Full

"We want to just cuddle now." he says, gently lifting a blanket over his brother's legs, "Because Malachi and I are on the same team."

And this life...it is so full.

My heart permanently residing at the base of my throat, and not just when my kids are defying gravity and all common sense.

And this is the kind of fullness that begs to be shared. To be added to.

So Josh and I talk and talk, in circles. We talk about my body, my health, my emotional stability and readiness. We talk about what we have lost, what we have gained- what we stand to lose or gain in the future. We talk about the number 3. We talk about other numbers too, numbers of bedrooms and numbers of seats in our car and the ever-present-in-our-mind number of dollars required and acquired.

We talk about the fullness of our life, and try to measure something unmeasurable. Will our cups, as they say, runneth over? We both know the feeling of barely treading water. Will we fill until we are overfull and drowning?

And the allegory falls away, contracts, and comes back new.

Should we allow it to? To spill over? Isn't that what fullness does at its greatest? Spill over and run out and engulf?

And we've talked about this before, with its different set of numbers, different things to be lost and to be gained. We talk about what family means, what we want our family to look like. We talk about what makes a child your own. We try to be honest and measure our fullness again, every person in this family on their own. Because this is a journey that can suck up everything you have, leaving you dry.

Are we that full? Each of us?

So full as to give and give and give and give to a child that knows nothing of receiving and still have more left over?

I joke that applications and home studies are not nearly as fun as sex and we stare down two very different paths. Two different risks.

I sit after our talk and try to visualize the child that I can feel in my heart, waiting. Does he look like me? Did he come from my womb?

The picture remains fuzzy.

And in the end we decide to wait out the rest of this year- the year that is supposed to be mine. We wait for the kids to get older, for the money to purchase a bigger car, for a few weeks or even days of sleeping thru the night in a row. We wait for more time to research into foster adoption. We wait for the bravery to really do this- or the honestly to admit that we cant.

We wait for the picture to become clear.