Coincidence? Or Sign?
Albert Einstein said, "There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle."
Maybe I'm a romantic, but I can't help but think the latter. I mean, when it comes to coincidences there are just too many big ones in life! So if I tell you mine, will you tell me yours? Because I'd love to hear them! Ok, here are my 2 big ones (both happened during the adoption of our first baby):
COINCIDENCE/SIGN #1:
My husband and I had dreamed of having kids for so long and had been unable to conceive. If you've gone through infertility, you'll relate to the feeling: it's devastating. It made it even harder that my daily drive to work would take me past one particular just idyllic-looking family who lived down the block from us. Every day I'd watch those parents pushing their two beautiful girls on tricycles, or making chalk art with them on the sidewalk, and I'd say to myself through exasperated tears, "Why can't I just have a family like that? That's all I want. Is that too much to ask???!!"
So when Dave and I finally got up the guts to fill out the adoption application, we were pretty terrified about it. Adoption is a scary, uncharted leap of faith...and it wasn't how we had originally pictured becoming parents. But we sucked it up and dropped that letter in the mailbox, hoping we were doing the right thing.
A few days later, there was a knock on our front door. I opened it to find the father of the two little girls from down the street standing at our front step, holding an envelope in his hand. It was a letter of receipt acknowledging that we had applied to adopt. It had Catholic Charities' return address in the top corner, and ours as the addressee.
"I don't know why we got this in our mailbox," he said. "It's addressed to you correctly, but somehow the mailman delivered it to our house down the street. And I know we've never met, so I don't want to be a nosy neighbor...but I just want to say that I know what this letter is. We worked with Catholic Charities when we adopted our two little girls."
(As I'm writing this, my two little girls are sleeping upstairs. We adopted them both through Catholic Charities.)
COINCIDENCE/SIGN #2:
Being on the adoption waiting list is a weird kind of limbo. You could get a call out of the blue, or not hear anything for years. So we - like a lot of waiting parents - decided not to acquire any "baby stuff" during that time so we wouldn't be constantly reminded of the limbo we were in! But we did make an exception to that rule on Valentines Day, 2015. We decided to spend our Valentine "date" at the used bookstore to pick out some books for our baby-to-be.
We had a blast, spending hours leafing through the cardboard baby books, reminiscing at the familiar ones and shouting with excitement when we found books about our favourite subjects. Dave the baseball fanatic chose "H is for Home Run" and a picture book of the Star Wars characters. I chose "The ABCs of Canada", "The Tale of Jeremy Fisher", a picture book about gardening, and a little gratitude poem called "I'm Thankful Each Day".
We brought our little pile of books home and stacked them on the bottom shelf of a cabinet that's built into the wall of our bedroom. They were the first physical acknowledgement of the fact that we were hoping to have a baby someday soon.
Up on the top shelf of the cabinet, collecting dust, was a music box that belonged to Dave's mom. (She had died when Dave was 10, and his Dad had recently also passed away, as had my Mom.) I don't think we had EVER wound that music box up...it had just moved with us from house to house, finding a home on that top shelf as a little seen-but-not-heard decoration.
Dave and I sat in bed that night with glasses of wine, talking about the books we'd bought and how excited we were to read them someday. Then fell into a sweet sleep...until 3am, when we suddenly awoke to a tiny, tinkling song playing somewhere in the corner of the bedroom. "Wha? What IS that?" we mumbled to each other, stumbling around in the dark to find the light switch and the source of the sound.
It was the music box. Playing. By itself. Untouched. Never having been wound. Never having been jostled. Playing for absolutely no scientific reason.
It played its little song for about a minute, then stopped...then played again for another minute, then stopped...then played for one more minute, and then stopped for good. We've never heard it play since.
Three times. Significant? Well, since I'm the "everything is a miracle" type, I believe it is. Because we had three parents somewhere on the other side of the universe, and the way I see it, they were telling us "We see your books. We know what you're trying to do. We've got your back. We're working on this for you."
Four months later, we brought home our brand new baby girl, sat in a rocking chair next to that bookshelf, and read her the books we had chosen.
Coincidence? Or Sign?
Ok....now will you tell me yours?? Write them in the comments, or message me on Facebook if you'd prefer to keep them private!
(Photo of Dave and me with our babies was taken by Sara Kauss)
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