Not Supposed to Be Mine

Seven days.

After 1,642 days of waiting, of court dates and caseworkers and decisions I wasn't allowed to make, of loving children I had no legal right to call mine — seven days until I do.

Seven days until my daughters are officially, legally, permanently Sankeys.

I should just let that be joyful. And it is. It absolutely is. There is a specific kind of joy that only exists at the end of a very long wait — the kind that has been stress-tested and wrung out and still comes up gold. That is what this week feels like. I am full. I am grateful. I am the woman standing at the end of the marathon with her arms raised who also cannot feel her legs.

But I'd be lying to you if I said joy was the only thing in the room.

Because the truth, the full truth, the one that's easy to skip over in the celebration — is sitting right next to the joy, and it matters just as much. And I think if you're adoptive or foster or step, you might need to hear someone say it out loud.

These girls were not supposed to be mine.

I want you to stay with that for a second before you argue with me. I know what your heart wants to do. It wants to say, "But God ordained this. He planned it. He knew all along." And in some beautiful, sovereignty-of-God sense, yes. But here is the harder, truer thing underneath that: God's perfect, original design for family was not this. It was not fragmented. It was not a child carried by one woman and raised by another. It was not courts and TPRs and 1,642 days of legal limbo before a little girl could have a permanent last name.

That is not what He designed. Sin did this.

Sin. The thing that broke the world and keeps breaking it, that is why these girls are mine. God, in His sovereign mercy, took the broken pieces and put them in my home and said love them anyway. And I do. With my whole heart, I do. But if I skip the part where those pieces were broken in the first place, I am whitewashing a picture He did not paint and calling it beautiful.

The picture He painted was beautiful. It was a family that looked nothing like mine.

That is the hardest thing any adoptive parent will ever have to swallow.

I remember the day they came like it was branded on my brain. Our 11-week-old baby came in a car seat, wrapped in a fuzzy tie-dye blanket she clearly considered her own. Tiny. Easy. She slept through the night like a little lamb who had no idea what was happening around her, bless her heart. Our toddler walked through the front door as a two-year-old on a mission, and the second she saw how many rooms we had, how many toys, the TV, she was in. She immediately began scoping out her kingdom.

Our house went from four people to eight overnight. EIGHT.

I remember standing in the middle of that chaos, feeling overwhelmed and scared and completely lost; like someone had handed me an instruction manual in a language I didn't speak and expected me to build something that couldn't afford to be built wrong. I was drowning in the best possible sense of the word. Which is still drowning. Drowning is still drowning.

And somewhere in those first hours, holding a baby who had no idea her whole world had just shifted, I thought: what did we just do?

What we did was say yes to brokenness.

Say yes to somebody else's grief becoming our daily reality.

Say yes to loving two little girls who belonged — who should have belonged — to a family that wasn't ours.

I don't know exactly when the shift happened. I don't think there was one moment — I think there were a thousand small ones, stacked up over 1,642 days, like stones in a wall. But I know two of them by name. The first time each of them called me Mom. The first time each of them looked for me when they needed comfort. Not anyone else. Me. Mom.

Those moments didn't make them mine in the biological sense. They didn't rewrite the story of who carried them or who they were created for. But they did something I still can't fully put into words — they made it clear that whatever God was doing with all of this broken and scattered material, He was building something. And I got to be part of it.

That is a grace I did not earn. I want to say that plainly.

Our oldest has a growing relationship with her birth mother — one that is safe, sober, and stable — and I believe that relationship is part of her healing. It gives her something to hold. Our youngest daughter, though — she never formed that bond. And she still carries a confusion about that, still works through what it means that the woman who carried her is someone she doesn't feel attached to. There are no clean answers there. There's just love and patience and a lot of conversations that don't resolve neatly.

Both of them are excited for adoption day. Both of them want to know when they get to be "official Sankeys." They are ready. They are asking for this.

And STILL, even in their readiness, even in their joy, there is a thread of loss woven into this that I refuse to cut out of the story. Cutting it out would be a lie. It would be a kindness that actually isn't kind. The family they were created for is not mine. Honoring that truth — holding it with both hands even on the most joyful day of our lives — is not a contradiction of love. It IS love. It is the kind of love that doesn't need to rewrite history to feel secure.

So here is what I want to say to every adoptive parent, every foster parent, every step-parent who has loved a child that the world didn't originally put in your arms: You do not have to pretend God planned the brokenness.

He planned you, your yes, your staying, your love — but the brokenness? That was sin. And it is okay to grieve that. It is okay to look at your child and feel the weight of everything they lost before they ever got to you. It is okay to say: this is not how it was supposed to be, and it is also exactly where I am supposed to be.

Both things are true. Hold both. If you rush past the loss, you will eventually communicate to your child — without meaning to — that their grief is inconvenient. That the story only counts from the part where they were yours. And they will learn to hide the parts that don't fit. Don't do that to them.

Sit in it with them. Name it. Let it be hard. And then — when they look at you and call you Mom, and you watch their little face light up at the thought of sharing your last name — let THAT be hard too. Let it be full. Let it be the most complicated, grace-drenched, beautiful-and-broken thing you've ever been part of. That is what it is.

In seven days, my daughters will be Sankeys. Legal, forever, not-going-anywhere Sankeys.

They were designed for a family that sin dismantled. And through that dismantling, God placed them with me — not because this was His original plan, but because this is His redemptive one.

There is a difference. And the difference matters.

He adopts us the same way, you know. We were not created for separation from Him. We were designed for perfect communion, and sin wrecked it. And through the brokenness — through a cross that should have never been necessary — He brought us home anyway.

So when I stand in that courtroom in seven days and watch a judge make it official, I will feel joy and grief in the same breath. I will think of the family my daughters were created for and the one they are becoming part of. I will think of a God who takes broken things and refuses to leave them that way.

And I will say thank you. For all of it. Even the parts that were never supposed to happen. Especially those.