One of the strange parallels between losing our son and having our adoption fall through is they transpired in exactly the same amount of time, roughly two years apart. Our son received a terminal diagnosis early in the second trimester of our pregnancy, and passed away exactly 100 days later in July of 2014. For 100 days we loved and cared for a child who we knew, barring a miracle, we would never get to raise (I wrote about this more extensively here). The 100 days were not a guarantee – his condition was so rare that our doctors could not predict anything about how our pregnancy was going to continue. So we began each day by waking up and listening to his heart on a portable fetal doppler, a drumbeat that gave us the resolve to march onward and ask for a miracle. On the 100th morning of this ritual, the drumbeat silenced, and life as a family of three suspended.
Remarkably, it was also 100 days between when a woman in Kansas selected us to adopt her child this past June, and when she informed us that she had changed her mind in September. For 100 days we grew to love a child we would ultimately never get to meet. Each night we whispered to him goodnight from thousands of miles away praying he would hear it. Then we stopped with no ceremony or closure. It was over, just like that.
I believe in the importance of living one day at a time when you are in the thick of a crisis ― it’s how we survived those times when more than one single day’s worry would truly bury us. But in the moments where we needed to make a major decision about committing to this crazy dream, exiting our present and widening our perspective to the past and future was crucial. My husband and I are in our thirties, which means that if we live into our eighties we very well may have 20,000 days ahead of us. The prospect of living on this Earth for 20,000 more days without children of our own makes us infinitely more sad than the 100 days we just endured. Protecting ourselves from more pain today by giving up this hope promises exponentially more pain in the future. So we keep fighting alongside the hope that we will someday be parents because we refuse the accept the alternative, and when it gets to be too much right now we lean on our family and friends and faith to get us through.
This kind of fighting hope ― fueled by perspective ― is what I am dedicated to live out in all areas of my life in 2017.
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In the days after the election, I read (and re-read many times) a short but poignant essay in the New Yorker responding to Trump’s victory by one of my favorite authors, Junot Díaz. In it he wrote:
“But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. ‘What makes this hope radical,’ Lear writes, ‘is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.’ Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence.’ Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible.”
His piece was of course written in a very different context, but I believe this concept is transcendent and beautifully puts to words the type of hope I also speak of. Not just in parenting, but in all areas of life where I have an unwavering belief in the importance of a different future. And right now, there are many. I think it’s critically important as we all look to 2017 that we hold on to our ambitious goals in the face of our tragedies, make new ones with passion, and then fight alongside radical hope to get there. There have been many, many times in our hope to be parents where despair was justifiable, but we have survived the end of our world and continue to fight simply because we refuse to lose hope.
Here’s to 2017, a year in which we fight together alongside hope. Happy New Year.
This article originally appeared here.
