This is a post made by one of the parents in the Johnston adoption of Olivia. The original post is here: https://spiritualityandspanx.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/officiallyolivia/
To me, fostering or adopting is simple. If a child is in need of a family and you can be a family- then you have your answer. I think adults try to make it too complicated.
To me, fostering or adopting is simple. If a child is in need of a family and you can be a family- then you have your answer. I think adults try to make it too complicated.
I think one of the biggest reasons is fear. Fear that you don’t have what it takes. Fear that you aren’t the perfect parent or human. Fear of heartbreak.
The fact that children become orphans in the first place is proof that we live in a broken world. When you dive head first into that brokenness, you open yourself up. I have been both incredibly blessed and incredibly beaten down by international adoption and the foster care system. My family’s journey to Olivia has had multiple twists and turns. I have failed too many times to count and pieces of my heart will forever belong to children that used to call me ‘Mom’. BUT… They are ALL WORTH IT. Olivia is worth it!
Our family is weird, messy, emotional, and loud- totally not your picture-perfect family. But, we love big. We love Jesus and His people. We want to be there to help out when someone is going through a hard time. I want to be the mother I would want my kids to have if I could not raise them.
Photo collage of Olivia’s family
Olivia was our fifth foster child, and our second attempt at being a foster family. We’d been trying for three years to add a little girl to our family. We already had two biological children (a boy and a girl) and a little boy from Ethiopia. My daughter wanted a sister terribly. We had come so close so many times.
In February of 2015, my husband got medically evacuated from Afghanistan. He needed to have emergency back surgery. With everything going on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was time to add to the family. (To be fair, I had had that feeling since 2010.) Being the awesome husband that he is, he said okay.
I spastically got everything completed to get our home licensed again. I also posted our families profile to a couple different websites. It paid off. Olivia’s social worker called our agency to see if we would be interested in a 2 month old little girl with possible HIV. I said yes right away. She sounded like the perfect fit. (A little background: I am on staff at Project HOPEFUL. We advocate for orphans with HIV and other special needs. Also, we had tried adopting a little girl with HIV previously.) Olivia was exactly what we wanted! (My Ethiopian son had requested a “brown child”. He was tired of being the only one.)
On June 29, 2015, Olivia was brought to our house! She owned all five of us from that first moment.
In November we adopted Olivia! We got to be a part of Adoption Day at the court house. It was amazing! It feels so good to have her be a Johnston. She completes our family and rules the house. The quiet, still, content infant that showed up in June has turned into a loud, demanding, spoiled, happy, SUPER mobile ten-month-old.
Our journey to Olivia did not take the smooth path that I thought I wanted. It wasn’t filled with rainbows and butterflies that I had once imagined. It was HARD. Being down in the trenches of orphan care changed my soul. In all of this, I’ve been shown that our mission for this world isn’t to play it safe. Get your hands dirty, swing for the fences. Let’s live the gospel! Let’s show the world what it looks like!
