The Runner-Up Version of Me. And Adoption, Part 1

So I’m fifteen posts in, and my amateur blogging self has discovered a pattern: almost every time I post, the topic I’m trying to muck through just happens to be that week’s hurdle as well. Like last week? My snarky recovery program was front row in the struggle. My chronological journal-post series is lining up like lifting emotional barbells on a regular basis.

And it’s the same thing this week, again. I'm at the place in my life story where I accidentally ran into the son I gave up for adoption when I was in high school. But before I can tell you that part (next week) I have to tell you how it all started in the first place. However, unwed mothers are getting all kinds of press this week, and the things that are said just open that wound up all over again. Ughhhh. I’m not going to lie: sometimes I get so mad at my computer that I have inner-thought conversations with random commenters all day long.

So here it is.

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When I was seventeen I got pregnant. The dad was my first real boyfriend, and we’d been dating for almost a year - we even went to Christian retreats and camps together. I wore a “Promise Ring” on a necklace from my parents, and that was that. I was super involved in our huge church- musicals, youth group, volunteering... all of it. I had my little Christian friends in all my classes at my state-of-the-art school in the suburbs, and had no idea alcohol was even a thing. I was in sports and honor society and orchestra and piano and...

Who cares. I was still the saddest, most broken person from as long as I could remember. None of my friends knew I felt that way cause Happy is cooler than Sad, so I put on Happy. No vulnerability, no real conversations, just trying to be a Good Enough teenager was my story. Yes, I suppose I could’ve sat down at the dinner table, where we had homemade family dinner almost every night and said, “Hi. I feel like I’m sad and like I don't really matter. But having a boyfriend fixes that, and I don’t really know why”... yes, I could've done that. Except, I didn’t even know that back then, and who says stuff like that anyway? Don’t talk about feelings - feelings lie. Just suck it up and be less sad and annoying and needy. I didn’t know much of anything in the emotional intelligence department except to try to Keep Calm & Act Like You're Not Sad.

I had decided around this time that God didn't really care about me a whole bunch - which is not cool when all your friends are Christians. How could I miss the whole Unconditional Love part if I was so involved in church? It's like the whole point! Well, I missed it, because it just didn't make sense. I mean, come on: there was a whole wide world of people. I was just one person, and it was difficult for my super-reasonable argumentative side to understand why I mattered. I was the middle child of three girls and felt like it was a constant battle of performance performance performance, and I just got bored with that. My years and years, and YEARS, of youth group and Bible-reading didn’t deliver God’s love to my heart. The message I internalized there was still good: “Well, you matter cause HE LOVES YOU”. But... what did that even MEAN? A person I've never met and I've never seen, LOVES me? How the heck am I supposed to make that real? It was like a Dad that had to love me because I was his daughter, but other than that he'd only take me out for proverbial ice cream if I did something impressive. The rest of the time? Who knows. So, “Yes, I know He loves me, and I had the best week in my devotions” is what I’d say instead. And I DID do devotions, and I DID believe God existed - but... I just didn't FEEL the love. It felt like a program. So I kept trying harder. Maybe then I would feel like I mattered?

Enter my first boyfriend. Like most boys at that age, he’d call me all the time for no reason at all. He wasn’t checking in to see if I’d “witnessed” that day, or remembered to pray. He didn’t care how perfect my grades were or how well I played the violin so that we could go have a date and get ice cream. We’d just... go get ice cream. We’d sit on the phone for hours with nothing to say (email wasn’t invented quite yet you guys, oh for real). There was no striving required. If I messed up and admitted I had done something imperfect-like, he didn’t care. And I didn’t have to read The Boyfriend Devotional to get his attention and affection, he’d just call me anyway to see what was “up”. I mattered, just because - plus nothing. (Of course, at the time I didn’t literally THINK any of this - my teenage version at the time sounded more like, “this is fun, I feel happy, so having a boyfriend must be my thing”). And no, pregnancy was never ever the plan, you guys. We dated almost a year and it was a slow fade that neither of us saw coming. Promise ring and all.

But it came. And WOAH. The whole ordeal was nothing I’d wish on anyone - and I don’t even mean the actual physical pregnancy part - but the shame and humiliation and rejection part. It's for real. And real - only for the girl, not the boy. People who barely knew my name were suddenly saying things like, “I guess she never had a relationship with God to begin with,” and “I bet she sleeps with everyone”. The former hurt way more than the latter. One girl from church who had borrowed me a hat I hadn’t yet returned, told a friend, “Well, screw her, she can keep the hat... oh, wait... someone did that already! Haaaa!” The hardest part for me was that a lot of the worst came from girls who had admitted to me their own failings in the physical department, but just hadn’t gotten pregnant like I had. Sex before marriage wasn’t the shameful part - pregnancy was.

