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Welcome friend! This is the Living With Joy Renewed podcast, where adoptive families find healing for the present and hope for the future.
I'm Jeanette Nafziger, and I'm here to come alongside you on your parenting journey each week with tips, real-life stories, and encouragement to help your family find renewed joy at home.
Thanks so much for joining me here today. As I share these podcasts, I'm going to be sharing stories from our experiences as a family from some the some of the highs where we were up in the mountain and celebrating success to the pits and the lows of the really hard days. So today, I want to share with you the story of our family. So as I share these experiences with you, you can picture who we are, where we came from, how our story got started, I want you to understand a little bit of who we are, so that you feel like you're part of our story. Our adoption stories start out a little easier than some and maybe a little bit more difficult than others. But it's our story. And we look back on it with thankfulness because it's shaped who we are today, not just as a family, but myself and my husband. We're different people than we would have been if we had not gone through this experience. And we are so thankful for it. Our story starts 30 years ago, when my husband and I got married at a very young age, we wanted to have a family. That was our main goal was to raise children. So after being married for a few years and trying to have children, we realized this was not going to be as easy as what other people made it look, I guess. So, you know, we went to we started some fertility treatments talk to some fertility drug doctors, we were told that we had a one in a million chance of ever getting pregnant naturally. And that even with fertility treatments, it was going to be a very, very difficult process. And they didn't have much faith that it was going to be successful. We did go through one fertility treatment. It was not a pleasant experience for us. And it didn't work. And we didn't feel like we were supposed to pursue that avenue. Looking back, I realized we had so much peace still about what our family was going to look like we never panicked. We never had that thought, what if this doesn't happen? We just had a piece that things were going to work the way they were supposed to work out. And at the time, we were involved with our church, we were actually the youth group leaders at our church. And one of the youth members came to youth group one night and just shared that his family had just picked up their first foster child. It was an infant they picked up from the hospital the day before. And something in me lit up. And it wasn't at that moment. It wasn't so much of an adoption, maybe we should think about adoption. It was more, huh? I want to meet that baby. I shared this with my husband on the way home. Of course he gave me a look that said you are absolutely crazy. And it's not the last time he ever gave me that look either. But we did decide, you know, maybe we could talk about adoption. And we didn't talk about it that night. We didn't talk about it that week. But later that week, we were in a meeting. And this family was there. And they had this little baby girl with them. And of course everybody's over in the corner wooing annoying over this, this precious little baby. So I went over and I looked at her and they were friends of ours, she she put the baby in my arms. And I just looked at her and she was so perfect. And so, so beautiful. My husband came up behind me to see what all the fuss was about. And I turned around and they put the baby in his arms. And I looked up at him and the minute he looked at her he got tears in his eyes. They flowed down his cheek. Now my husband is a beautifully emotional person. But the feelings he felt that night he would describe it something he's never felt before. And that moment changed our world forever. We actually did end up adopting that baby. That baby. She had been that's our oldest adopted daughter and she had been abandoned at the hospital by her birth mother. And her birth mother was overwhelmed. I don't know the whole story. But I just know that she decided I can't take care of this baby and somebody else can do it better. That's what she told the nurses and she just left one day without really telling anybody. So we were able to do respite care for her bond with her. And as we were friends with this family, and eventually we became licensed as foster parents and got her into our home as a foster child. And by the time she was 10 months old, she was adopted. So that was our introduction to foster care and adoption. Definitely an easier story than most I look back on that and wonder how in the world that that happens so easily so smoothly. But I think it just laid the foundation for us to continue pursuing this avenue of adoption, as it came along. We found out actually about a year and a half later that we were pregnant, naturally. And our son came along two years after our our adopted daughter was born. And he those was a great blessing. Now we had two beautiful children. We were so excited, we hadn't really pursued anything. I'm gonna go back. We were so excited to have this little family leaves two beautiful children. We did keep our home open for foster care over this time, but we were only doing respite care, we were taking in emergency placements, children who had to have a place to stay for a night or two until they could find a more permanent solution for them. We were also doing respite care for other foster families in the area that needed a licensed foster home to do babysitting and weekend care for their children. We did get a call Then one day, about two years after our son was born from the county that our daughter had been adopted from, and they said that there was a little boy that had been born. He was a birth sibling to our daughter they had they shared the same birth mother, that he was in a foster home. He was about a month old at the time. And would we consider taking him in as a foster child. Since we had kinship, we had his sister. And we'd said we definitely would. He was not considered a foster to adopt placement at that time. For about a year, we did have supervised visits with birth parents every week. So he saw them every week for the first year. That situation ended up not working out the parents were not able to reunify with him. And so we were available as an adoptive home for him. And we did adopt him about a year and a half after he had been born. So here we are with now three children. To adopted one biological child, we are suddenly outnumbered. having the time of our lives. We love having these little kids around. So much fun. But we were outnumbered. So we closed our home to foster care, at least for the time being. So that we could focus on raising these three little ones. About two years after our third son had been born, that our second adopt a second son, our second adopted child. So scratch that. So about two years after our third child was born. We got a call from the same county again that our first two adopted children were from. And they said that they had they were in need of a foster home for a little girl had been born just the day before she needed picked up the next day, we had an hour to decide. Now we were not actually open at that time for foster care. And