God is Big.
Just two weeks after 18-year-old Fiorella courageously left her home in Peru to come to the United States in search of a better life, she learned she was pregnant. She behind in Peru a broken childhood of abuse, neglect, and abandonment, a dear grandmother who had become her “mom,” and her boyfriend.
Here she was this timid girl in a foreign land, amongst unfamiliar people and language left to consider the responsibility of a little life growing inside of her. Crying herself to sleep night after night was all she could do at the thought of becoming a mom, all alone, here in a strange land. She had no idea what she was going to do or how she was supposed to do it. She didn’t even know where to begin, let alone who to ask for help. She was desperate. She was beyond scared.
She found work at a popular hotel washing dishes and emptying trash. She spent her entire pregnancy handling waste — other people’s waste — an overabundance of American waste. She would stand for 10-hour shifts, not allowed to take as much as a 5-minute break to rest her legs and nourish herself and the baby within her.
When a couple of Institute students met Fiorella she was tired, big-bellied, and nine months pregnant. She had been sleeping at work overnight because she had no ride to get home and was eating only one meal a day. Women of average weight require an extra 300 calories each day in pregnancy. This totals about 1,900 to 2,500 calories a day. Underweight women require even more than that. Which category do you think Fiorella fell under? She wasn’t even getting a non-pregnant woman’s worth of caloric needs. She wasn’t even getting as many as my 5-year-old daughter gets in a day. The students realized the urgency of her situation and that’s when they introduced her to me.
Just days before I knew anything about Fiorella, God had spoken to my heart the word “adoption” repeatedly over a 24-hour period. At the time Gregg was in Uganda ministering with our immersion team. He told me that God was speaking the same thing to Him, but not concerning adoption in general, but specifically concerning Gregg and me. We were oceans apart and God was speaking to us the same word, at the same time? We both knew something BIG was about to happen.
When I met Fiorella, she was three weeks away from giving birth. Upon hearing her story in her own words, I was instantly broken over the reality of what life had become for her. This pursuit of the “American Dream” landed her at a minimum wage 70-hour workweek job that caused her to get sick often from perpetually handling so many germs and trash. Dream? She was living no dream. She was overworked, underfed, sleep-deprived, about to give birth, and barely surviving it all amidst a culture that refused to value her baby and her as human beings. With a baby on the way, the cost of living and “life” as she knew it was about to become much more difficult than she had ever imagined. This was a nightmare.
She had no friends, no support, no knowledge about birth, no understanding of babies, nor a mother figure to look to for support or advice. Outside of her personal experience, she knew nothing about pregnancy as far as being prepared for birth all she could tell me was, “I was scared.” Her fears were not merely concerning the birth of the baby, but more so all that would follow after the birth. She was scared out of her mind to become a mom, the only caregiver of a tiny, helpless, and needy human being.
On one occasion, in broken English, she expressed to me that what she feared more than the pain of childbirth was the thought of them trying to stick her with any needly whatsoever. She feared being taken advantage of by the system because of the language barrier. She feared them doing things to her that they might make her pay money for later. She feared signing consent papers, machines that went “Beep” and being alone in an unfamiliar environment.
From statements like this, I knew the task of birthing, which was quickly approaching, was going to be a horrific experience for her unless she released some of those fears. Because I’ve learned that fear is the enemy of the birthing room, with all my heart I wanted to instill in Fiorella a confidence to believe in herself and how God designed her body to birth.
In my broken Spanish, I attempted to encourage her through a crash course childbirth education that covered the basics of childbirth, her legal childbearing rights, and the importance of relaxing and accepting the process. Together we formulated a typed-out birth plan that helped her voice her desires for the birth to her caregivers.
We watched birth videos together and her eyes were as huge as saucers as she witnessed the normal sights and sounds of other women birthing their babies. I realized that no preparation or childbirth education from me was going to give her the confidence she needed in herself to be a good mom like the experience of the birth itself would. I knew that was what she needed for a successful start. It would become her rite of passage into motherhood, intended by the Creator Himself, as she labored and felt her baby pass through her pelvis right out of her frail body and into her arms.
I committed to being at Fio’s side during the birth, and this alone seemed to ease much fear or take the edge off anyway. I wasn’t about to let her be alone in the hardest work of her life - no woman in birth ever should be. I attended the birth as her advocate, her doula, and most importantly, her friend. She also had an acquaintance she knew from work attend the birth to serve as her interpreter as well as the two Institute students who were compelled to help her feel surrounded by support in birth.
The birth itself was quite the marathon for Fio, lasting over 30 hours. It required so much strength and concentration for her not to resist the intense work of her contractions. For the last 15 hours of her labor until the birth itself, every contraction seemed to storm through her body like a train. As soon as she felt a contraction beginning she would gasp for air as if her breath was being violently stolen right from her chest. Her eyes would fly open to their widest capacity signaling sheer terror from what she was feeling. Regardless of the previous contraction and how she knew it made her body feel, the following contraction would shock her just as much and throw her body into the arms of one of us supporting her. Then she would desperately reach out for a hand to hold.
She was without a doubt the most fear-ridden woman I have ever attended at birth, yet the entire time I was compelled by her fear and pain. Because it’s not hard to imagine the fear you would experience in having an unplanned baby as a teenager in a place that doesn’t speak your language, and in a country that values its systems and routine procedures more than the human beings they were intended to serve.
There were moments where she would squeeze my hand so tightly that I honestly believed that some of the tiny bones in my hand and fingers were going to break. The stronger the contraction got, the harder she squeezed. As my hand was being crushed she’d cry out, “Tara no puedo, no puedo!” (“I can’t, I can’t!). Then she asked me, “Do you remember the pain, and how hard it was?” I reassured her that yes, I remembered and test it was hard, and yes she was doing it! The faith that she put in my words and in me was overwhelming and moved me to tears. Here I was, a near stranger to her, and my simple presence and touch gave her just what she needed to scale the highest mountain she’d ever climbed. Her childlike trust in me also spoke to me the reality that she really did have no one else.
In moments where I didn’t know how else to help or comfort her, or know what else to say with the little Spanish I knew, I felt God move me to sing in Spanish. I’m not sure who those songs helped more, her or me, but I felt almost as desperate as she was for God to help her. I knew He was all she had. Through a few intense contractions, she’d cry out to God that she needed Him and asked Him to help her, and He would. It was beautiful.
Like many women in birth, once Fio started to push her baby out her attitude transformed from desperate to determined. As worn out as she was and still scared of the uncertainty that lied ahead of her in those last few moments of birth, she stopped pushing and looked at me as I held her leg back. With this candidly confident smile that I will never forget she said, “Tara, God is big. God is big.” Instantly my eyes flooded with tears, and my heart flooded with the presence of God. I smiled back at her and said, “He is. He is so big.” With her three simple words, my life was changed. He was so big that day and yet in all of his grandeur he chose to meet with a young, abused, unwed girl who was having a baby on her own.
He was with us in that birthing room and I felt anew His heart for the immigrant: the foreigner who is simply lost of ignored in the shuffle of an affluent life. The immigrant is not forgotten by God and therefore the people of God are responsible to see that they are remembered and valued. God was so big that day. Big for the precious new life He helped usher in and had a purpose for. Big for the way He strengthened Fio to labor through the sheer fear of the unknown. Big for connecting all of us as one family through the powerful experience of human need. He was big for all the reasons he brought Fiorella into my life. Today she and her beautiful daughter Anyeline live with me and Gregg. Since we have adopted this precious family, God is with us every day and continues to show himself so big!