When Life Becomes the Story

Where I've been, embryo adoption, and finding my way back to the Writer's Desk.

It has been a while since I've sat down at the Writer's Desk. A long while.

I could give you the usual excuses: life got busy, work got hectic, I lost track of time, but the truth is much bigger than that. Life didn't just get busy.

Life became the story.

Years ago, I read Someone Like You by Karen Kingsbury. If you're familiar with the book, you probably already know where I'm going with this. The story introduced me to the idea of embryos being donated to another family and gave me a glimpse into a world I knew very little about at the time. I read that book after God hit me several times with the concept of embryo adoption.

There's something powerful about fiction doing that. We pick up a book expecting to be entertained, and sometimes a story follows us long after we've turned the last page. Sometimes it introduces us to people, experiences, or possibilities we never knew existed.
And every once in a while, a story that once seemed entirely removed from our own lives becomes strangely, beautifully personal. Because a year after reading Someone Like You, my husband and I adopted embryos.

And if you're sitting there thinking, Wait. You can do that?—you aren't alone. Embryo adoption isn't something most people encounter in everyday conversation.

Our road to parenthood didn't look anything like the one I imagined when I was younger. My husband and I entered our relationship already knowing that biological children might not be possible for us. Infertility wasn't an unexpected plot twist several chapters into our marriage. It was part of our story from the beginning.

But knowing something intellectually doesn't necessarily prepare your heart for living it.
There were years of wondering what our family would look like. Years of watching other people announce pregnancies and welcome babies while trying to trust that God hadn't forgotten us. Years of conversations, research, closed doors, possibilities that didn't work, and prayers that sometimes seemed to receive no answer at all.

Then came the conversation with our Reproductive Endocrinologist about embryo adoption. It took a year filled with watching Someone Like You in the movie theatre, reading Someone Like You the book, grieving what our life would look like, and praying earnestly for the direction God wanted us to take for my husband and me to consider embryo adoption.

After many failed attempts at matching with potential donor families on Facebook and other matching sites, we decided to go through an agency to adopt embryos. There were three tiny frozen embryos whose biological family had completed their own family but wasn't quite ready for their remaining embryos' story to end. And there were two people in Alabama who desperately wanted to become parents. Somehow, those stories found each other.

We adopted those three embryos and stepped into one of the strangest, most terrifying, most incredible chapters of our lives. Fast forward through nearly a year of tests, procedures, and surgery, and one of them was transferred to me.

And today, as I write this, I'm pregnant with our healthy baby girl due in December.
Even typing that sentence feels surreal. After infertility, wondering, praying, and accepting that motherhood might not happen the way I'd pictured it, there's a little girl kicking around inside me as I type this.

God has a sense of humor about timing, doesn't He?

And before this turns into one of those beautifully filtered stories where I tell you that everything worked out and therefore every day since has consisted of glowing pregnancy photos and peacefully rubbing my belly while sunlight streams through the window as I wave softly goodbye to infertility...No.

Pregnancy has been hard. That glow is sweat after dry heaving. I’m rubbing my belly because I couldn’t feel baby girl until just recently because I have an anterior placenta. And for most of my 2nd trimester I couldn’t use my wrists and hands properly because I developed pregnancy carpal tunnel syndrome—to the point where I had to see an orthopedic specialist and get steroid shots in both of my wrists.

I've struggled physically far more than I expected. There have been painful days, exhausting nights, appointments, worries, tears, and moments when I've wondered how on earth I'm supposed to keep doing this for another day—let alone another week or month.

I've learned that receiving the thing you prayed for doesn't mean the road suddenly becomes easy. And I've learned that being grateful doesn't mean you're required to pretend something isn't difficult. I can desperately love this little girl and be overwhelmingly thankful for the opportunity to carry her while also admitting that pregnancy has challenged me in ways I never anticipated.

Both things can be true.

Maybe that's part of what God has been teaching me during this season. Sometimes the miracle isn't an easy road. Sometimes the miracle is simply that you're finally walking the road you once begged God to let you travel. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, writing took a backseat. So did this blog.

There were days when opening my laptop after work sounded about as appealing as running a marathon. There were weeks when my creative energy needed to go elsewhere. There were moments when simply taking care of myself and this tiny person growing inside me needed to be enough.

For a while, I felt guilty about that. I'm a writer. Writers are supposed to write, aren't we? We're supposed to maintain our websites and post consistently and build our platforms and work on the next manuscript and somehow convince an algorithm that we remain alive. But life doesn't always cooperate with our content calendars. And perhaps that's okay. Because I've realized something during my time away from the Writer's Desk: I still want to write.

After everything that's changed, the stories are still there. And strangely, I've found myself thinking about writing in much the same way I've thought about this journey to motherhood. There are things we can want desperately and still struggle through. There are dreams we can believe God placed inside us while simultaneously wondering whether we misunderstood Him. There are doors that close. There are disappointments. There are seasons when we wonder whether continuing makes any sense at all. Writing has given me plenty of those seasons.

I've written books I loved. I've sent queries. I've received rejections. I've wondered whether a story I believed in as fiercely as I did when I typed The End would ever find its place in the world. And I've learned that sometimes a “no” doesn't necessarily mean the story is over.
I think infertility taught me that before writing ever could. Our family didn't arrive through the door I expected. It came through one I didn't even know existed once upon a time. A novel introduced me to embryo adoption before it became part of my own life. And three frozen embryos became our children before I ever knew whether I would get to meet any of them.

Life is weird. Life is hard. But life is also incredibly beautiful. And God is extraordinarily good at writing chapters I never could have plotted myself.

So that's where I've been. I've been becoming a mother. I've been learning more about surrender, perseverance, gratitude, fear, hope, and faith than I probably wanted to learn all at once. I've been discovering that miracles don't always arrive wrapped in easy circumstances. And I've been remembering why I fell in love with stories in the first place. Because stories matter. Someone Like You mattered to me long before I understood why it would.

Maybe that's one of the greatest privileges we have as writers. We don't always know who will find our words. We don't know what they're walking through when they read them. We certainly don't know whether a story we're writing today will mean something entirely different to someone years from now. We just tell the story we're given. And then we release it.

So I'm finding my way back to the Writer's Desk. Not because life has finally become uncomplicated. Quite the opposite. I'm coming back carrying a few more scars, considerably more perspective, a baby girl, and probably a snack. Actually, definitely a snack.

And I still have stories to tell. Maybe that's what perseverance actually looks like. It’s not charging forward without ever getting tired or pretending rejection doesn't hurt, and certainly not insisting difficult things are easy simply because they're worth doing. Perseverance looks like resting when you need to, and allowing life to interrupt the plan. Nix that. Allowing God to interrupt your plans. It also means returning to the thing you love when you're finally ready and saying: I'm still here.

And I think I'm ready to start writing the next chapter.

💬 Have you ever read a book that unexpectedly mirrored something happening in your own life—or later became part of your story? Tell me about it in the comments below!