We walked into the SDA office in Kiev at 9:00 a.m. that morning with excitement, nervousness, and hope. It was time to officially get the referral for our daughters! We walked out one hour later with grieving hearts and temporarily diminished faith. The two little girls, who had been loved by our family as daughters and sisters for 7 months, were not among the files set before us in that office. We were offered no explanation; we just had to move on with the business of looking at other children's files. We had numbly chosen two other children to meet, but we were barely thinking about them on this day.
It's impossible to describe how you can grieve for two children who you've never even met. I've never experienced pregnancy loss, but I'm going to be bold - and pray that I don't offend anyone - and say that I believe that the grief we felt was probably similar. I've thought a lot about that over the past year, and talked with a few people who have had miscarriages; I really think that's the best way to make people understand how it felt to be told that "our" girls would never be coming home with us. I may not have been physically pregnant, but the love we felt for them was exactly the same as how we had felt for baby Sophia and baby Claire as we had anticipated their arrivals. We prayed for a long time for these girls and prepared our home and family for them. We prepared Sophia and Claire for their new sisters and talked about them every day as if they had always been part of our family. We shared the news with family and friends and rejoiced as everyone shared in our excitement. We decorated their bedroom and filled their closet with clothes, just like you would for a new baby. We sent them letters and gifts to introduce our family to them and let them know that they were already deeply loved. We were already a family of six before we ever got on a plane.
Despite our grief, of course, we eventually moved forward in faith and God introduced us to our Anya and Sasha. I don't think that anyone who has seen our family in action could deny that God knew what He was doing. Through the good days as well as the hard ones, they just fit with us. But the truth is that Tanya and Rita still - always - hold an irreplaceable spot in the fabric of our family. I will probably always pause on April 10th to quietly reflect on that tearful day, thank God for his wisdom and guidance, and pray over the sweet girls who brought us to Ukraine and to our son and daughter.
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