My husband does not know I wrote this blog to talk about how great of a guy he is. If he knew, he might try to stop me, because I’m not so sure he knows just how great of a husband and daddy he is.
To get started on why this blog is called “Coffee Notes” I need to go back a few years, six years to be exact. In the summer of 2019, we were finishing up our paperwork to be approved to become foster parents. We were blindly anxious about what all that would mean for us. At that time, we were two years into an infertility diagnosis and had walked through three miscarriages; a low point in our lives as you can imagine.
We were anxious to fill an extra room in our home with a baby. That room was hard to walk in. The emptiness and the quietness of the room bothered me. The void in our hearts and in our home grew until we knew the Lord was calling us to open our hearts and our home to children who needed those spaces.
There we were, neither of us knowing much about foster care, signing paper after paper to say we promise to take care of someone else’s child like we would our own. It was an intimidating process. A blessed role- one not to be taken for granted, but a very intimidating role. Before we finished signing paperwork, we received a call about a little boy who needed a safe place to go. Will and I both took a big breath and before we knew it, we were meeting with this little boy’s social worker. She informed us that it would be a few days before he would be placed with us, but that he was coming. (This is a special case, usually kids in custody need a placement right away).
Fast forward a few days, and we were meeting this little boy and taking him to his new temporary home. One of those “empty” and “quiet” rooms was about to be filled.
This little boy (let’s call him Teddy) had been through more in his short life than many of us could ever imagine. He was hurt with big emotions that Will and I were not sure how to handle. Our days were quickly filled with meltdowns, screams like we had never heard before, and words that no six-year-old should know.
During this time, Will had to be at work at 3:30 am. So, I was the main one to get Teddy ready for school. The quiet mornings I used to know (and sometimes dread because quiet is hard when desiring a baby) were no longer quiet. Teddy would let me know in his own way that he did not want to go to school and made that loud and clear.
Will felt guilty for not being there to help, so he began writing me and Teddy notes in the morning and would leave them right by the coffee pot that was ready with fresh coffee. Those notes became such a life source for me each day. Our time with Teddy did not last but a few months. I cannot share much of his story here, but God is completely involved in redeeming this little boy’s story. He received the help that he deserved and is now with family that he didn’t know he had at the time. God is in the details, friends.
However, even though Teddy was no longer there in the mornings, Will continued to write a note and have coffee ready for me each day. My mornings returned to the quiet ones. As crazy as it sounds, I didn’t really know which type of morning I would prefer at the time. Quietness can be extremely loud when you’re longing for a baby.
Will’s coffee notes have always been pretty simple. A simple “I hope you got some good sleep” and “I love you, have a good morning” and “I’ll see you soon” are written many mornings, and it is crazy to think just how much those little notes meant to me every morning. Those coffee notes have met me in the morning as I was miscarrying our third and fourth babies, as I found out another friend was pregnant with her second child, as holidays came and went, as doctor’s appointments with no good news passed, as yet another negative test landed in our trash can- Will’s Coffee notes (notes just on sticky notes or napkins or whatever were on hand at the time) met me where I was at each morning.
His notes have changed over the years as the Lord answered our prayers by adoption and by having a healthy pregnancy. His notes changed once again as we walked through the loss of our second baby boy at just 26 weeks. Now his notes meet me in the mornings with our youngest on my hip and the other two usually not far away. His notes still remain pretty simple if you want to say it that way, but the love that they show me is not simple at all. If I am counting correctly, I have around 1,800 “coffee notes” from Will. Eighteen hundred little reminders of the love he has for me. Eighteen hundred reasons our kids know to look for “Mama’s notes” in the mornings.
I wanted to share about these notes to encourage anyone reading to find what “little” ways they could show love to their spouse. Something as simple as a note by the coffee pot might just be what means the most to your spouse.
