Adoption is a Puzzle, and Everyone Has a Piece

I had no idea what to title this post, and that just sort of rolled out of my head.  It sounds right, too.

I don't have all the answers.  I don't know where to find all of the pieces of the puzzle, or who has what pieces, but I do know what pieces of the puzzle we, as a hopeful adoptive family, have to offer:

love- the same love we have for our biological son;
security- a stable home and family to grow up in, with a mom and a dad, so that all of our child's energy can be spent on being a child, learning, and growing;
self-confidence- the kind that enables a child to succeed, deal with peer pressure, and reach their potential;
faith- the knowledge that God lives, and that He loves each of us, and the assurance to teach our child what we believe, then let go and let them choose for themselves.

Some of the other pieces of the puzzle are pretty obvious, others aren't, and others are still unknown:

a child- pretty obvious, but this is probably the central piece of the puzzle, or even the completed puzzle itself;
a mother- I don't mean myself, either- I mean our child's birthmother, the next most central piece of the puzzle, without whom solving the puzzle would never, ever happen;
a friend- someone who can help the birthmother make the most difficult choice of her life- to place her baby for adoption- not to "give up" her baby, but (cliche as it may sound) to "give her more."

Other pieces of the puzzle can be mundane, routine, and seem unimportant, even though they are still pieces to the whole picture:

word of mouth- telling people that you know someone who is adopting, or even telling someone that you know someone who knows someone who is adopting, can play a key role in finding some of the other puzzle pieces;
agency- perhaps the most difficult decision other than whether or not to journey through adoption is the choice of which agency to use- where will I find my child?  Will it be with this agency or that?  What if I choose the wrong agency?  How will my child find me?  It's in this type of decision that I wish life, and the adoption journey, came with an instruction manual.

We have some pieces of the puzzle that we will never lose: love, security, self-confidence, faith.  But there is another piece that is extremely easy to lose:

hope- it is soooo easy to lose the hope that this journey will end the way that we want it to end, and if we lose this, we essentially lose all of the other pieces- they become invisible to us, like the blue sky on a cloudy day.  It may be there, but we just can't see it.

We are in the middle of this journey, and trying to find all of the pieces of the puzzle- of our puzzle, our child.  Each puzzle is different, and the pieces only fit together when its the right puzzle.  We thought we had found our puzzle, and all of our pieces, but came to realize that the pieces we had gathered did not fit together.  Whether we just simply gathered random pieces, thinking they would fit, or whether some of the pieces were counterfeit and given to us with the intent of deception, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that in the end we find all of our pieces to our puzzle, and figure out how to put them together.

This is our journey.  Share it.  Tell someone.  Tell someone you know.

Be a piece to someone's puzzle.