I had to quit all my sports and clubs and activities. I was supposed to play my violin in a community play and they stopped calling. I was too terrified of painful comments at the church I'd grown up at, so I stopped going. I suddenly had nothing impressive to my name - my long list of things I’d spent my whole teenage life getting value from dissolved. I was simply, A Pregnant Teen, now. As everyone else was gearing up for our Senior year of high school, I was at home trying to get a head start on homework and classes that I taught myself, so I could still maybe graduate. And all along the way I kept thinking, you're disgusting. If you had just stuck with the God program Annie, worked harder to not be a dumb drone, you never would’ve been here. Now, you’re a disappointment to everyone, God included. You deserve every rejection and disgust look you get.

At that point I kinda gave up on praying. You can’t pray when you’re pregnant like that - my big unmarried belly cancelled those prayers out pretty much. No point in talking to the wall. God still loved me of course - that’s what He does - but he wouldn't be taking me out for ice cream any time soon. I was just fitting under the big umbrella of God’s Love, and there was nothing much individual about it. The girl I was “supposed to be” was an impossibility now - but there was the runner-up version of myself left I could attain to. I needed to be grateful that I could be forgiven by people *after* the baby was born, that God had forgiven me, and that I could possibly work hard enough to show everyone that I really did love Him, after all.

One day, my best friend's Mom brought over a pamphlet from one of her co-workers on an agency that did something called Open Independent Adoption. You pick the parents personally, make any rules you like, decide how everything's going to go, and you're in charge. I had already known adoption was for me, but it terrified me too - what would it be like to always wonder how they were, what they were like? Never knowing those things sounded hell-ish to me. This version of it? Perfect. I went to the agency from the pamphlet and paged through hundreds of one-page letters in a three ring binder, all written by parents who wanted children. I was horrified and terrified to read them, but cried through every one, hearing their desperate heart's cries for children they couldn't have themselves. I got to the end of the binder and closed it. A couple letters had stood out, but I couldn't pick, I just couldn't. I was 17. How in the world could I pick?

"Is there anyone not in the book yet who's wanting to adopt that you know of?" I asked. Really, I'm thinking, let's just make it easy and can you make my decision for me please?

There was.

So this is how it turned out: the pamphlet my friend's mom brought over? It was given to her by a co-worker that already adopted from this agency - they had a two year old. Turns out, this co-worker and his wife went to my big huge church too. Turns out they had gone on stage a year before and told their beautiful adoption story that I had probably heard and paid no attention to at the time - like I usually didn't in church back then, blah. And somehow I got the tape of that service, and watched it, and cried. They were the ones I wanted. I emailed them. We met for dinner, face to face.

I remember the day, when the woman who adopted my son told me in person that God’s love was nothing like I thought it was. I laughed at first, brushing it off, saying “...yeah, I know I know... God loves... I know.” She persisted: “No, no, listen - I don’t think you DO know.” I was too tough to admit my shame to her - I wanted her to think I was *something*. She went to the very church where I was getting rejected by my peers, and what if everyone there felt that way about "people like me"? I wanted to be impressive so she wouldn't believe any of it. I wanted her to like me. But she cut through all the crap, and she told me it was ridiculous. That the pain I felt from the blasting comments hurt God too. That He never saw me as someone to be ashamed of. She told me how she wanted to start a ministry where pregnant teens could come and feel God's love. And I always thought she would, because I felt God's love through her that day. Her passion, refusing to let me believe for a second that God was ashamed of me... she couldn't stand it. She was defending Him as if... they had been out for ice cream together recently. She knew Him in a way I didn't, yet.

At the time I thought, "well hey: at least the runner-up version of me can get to know God like that, since the person I was "supposed to be" couldn't...

I believe that the runner-up version of ourselves can be better than the "supposed-to-be" version if we let God take over. He specializes in under-dogging it. Because when we're stripped of all our works, our perfect social life, and maybe even our money and accomplishments, we know that when things go well it's him trying to get an Ice Cream date. I'll tell teens all day long to never ever have sex because I know it's all wrong. But weakness that produces pain and despair is God's favorite place to step in, because we're willing to admit we need Him then. Blessed are the brokenhearted, you see. Maybe we have bankruptcy and divorce and failure. But the runner-up is better at knowing that their value doesn't come from being in first place, so they don't have to strive to stay there. Their value comes from knowing God cares about who they are, and not what they've done. And that is amazing freedom.

#IceCreamDateForLife

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SFAwzySMy8