april 8.

One year ago today, David came home from work, walked into the kitchen where I was cooking dinner, and told me that he’d just received an email from our adoption agency. It was about two brothers, ages 3 and 2, who needed a family. My heart stopped in its tracks, and then pounded on. Wait. What?

But David wasn’t asking me if we wanted to be considered for adopting the brothers; he was letting me know he already responded with a “Yes!”

I was terrified.

But I trusted him.

We knew almost nothing about the boys. We didn’t know what they looked like or their names or where exactly in South Carolina they lived. We knew a few vague details about their situation. We knew that their birth mom wanted an open adoption.

My mind began racing a-mile-a-minute. I couldn’t sleep at night. We’re supposed to get a baby. That’s the path we chose.

Adopting a baby would change our life. Adopting two toddlers would change it way more. I wore myself out weighing each pro and con over a decision that I felt would spell out our entire future — and yet there was too little information to properly make my list, too many variables. I felt the control slipping from my fingers, and I am a girl who likes control.

But also, somewhere in that tailspin, in my heart of hearts, I felt the tiniest sliver of hope.

When I lay in bed, wide-eyed at 2 a.m., I had pictures in my head. Fuzzy pictures, of two nameless, faceless boys, slightly damp and clean-smelling from the bath, piled onto our well-worn India sofa with Judah and Amelie and I for story time. Pounding across the hardwood floors, screeching and wrestling with David. Jumping on our trampoline. Sleeping in the baby’s room.

I was so terrified that first day. I’m a fairly intuitive person, but I had absolutely no sense of the outcome to this story — would these boys be ours, or would they not? Was this email The One, or would we get passed over like we had for the dozen other recruitment emails we’d responded “yes” to?

We generally kept recruitment emails to ourselves, and we didn’t mention it to our kids, but I frantically texted close friends and family, begging for prayer, and they hopped on the roller coaster right along with us. I changed my mind many, many times. I said, “No David, we can’t do this. It’s too much. Please write our adoption agency back and withdraw our names.” And he hugged me like he has so many times in our married life and said, “I know, babe. I love you. Let’s take the leap.”

I wanted my comfortable, semi-predictable life. I wanted the baby’s room that I’d filled with my grandma’s patchwork quilt and an IKEA futon for late-night feedings and carefully painted-and-distressed photo frames with prints. I wanted the the swing and Britax infant carseat and the tray of glass baby bottles our friends had passed along to us. I wanted gauzy swaddle blankets and pacifiers and all the first milestones.

But those boys.

They were lodged in my head and I couldn’t get them out. Where were they, right this minute? What were they doing? They were three and two, and our own biological children were seven and five. They could be folded seamlessly into our family in a moment . . . seven, five, three, two. They are perfect for us.

I ached for them as a mother aches, even as I was afraid of them, of the unknown. I ached for their birth mom, as a fellow mother aches. I cried all the time.

Father, I’m so scared, but I think I know what I want. Will You give it to me?

On Monday, April 13th, I walked through the dining room, carrying a mug of steaming tea to the back porch. It had been five long days since the email. I was Moving On. I happened to look down at my phone, and in that exact moment, it started buzzing, and I saw “David Gentino” on the screen. And I knew.

I’d waited for this call every single day, almost every hour, for six months. Like someone in a dream, I answered it.

And my life changed.

Eleven days later, we dropped our kids at their cousins’ house for the day, and drove the hour-and-a-half to sit in a small city office with our social worker and sign a whole stack of papers. And then, just like that, in what felt like the most anticlimactic moment of a lifetime, David and I had two more children.

By then we knew their hair color and eye color, we knew their names, and the tone of their voices. We’d read them board books in Barnes and Noble and scampered across playgrounds after them. But we didn’t know them. We’d never fed them or changed their diapers or sung them a lullaby. We’d never even heard them cry.

It was the most surreal experience of our lives, and the road ahead was harder than those agonizing 16 days between receiving the first email and adopting our boys. Well, in a way. In a way it was easier, because it was finished and also it was just beginning. We were embarking on the rest of our lives together.

This year has been filled with more joy and love and support than we could ever have imagined.

Right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop at the end of a long, tiring week. There are tears in my eyes, because I feel very inadequate for this task of mothering four children. I’ve lost my temper this week. I’ve scolded my kids for things that just.don’t.matter. I’ve thrown up my hands at complaining and sibling quarrels and have laundered my duvet, duvet-cover and every part of our bedding, not once, but twice, due to nap-time potty accidents of the three-year-old (don’t ask). I’ve scrolled Instagram to avoid engaging with my family. I’ve thought, I cannot do this one more day. I can’t.

Even as I write these things, I’m fully aware that the above list contains only what went wrong this week, and not the good moments, and that makes me even more frustrated with myself.

And yet. Just now, I pause and think back to this day, one year ago, when it all began. When we took the leap.

We received an email and we were scared and excited, and we knew that a whole mountain of obstacles stood between us and adopting those boys. Over 16 days, we watched, open-mouthed, as God moved that mountain. By the time the papers were signed we had not one doubt.

God brought those brothers into our home, our life, and some days I’m desperately weary and overwhelmed by noise and touch and little needs. But I know, even in the hard weeks, that God has given us something indescribably beautiful.

He answered our cries for a child, and He gave all six of us exactly what we need. He made us a family. I wouldn’t trade Gabriel and Noah for all the sweet-smelling, wrinkly newborns in the world.

I don’t feel good enough for this task, but that doesn’t matter because God chose me to be their mom. He has written us a beautiful story; can’t I trust Him to be faithful in my hard days and bad moods?

I can.

This is a day for celebrating.