we were still licensed but we weren't open. So we really actually never have figured out why they called us for this placement. They said that she was a foster adoptive placement and that they needed a home that would be willing to adopt her. Because most likely that's where this case was going to go. So we had like I said we had one hour to decide. So we did decide, yes, we would we would take this little woman and loved her from the very very start and went and picked her up from the hospital and Oh, What a precious precious little thing. But within two weeks, they had changed the goal to reunification with her birth mother. So we said okay, so this is going to look different than we we had been told it was going to look but all of you who have worked in the foster care and adoptive system know that that is kind of par for the course there doesn't always look the way we're told it's gonna look like and that's okay, because this is a process that is just has many different outcomes, many different possible outcomes. So for six months, our youngest did a supervised visits with mom every week. And at the six month hearing, the plan was to increase those visits and start the reunification process. That's what they went into the courtroom with a plan but the magistrate in that case, actually, in that, in that hearing, she decided that what she felt was best for the child was to actually change the goal to adoption, not to continue the reunification process. And this surprised everyone, the birth mother decided she wanted to appeal that she had been working hard. She had been coming to every visit doing what she needed to do. And so she wanted to appeal that decision. But within a few weeks, when things really started falling apart, in this case for birth mother, she made the difficult decision decision to terminate her rights to voluntarily sign sign away her rights. She came out of a visit one day, and she just had tears on her face. And she said that she wanted stability for her little one. And I can't imagine how hard that decision had to have been for her to make. I admire her strength. I admire her ability to make a decision for her child that probably tore her apart. And all of our children's birth mothers. I just honor who they are in our children in our children's lives, and the strength it took to make some of the decisions that they had to make. So here we are now with four children. All two years apart. Loving life we just enjoyed. Like I said, having these little ones around. We moved about 500 miles away when our when our children, our youngest was just preschool age. We moved about 500 miles away from our hometown and our families. And we lived in another state for about eight years. While we were there, we were next door to a wonderful family, who's great grandparents were raising their four granddaughters and one of the daughters became best friends with my daughter. When we moved back to our hometown, eight years later, this young girl asked her grandparents, if she could come live with us go to school where we were going to be there were some good opportunities for her here. She was a young teenager at the time and the grandparents said yes, you can, you can do that. So that was about 10 years ago, she has been with us ever since she is our fifth child. She's actually the oldest of all of them by a year older than our first adopted daughter. And she is my is as much our daughter as any of our other children. She's still connected with her family, she sees her sisters often goes down and visits her grandparents. But we are so blessed to have her as part of our family too. So when we introduce our family, we say that we have three adopted children, one biological child and one acquired child, which makes her laugh. But that's how we got started. That's where our that's where our family originated from. That's how it evolved to become who we are. I say that we are one great big loving mess sundaes. A beautiful mess, though. Just trying to figure out who each other is all coming from such different stories. It's beautiful and difficult all at the same time. And I'm sure all of you who are listening to this who are adoptive parents understand exactly what I mean when I say that. But we wouldn't change it for the world, we would not change the way our family came together and evolved for anything. They have taught us so much our children, I'm really a different person than I would have been if my story had looked different. But there are things I wish I had known in their childhood years that I know now. And that's why we're together now on these podcasts. And that's why Joy renewed as a foundation was formed. I want to share with you what I've learned some of the mistakes I've made some of the successes that have come out of pure instinct and intuition than anything else. And I want Joy renewed to be in an organization that walks alongside parents equips them helps them with relevant day to day information as you raise these beautiful adoptive children. We offer life groups for adoptive parents that offer support and encouragement from other adoptive parents, often in the same situations. My husband and I often felt like we were alone, out there that no one really understood our world. And because of that, we often actually felt judged. When we began to understand that we couldn't really parent our children to traditionally according to everybody else's expectations. We felt the judgments. We felt I mean, we've even had very close friends in later years. apologize saying I did judge you. And we did make a lot of mistakes. Don't get me wrong we do as parents, we're human, we all make mistakes. But I am thankful that we did learn some things about what it looks like to not parent, traditionally, because we had to understand our adopted children in a different way than other parents have to understand their biological children. And that's okay. We just need to be able to have the knowledge to be able to do that. And that's where we are today here, with joy renewed. We also offer family relationship coaching, we want to help families, increase positive communication, increase their knowledge, increase their understanding of one another. We don't really focus on particular behaviors or problems like that we really want to help families be equipped to create a home environment that is a safe haven for their children as they navigate their world and what it means to be an adoptee in this world. We also offer parent trainings to equip adoptive parents with the right tools when they need them to get through tough times. And we're available for speaking engagements. I love to go out and share my stories to help groups gain knowledge and an understanding of what it looks like to support and adoptive family. I also like to offer encouragement to groups of adoptive families. Because we all need each other. We all have to share with one another what works, what didn't work, what we've learned what we wish we knew what we wish we knew more about in order to be able to help each other through this. So check out our webpage live with joy renewed.com learn a little bit more about who we are. I just want to be able to walk alongside you as you travel one of the more difficult roads of a parent. Together we can raise amazing human beings who will themselves be equipped to fulfill their own destiny in life. Thanks for listening. Check us out again.