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32 Years – Romans 8:28 (Faith Storytellers Talk)
April 29, 1987 started out like any other day. I would go to work. Mom would pick me up after work, we’d eat supper together, and she would drop me off at the hospital where I was to meet my husband for our second prenatal class. My water would break on the way to that class.
All of a sudden, words like emergency c-section and life flight were being said. We frantically called our family to let them know what was happening.
The helicopter arrived and they would strap me in. My husband would follow by car.
They would take me out of the helicopter while the blades were still moving, rushing me inside. Tests would be performed. After the ultrasound was done, the doctors would say there would be no waiting the boys needed to be born now.
I had never been so afraid or felt so alone. I prayed Dan would get there before they took me to surgery.
At 12:04 a.m. that night our boys were born almost 12 weeks too early.
5 days later, I would hold Kyle for the first time as he took his last breath.
A few days later I would hold his lifeless body in the backseat of the car as my mom drove me the 90 minutes back to our hometown. I would hand off his little 3 pound body to the funeral home director and leave empty handed.
A few days after that I would stand in a cemetery and watch my husband pick up that little white box and carry it over and sit it down at the gravesite.
This was NOT my dream.
The next 14 months would be spent sitting at Codey’s bedside, praying for a miracle. We would call our family down numerous times saying Codey wasn’t expected to make it through the night but he somehow would.
Somewhere in those first few months Dan and I decided to stop waiting for Codey to die and start celebrating every day that he was alive. But to do that we had to stop being angry and trust God and His plan. If God is perfect, then there can be no mistakes. I either had to trust that God could make good come out of the bad or I had to give up my faith.
During those trying months Dan would decide that God was indeed calling him to be a physician. We would have another son and start planning our move to Iowa City for medical school.
Dan would go through medical school and his residency. We would have another child, a little girl this time. Life seemed pretty ordinary.
Dan would decide to continue his training and become a neonatologist. He would be caring for sick and premature babies. It seemed fitting with all that we had been through.
While Dan was doing his fellowship, there would be a mother brought to his hospital that would deliver a baby girl. There had been pre-adoptive parents chosen for this baby but a last minute ultrasound showed a serious heart defect and the pre-adoptive parents would back out. The birth mother was presented with three options for the baby – a 3 stage surgery process, a heart transplant, or to let the baby die. The birth mother was not prepared to care for this baby and chose to leave her in the hospital to die. My husband fell for this little girl. He bought booties for her feet and stuffed animals for her bed. He wrote an order that the nurses had to rock her every hour. He came home heartbroken that no one was celebrating this little girl’s life.
It didn’t take long for us to realize we were the perfect parents for her. We had already had a child die. We knew that we could love her and survive the loss. When we presented this to our children, our 11 year old son said that no baby should die alone without a name. Our 6 year old daughter, hit her knees, and begged us for this sister. She said she understood that the baby could die but that Kyle was still her brother even though she’d never met him.
We would choose to proceed with the adoption with the plan to take her home and love her for as long as we were allowed to. During these discussion, where most everyone thought we were crazy, there was one lone voice of hope. The cardiac surgeon discussed with us the possibility of doing the 3 stage heart surgeries. I was afraid that another child of mine would die in the hospital but in the end we would decide to proceed. We named her Hope, which means faith and trust.
Hope would survive these 3 heart surgeries and Dan would finish his fellowship. Dan would take a job in Des Moines and we would move back to be closer to our family. Sometime in the first few years, their NICU would join a national practice which had 400 NICUs. A few years later Dan would become the Director of Clinical and Quality Improvement for this national company. He would be indirectly involved in the care of 100,000 babies every year.
And to top it all off, we would have another little girl.
We felt like we had come full circle. Dan was now caring for parents who were in situations like we once were.
At the age of 45, Dan would come to me and mention adopting again. He would remind me that Codey, who was now 22, would always live with us. He would say that we have a big house and a great job and lots of love to give. He wouldn’t be wrong with those words, but I still said “NO!” I was way too old to be adopting.
But then one day, I read a book by Mary Beth Chapman that asked, “Was it better for an orphan to have an older mother or no mother at all?” and my heart was changed.
We began the process of international adoption. We set out to adopt a little girl from China. China started a new program where you could adopt two at one time. Hope would beg us to adopt a little boy with a heart defect and we did. We figured we were never going back and they would have each other and feel less alone.
We would show up in China and find two of the most shut down, sad little, hungry children. Ben would literally eat for an hour when we got back to the hotel room. This 19 pound, 3 ½ year old little boy would change our whole lives. The very next day we went to visit his orphanage. We headed through the gates and noticed the tall brick wall with glass shards all around the top. We entered the clean, new orphanage and noticed how eerily quiet it was. No noise in the baby room. Rooms filled with little kids in cribs, no toys to be seen. They took us to Ben’s floor. They showed us where he slept. Ben wouldn’t let go of my husband. As the nannies, who had cared for him for 3 years tried hard to coax Ben out of Dan’s arms, Ben just buried his face farther into Dan’s neck. My heart was broken. What would cause a little boy to hang on to a total stranger and refuse to go back to the people who had been caring for him for over 3 years?
I would know even before our plane hit the ground in Des Moines, that we would adopt again. I didn’t know, however, that it would be the very next year. We started our paperwork again. We heard God whisper the number 4. Our agency and our social worker would be on board with this number. We put 4 on all the paperwork because we knew it was never going to happen. China only allowed two at a time. It was easy to say yes to something you knew could never happen.
God had other plans though. In the most miracle filled, crazy year of our life, we would head back to China, this time to adopt 4.
If you are trying hard to keep track of the numbers, here’s the recap – 5 biological children, 1 adopted domestically, and 6 from China for a grand total of 12 children.
All my life I had wanted to have 12 children. I gave up that dream, at the age of 23, when we had the twins because I was never going to get pregnant again. God is good though and 25 years later at the age of 48, He allowed my childhood dream to come true. While everyone else was calling us crazy, I was discussing how seriously blessed I was.
But God wasn’t done yet. Our daughter, adopted at the age of almost 14, told us what it was like for a child in a wheelchair in China. She would beg us to go back for an older girl in a wheelchair and we did.
We would say we were done once again. But as luck would have it a friend would send us a picture of a little girl and ask, “Doesn’t she look like an Ellsbury?” We would laugh and say, “No. But we will advocate for her.” Elyse and Grace had other plans though. They believed this little girl was their sister. It wouldn’t take long for the rest of the family to agree she was indeed their sister.
We would head back for two more.
My life is nothing like I planned it on the day Dan and I wed almost 35 years ago. I’m not sure I would have said, “I do” had I known what was about to happen. But standing here, 32 years out from the worst year of my life, I can see a bit of the threads of the tapestry that God has been weaving in my life.
Without Kyle’s death, we would have never been brave enough to bring home 6 more children who had serious, life shortening conditions. Without Codey’s special needs and living with us forever, we would have never taken in the children that we did who will need live long care.
We all talk about Romans 8:28 like God will only bring good into our lives. But the reality is that verse truly means that God can make the most amazing type of good come out of the most devastating type of bad.
My life is living proof of this fact.