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With love,
Zach & Beth
We're Beth, Zach, and Bergen. Two of us writing about each other, and one of us along for every walk. