how to build our family. I'm overwhelmed and full of doubt. I pray and pray for signs from God. And then I worry that I'm missing the signs or misinterpreting them or seeing signs where there aren't any.
As I've written before, mrohkay and I always planned to adopt, but we expected it would be our second child. Now that we're struggling to have our first, we wonder when, or if, we should stop trying. Even though the odds are that we will have a successful pregnancy eventually, we don't know how many miscarriages we can handle along the way. We've been debating whether our third or fourth attempt will be our last - at least for a little while. I've been researching adoption a bit.
I recently told one of my friends about our fertility issues, and she started telling me about this adoption agency she knew of. I was interested and spent a few minutes looking at the agency's website. A few days later, I noticed that someone I follow on Twitter had re-tweeted something from the agency. So I started following the agency. A few weeks after that, the agency started following me back. A few days after that, someone at the agency wrote to me and asked if I was interested in meeting. Less than a week later - today - I was cleaning around my house. I picked up the alumni magazine from my law school, which I normally throw directly into the trash, and I flipped through it. A picture of a woman holding a child caught my eye (naturally). Yes, it turns out that the founder/director of the agency is an alum of my law school and was featured in the magazine.
Why is this agency popping up everywhere I turn? Sign or coincidence? We're officially "trying" again right now, so... what does this mean? Are we supposed to be doing something (other than doing "it")? Anyone?
