Our Journey Begins - Quinn & Vanessa
Our family never felt like it was the correct size. My wife and I both came from large, blended, families and I think we both pictured our lives as one where we would have a large family of our own. It seems that God had other plans. We tried for years to conceive, experiencing a lot of hard, emotional, set backs and miscarriages. It was incredibly difficult. We didn’t really know what was wrong, or if anything was wrong, so we kept trying. Eventually, God chose to bless us with a beautiful daughter, Trinity, a name we chose to honour God. Shortly thereafter we found out that Trinity was even more of a miracle than we believed. We discovered that my beautiful wife suffered from POF, Premature Ovarian Failure, a condition that meant that even conceiving once was highly unlikely. And conceiving again would be next to impossible. We did everything we could to increase our chances, from taking part in POF studies in the United States, engaging in hormone and other therapies, and exploring every fertility option that medical science had at our disposal. We spent years, and tears, on this journey. Nothing worked or had any chance of working. Every treatment that people typically engage in was ruled out, one by one.
We mourned, and I have to say that I gave up.
God chose to bless us with a daughter and we are and were richly blessed. Trinity was the most amazing gift that we could be given. One of my many flaws is that if something in my life is too painful, I tend to kind of ignore it. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it, and I want to forget about it. I mourned, we mourned, and I buried myself in the joy that was my family.
My wife is different. She is the strong one in this family, she is the heart and the centre. She had faith and she had purpose and Christ has given her a tenacity that will not give up when something is important. Then she came to me with an idea, one that had been floated by a few well meaning loved ones while we were struggling, what about adoption? I said no. She doesn’t give up, it’s not in her nature. She brought me information, she talked more about it, she reached out to people that we trusted for advice. I said no.
Finally, she asked if I would be willing to talk with an agency about adoption and get our questions answered by an expert. I said no. I said no until I found myself in that meeting.
She doesn’t give up. And so, we began our journey.
