The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety.
I think there's a lot of ways to be a mom. I grew up in a really wonderful church family, and I would say that I had a great mom, but I also had a team of women who were mothering me as well. They were mentors, and there were other ones that I could talk to and I could trust that would feed into my life. While that is removed from... Being a mentor to someone else's child is removed from having your own, there's such a wonderful, biblical mandate from the Lord that older women should be discipling and mentoring and teaching young women.
The bonds that I made with those women were amazing. They were the ones that threw me a baby shower. They're the ones that helped me fundraise for my adoption. So you can develop such strong bonds with people and you can be used by the Lord in such mighty ways that sometimes a biological mother just doesn't have the end road in that. I was so thankful for other women who wanted to invest in my life and mentor me in my life. But I also think these days there's just so many options to build your family.
I think it's important that you can grieve and it's okay to be incredibly disappointed with the brokenness that might exist in the way you thought your family would be formed. That's okay. I think grieving is appropriate, but I also think that the joy comes in the morning. There is a time to mourn, but then there's a time to wake up and seek out hope from the Lord about a different way to be a mom. It might look like mentoring someone else's child or being a part of someone's family, or that might look like adopting a child or being a foster mom. We're in desperate need of foster moms around this country. Good, good homes that provide a stark difference to the trauma that those kids are coming from.
Originally published Tuesday, 20 August 2019.
