Mamahood Stories~A Persistent Mama

Welcome to the Mamahood Stories guest blogger series!!  I have asked several special mamas to write posts for this series and I really believe they are going to encourage you and build you up!  My wish is that as you read these posts leading up to Mother’s Day, you are encouraged and exhorted to love on other mamas, waiting mamas, and women longing to be mamas!

Today’s post comes from Karena Burgess from The Whole Body Baby Plan.  We met in a blogging Facebook group and I am so excited to have her here today!  Her story is inspirational and I hope you enjoy it!!  When your done reading here, head on over to her space and enjoy reading some more of her posts!12Q

“Mr and Mrs Burgess, we regret to inform you that your baby will no longer be coming home in 2-weeks as we had anticipated. Would you like to continue the adoption process? You see the mom….. blah, blah, blah…” I heard nothing else in that conversation. I was devastated in such a way I had never experience before and this time, this straw was the last one that literally broke the camel’s back in believing we would eve become parents.
This was not our first adoption, nor was it our second or third adoption attempt. But this was the closest we had come to bringing home a baby.
About 5 years into our waiting to be parents, the idea of adopting was constantly presented to us. At the time my husband and I were youth pastors and we also did free financial classes in our community to help others break free from the bondage of debt.
We encountered people from all walks of life and they all said the same thing, why don’t you adopt, you’d make perfect parents. We had kids who would sleep over at our home from time to time. We did 24 hours rock-a-thon and game nights, but at the end of the day, it was short lived and we were still childless.
In the background, we were doing all manner of treatments, diets, prayers, surgeries to conceive. Desperately hoping and praying that something would stick and we would be able to at least adopt one of the children that we had encountered who currently didn’t have a home.

In 2012, I was sitting at my desk after I had finish teaching a group of college students how to   take care of themselves in the combat zone when it came to hygiene. These students were my “grown up” children. They relied on my judge and encouragement daily, and I poured into them like my own. But still on parents weekend, I was introduced to their parents as “mom away from home”. Parents loved that their children were being taken care of, but at the end of most work day, I would go home and cry.
Lord, I want a baby. God I’m desperate. What’s wrong with me? What did I do or didn’t do? What needs to change in me?
If I have found favor in your sight, please make us parents. My paraphrase of Exodus 33:13
After one of those desperate prayers, I got a phone call just after a class that there were a set of twins that needed a place to stay.  I was shocked. I was on the defensive too. I asked all the right questions: “Where are their parents (in jail for felony against them), where are the grandparents, (one sick and the other don’t want the babies), how did you hear about us (you guys are always helping people, can you help these babies out)….. The list of questions went on and on for about 15 minutes. I told the lady this is weird, but it all seems legit… however I need to speak with my husband and see what his opinion was on the matter.
I called my husband and his response was not what I had expected. And within 24hours, we were parents to two 10-month old boy/girl twin babies! ❤
Yay! 🙂 Praise the Lord!  I wished the story ended there.
Over the next several weeks, we met the grandmother who was looking for help with these twins. She didn’t want them separated and her health was failing quickly. She chose us from talking to a few people in the community. Before that time we had never met. At the time we were not even foster parents.
She was so happy we were going to take the babies, she suggested we adopt them permanently and we were all too happy to jump on the ball to get the process rolling. So we hired the best lawyer in town.
In the mean time, we took time off our day jobs to child proof our home, painted and renovated the extra bedroom that we had shut off because it was so painful to look at an empty room everyday.  Suddenly this room had two cribs, lots of diapers, toys, baby monitors, the works. In the process of the sudden drop off, we were still in the process of adopting other children and we didn’t stop the process, because at this point we had a firm date that baby was coming home.
We didn’t want to disappoint a child, so we continued. We made enough money to support a family of five and our home was big enough and family support was robust.
To keep this set of twins, we had to become foster parents for 3-months and we jumped in with both legs. Finished all the paperwork and all set for babies to change their last name when we received a letter in the mail saying that we have to appear in court because suddenly a family member has surfaced who wants the kids.
What the…..????
We spoke with our lawyer and the grandmother who was too busy and didn’t even come to visit the kids since birth suddenly wanted to be foster parents for her now 15 month old twins.
This was a serious difficult time of my life. Through court battles, we lost the babies and several years later, we still get phone calls on the medication that’s needed for them. Every year we celebrate their birthday. We cried, but we figured out how to move on slowly.
Several months after this failure, we got another dreaded phone call. We were so sure we were gonna have this baby in our home, that we went ahead and gave him a name “Samuel”.  Samuel was alive because his mom was raped and she didn’t take care of him. At 2 years old, he still wasn’t even crawling. But that was okay with us, cause we were going to love him into his destiny.  “Mr and Mrs Burgess, we regret to inform you that your baby will no longer be coming home in 2-weeks as we had anticipated. Would you like to continue the adoption process?”
I was devastated! There we were with two certain adoptions falling through right before our eyes. For no logical reason. Thousands of dollars gone, two empty bedrooms, and no babies. None!  I was numb. I couldn’t function. I took time off work. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I could no longer continue on with the adoption process. I just couldn’t.
We decided that we were going to trust the Lord in a whole new way. We were going to wait. No more surgeries. No more adoption paperwork. No more planning. We were just going to enjoy each other, travel more, visit more orphans, but as for ourselves, God would have to fight for us.
In 2016, about 4 years after that dread phone call, we gave birth to our miracle baby 6 days before our twins birthday. Yes, God has a sense of humor!
Today we still celebrate the twins. We still pray for baby Samuel and we are now biological parents to a baby girl who was sent to us from Heaven. Jesus Christ gets all the glory. He made a way. He opened the doors that no man could shut and shut the doors that no man could open.

I’m super grateful to be a mom. I pinch myself often and I continue to pray for others to have similar breakthroughs in their lives. If you are still waiting for a miracle, don’t quit! Don’t give up. You may need to press into your relationship with God a little more, but whatever you do, don’t stop praying and asking Him for His favor on your life.

Stay tuned for more Mamahood Stories!  If you missed the first , the second post, or the third post in this series go give them a read!  I am really excited to share all these lovely stories with you!