I have always been the middle child. Even before my brother was born, my parents say I acted like the middle child. It has always been a part of my identity. Then we decided to adopt and I realized that my wonderful world of oldest, middle, and youngest was going to change. There would be extra people who weren’t the oldest or the youngest and, although they were middle, weren’t quite the middle middle child. It took me a couple of days to figure out that one of those people would probably be me. I was most likely going to lose my place in the family. That freaked me out. While I wanted to have more siblings, I wasn’t sure I was willing to lose my place. If I wasn’t the middle middle, what was I? I felt like people would notice the oldest, middle middle, and the youngest, but not the other kids. And as a middle child, I want attention. But then there was the fact that there might not be a middle middle.

I was really scared.

Quite a bit of my social structure was based on me being the middle. I started talking to my parents about it, and they told me over and over again that my identity was in Christ. I understood that that was where I should place my trust, but I was not ready to let go of being the middle kid. My siblings and I would fight quite often about who had it the worst or the best place as a child. Somewhere along the way that became something that I couldn’t let go of.

My parents asked me if being a middle was something I couldn’t even risk losing, and whether it was something I felt like stopping the adoption over. I thought about it for a while and realized that I didn’t want to stop the adoption. I was scared that I was going to lose my place, yes, but I could always find it again, and it wasn’t worth other kids not finding a place. It took a while for me to be reconciled with the idea of not being the middle, but not long after, God threw two teens at us. One was older than me and the other was younger. Now here we are with two kids who have said yes to us, and no one loses their place.

God likes to laugh a lot. (Or as my mom constantly says lately, BUT GOD!)

-Mikayla