Start of the Journey--a little background...5

Okay, so here's the start of the whole big explanation of the past 13 months and how we took a year-long detour in Maine to get to Mass.

Many of you have been reading our monthly family updates for years (can you believe I started those over six years ago?) but explaining the miracle that is unfolding for us here in Mass would take way more than an email could fill up, so for those interested...here goes the big explanation!

Since I was a young teenager I never planned to stay in Memphis. In fact, I used to get maps out and measure the distance between NYC and Memphis to see what was in the middle! Yeah, well, that New York thing never happened...I still haven't been there except going to Brooklyn on a six hour layover to meet one of my mom's friends.

So, anyway, I always thought I would move and marry, or marry and move...didn't matter, but I always thought I would leave. Of course, at the time I was making these grand plans, God was not a factor in my decision making, but God definitely had different ideas about how I would carry out his plan.

I guess I stayed in Memphis because one, I was an only child and close to my mother and two, my father died my freshman year in college. This happened just a month after I became completely sold out to Jesus and I guess, that was the beginning of a lot of tough things I would go through. Bottom line was, I just couldn't leave my mother. So, I stayed.

Four years later, I met Fred who had JUST become a Christian. We married (yes, we got engaged after 13 days of dating) and started on our journey to have a family. We didn't spend too much time in the infertility world before we decided to adopt. We had always planned to adopt anyway, but we had no idea what God would call us into.

I wont bore you with the in-between, but as you know, we ended up adopting four babies, that either had special needs when we got them, or were at risk because of things their birthmothers did or did not do during their pregnancies. I used to get so upset when people called our children a 'ministry' because they are my children...I get so much joy out of being their mother, how could it be that we did so much for them? I don't feel what we have done to be that extraordinary but I do feel what God put in our hearts and the strengths he has given us as a team and individually in order to parent these particular children is.

Because my mom was such a fantastic grandmother, after we adopted Andrew, I just couldn't leave Memphis. Because of the situations with our children, my mom was a big help with us! Sadly, as most of you probably know, she died in March 2006, just 8 days after a diagnosis of leukemia. She was the last of my family I grew up with. My grandparents were gone and my dad died in 1988 and since mom was an only child, there were no aunts or uncles or cousins.

Fred and I started evaluating if we really wanted to stay in Memphis now that she was gone. We knew that most of our closest friends were planning to move in the next five years anyway. We always stayed and waved goodbye to many friends throughout the years. We were also frustrated with always having to fight the school system to get Gaige remotely what he needed, having sub-par medical care and then there was the whole crime and racial stuff that is a part of Memphis.

When Andrew was sick, I brought him to Boston to meet with doctors. I saw that Boston was really the mecca of pediatric care and I longed to be able to provide that for all the boys. Boston, is a HUGE place...the city itself is not all that big...but the surrounding area that is the metropolitan area, the traffic and so forth, scared us off.

So we began to think about options and realized that it was possible to access Boston medical care and live 100 miles away in Portland, Maine. The bonus was I had a half-brother (long story...another blog in itself) who lived there and we had never been near each other. So we felt this is where God wanted us to be.

So we made the decision to move to Maine. When asked, we told people it was to access Boston medical care and many of you asked us why not move to Boston and we said we were overwhelmed by it. We should have paid better attention to your questioning, I'm afraid...but that's all part of the journey I am sure.

So Maine it was...we left Memphis July 12th and arrived in Portland on the 16th! While we assumed the 'journey' was completed, it was just beginning.

....more to follow....