“What would you say to an adoptive mother who still feels like God made her infertile because she shouldn’t have been a mother?” I received this message via one of my social media pages. Upon reading it, my heart dropped to my stomach with immediate empathy for the woman asking. The struggle she has with her children’s challenges directly connects to her feelings of unworthiness due to infertility. Sisters, this is such a brutal reality for many of us. I’ve faced this falsehood more than once.

It is vital to separate your infertility from any behavioral, academic, or mental health issues your children have. Children come to us from brokenness – regardless if it’s through foster care, international adoption or domestic adoption. Along the way, something broke within your child’s family of origin thus creating the need for adoption. Many children in need of adoption come from a place of trauma. This creates the need for a different way of parenting, and it can be so very heartbreaking and hard.

Add this on top of the trauma of infertility and you end up having a mix of weariness and sense of not being good enough. Infertility is just as much a spiritual and emotional battle as it is a physical one. I’ve questioned if I was equipped for this role of being a mom to three children with varying needs and difficulties.

We often feel like we weren’t meant to be a part of the motherhood conversation. And then, once we actually become moms through adoption and it doesn’t feel good, we do this thing with our minds where we venture back down that road of despair. The lies we once convinced ourselves of being true are now compounded by the one thing we thought would stop them – motherhood.

Separating infertility from the hardship of (adoptive) motherhood is complex. In every way, it takes intentionality. It takes awareness and vigilance because it’s easy for us to “go back there”. It’s far too effortless to damage ourselves with self-criticism.

But please hear me when I say this, the thoughts of not being good enough do not come from God. They just don’t. We are his jars of clay; his most precious treasure. He doesn’t tell us what we aren’t, can’t or shouldn’t be.

During those hard times when you think you shouldn’t have been a mother, let the whisperer of souls remind you of who you are and all that you were meant to be.