Lois’ Infertility & Adoption Story

Each week I interview someone who has experienced infertility firsthand. Today I’m chatting with Lois Flowers.  She adopted two daughters from China after surviving endometriosis and infertility. I really appreciate the wisdom she shares here and I know you will, too.

Q. Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m 44 years old. I’ve been married to my husband, Randy, for 21 years. Just writing those numbers makes me sound a bit old, but honestly? Forty-four is a lot younger now than it seemed when I was 28! We have two daughters, ages 13 and 10; we adopted them both from China when they were babies.

Q. How long did you try to conceive and what issues were you facing?

We tried for about three years, starting after we’d been married for about the same length of time. Going into it, we knew that conception would likely be a challenge due to stage IV endometriosis (that diagnosis came in my early 20s), but we were still hopeful. Turns out, the original assessment was correct. I had major abdominal surgery to remove cysts, scarring and adhesions twice during those three years, but the endometriosis grew back very quickly, making it impossible for me to get pregnant. 

Q. What was your lowest point and how did you survive?

I think the lowest point was after the second of those two major surgeries, which came within nine months of each other. It wasn’t just having surgery twice. It was that the second surgery had to be done because the first surgery didn’t fix the worst problem, which was endometriosis in my colon. It was that the operations were done at a teaching hospital in a city three hours from where we lived, and there’s nothing comforting about that. It was that the surgeon specialized in IVF and was pushing that for us, but we weren’t sure. To make a long story short, after I recovered from the second surgery, we found a wonderful local doctor, tried a few minor procedures and then called it quits.

I think we survived the lowest points—as well as the rest of it—because of prayer. But not just “Dear God, help us get pregnant” pleas (although there were plenty of those). A specific, intentional kind of prayer.

We regularly reminded God that we really wanted me to get pregnant. But we also expressed to Him that what we desired, more than anything else, was His will for our lives. Yes, we wanted a baby, but if He had something else in mind for us, we wanted His will to be done. In other words—and here’s the extremely-hard-but-very-important part—if His plan for us didn’t include a biological child, then we didn’t want a biological child.

For me, that prayer started out more as an intellectual exercise than a true heartfelt desire. It was difficult to pray because I really did want to get pregnant and have a baby. For some reason, though, the thought that I might miss out on God’s best if I insisted on my own way made me keep praying that way.

As month after month passed without a pregnancy, an interesting thing began to happen. The more I prayed that prayer, the more it worked its way from my mind to my heart, until it truly did become my heart’s desire. After awhile, I really started to mean it. I can’t explain how this happened. I just know that it did.

Looking back, I can tell you with 100% certainty that praying this way made all the difference in the world. It didn’t remove all the sadness and disappointment that came with my inability to conceive. But it did bring peace, and for me, that was a huge blessing.

Q You wrote a book about your infertility struggle. What led you to write about your story?

My book is called Infertility: Finding God’s Peace in the Journey.  I wrote it because I believe with all my heart what Rick Warren wrote in The Purpose-Driven Life, that “God never wastes a hurt.” When we were going through the pain and discouragement of infertility, we desperately did not want our struggle to be for nothing. If we had to go through it, we wanted to be able to use the experience to help others. I’m a journalist by profession, so writing a book seemed like a good way to do that.

As you can probably tell by the title, it’s not a memoir or a how-to-get-pregnant manual. It’s more of a conversation about some things that I started learning in the midst of infertility—ways of thinking and believing that brought perspective and hope to a difficult struggle.

Q. You are the mother of two adopted daughters. How did you decide to pursue adoption?

We started out with a desire for a child, and when those three years of surgeries and trying to conceive passed, the desire was still there. We knew some people who had adopted internationally, and after talking to them and looking at pictures of little girls from China and Vietnam whose adoptions had been finalized by our lawyer, we decided that was the route we wanted to take.

Q. What has been the most surprising thing about adoption?

More than 12 years into it, what has surprised me the most is how much my children are like me, and like other people in my family, despite the fact that we share no genetic material. There are plenty of differences, of course, but I’ve been amazed at how many times we find ourselves saying things like, “She gets that from grandpa,” or, “That is exactly like you,” or, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” The other thing is how much I’ve learned from my children—not from being a parent, necessarily, but just by observing them be the people that God designed them to be. I am a different person—a better person, I like to think—because they are my daughters.

Q. What advice would you give to someone currently struggling with infertility who is considering adoption?

I’m the kind of person who likes to find closure in one area before I move on to something else. This can be tricky with infertility, especially when the cause is unexplained, but I think it’s helpful to consider letting go of your dream for a pregnancy before you start working on an actual adoption. This doesn’t mean “getting over” or healing from everything related to infertility before you start thinking about adoption, because that process looks different for each person. But it does mean coming to the point where you change your focus from conception to adoption, with the understanding that what could seem like Plan B for your family just might have been God’s Plan A all along.

Again, this might just be how I feel, but as someone with no biological children, it makes me sad to hear people say things like, “We’re adopting but we still hope for one of our own.” Any child that you bring into your family IS your own. Adoption is not a consolation prize.

I also would encourage people not to feel badly that they are considering adoption simply because they want a baby. This might sound strange, but it happens. One author I read who struggled with infertility put it this way: “I’d love to say we pursued adoption because of our desire to help a child in need, but in my fog of despair, I saw only my own need.”

I get where she’s coming from, but sometimes, in the midst of the pain and ache, your own need is all you can see. And in this case, in the midst of pursuing adoption after infertility, that’s normal. That’s what it means to be a person with a God-given desire. There will always be plenty of opportunities, whether or not you ever become a parent, to put someone else’s entire well being above your own, to work on removing the selfishness from your heart, and so on.

But there is absolutely no reason for people to feel guilty about adopting because they want a child. (If you didn’t, you’d have no business adopting anyway.) Women get pregnant all the time because they want to have babies, and nobody chastises them for it. So please don’t add false guilt to the struggle!

Finally, if you do start the adoption process, always remember that there are two parties involved (the parents and the child) and God’s timing is everything. If you are supposed to adopt a child, it will happen at exactly the right time for both of you. This might sound like a pat answer, but I cannot stress it enough! We had some delays in our adoptions that were incredibly frustrating, but it’s very possible we would have gotten different children if they hadn’t happened. I can’t even imagine that now—my life is so much richer and more beautiful because these specific girls are my daughters!

Q. Anything else you’d like to share with my readers?

When you are in the middle of infertility, it’s easy to think that you will always feel the way you do now. But you won’t. Take it from someone who’s been there … joy does come in the morning. Maybe not tomorrow morning, or some morning next month, but it does come. If your hopes of conceiving are fading, hold on to that hope, and especially to God who offers it.

Many thanks to Lois for sharing her adoption story with us today. Please leave a comment below to let her know you appreciate her. 

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