Step by Step Parenting

I was driving around town one day with my three small children in the backseat. We had gone to church as a family the day prior, and so I was being inundated with questions about God, Heaven, and death, such as, “What does Heaven look like, are there clouds there?” and “Does your grandpa live in Heaven now?” and “Does that mean that he knows the rest of our family that hasn’t been born yet?”

I did my best to answer their questions in a way that would make sense to three children all under the age of seven. I tried to explain to them what my dad once explained to me: that we all lived together in heaven before we were born, that we knew who our family would be when we came to earth, that we knew some of the things we might struggle with in this life, and that we all agreed to come to earth anyways. One of the kids asked if this meant they knew the twins that I am currently pregnant with are from heaven, and before I could answer, my stepdaughter asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks:

“Well, does this mean I knew I was going to have two moms before I came to earth? Like, did I know my parents would get divorced?”

I faltered for a moment, unsure of how to answer that. I grew up in a two-parent household and had never stopped to consider how the lessons I was taught might sound to someone whose family didn’t look like mine. I had never had any reason to think about that.

I ended up telling my stepdaughter that yes, she probably knew all of that before she was born, but her question stayed with me for days. Although she was asking from a place of innocent wonder, it led to me pondering more serious concerns in my mind. “Was my divorce part of some plan? Is this what God wanted for me? Or had I ruined God’s plan?”

I didn’t have specific or immediate answers to these questions, so I quietly tucked them away and went about my week. Several days later, during my personal scripture study, I came across a verse that said, “all things shall work together for your good.” (Doctrine & Covenants 90:24).

At first glance, this verse didn’t provide the answer I was looking for. How could a divorce possibly be for my good? How could only seeing my children half the time, missing them constantly, and them having to grow up in two separate households be for our good? Ever since returning to church in January of this year, questions like this have weighed heavy on my heart. I worried about how I would teach my kids the gospel if I only saw them half the time, I worried about what my “forever family” might look like if my whole family couldn’t be there, and I struggled to feel like my family and I “fit in” with all of the other families at church. The Sundays we are able to take our kids to church were filled with crayons, Cheerios, and whispering during sacrament meeting, but the Sundays without them feel empty.

As I reflected on this verse, I was reminded that even though we might not understand everything in this life, that God still has a plan for us. I might never fully understand why this was my lot in life, or why my path to being a family couldn’t be linear like so many others. And I might never stop missing my kids on the days that they aren’t with me, even if it’s gotten easier over time.

But I know without a shadow of a doubt that even if they have different parents, that my kids and step kids were meant to grow up together. I’ve seen it in the way they’ve loved each other fiercely since the day they met. I know that my husband and I are meant to be together, that we are meant to grow and learn from each other. And maybe most importantly, I know that the two little girls that we’re currently expecting sometime early next year are meant to be a part of our family.

If I was in charge of writing my own life story, I don’t think I would have ever written it this way. A younger version of me might not have chosen the “trials and sacrifices” that I ended up going through, but my perspective is limited compared to that of God’s. He sees things in us that we don’t, He maintains an eternal perspective of our lives that we often struggle to, and His ways are higher than our ways. As Elder Gong said during his April 2024 General Conference address, “Lived with faith, trials and sacrifices we would never choose can bless us and others in ways never imagined… [and] when we trust God and His love for us, even our greatest heartbreaks can, in the end, work together for our good.”

The heartbreak I have gone through has truly blessed me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, and I know the blessings I see now are only the beginning.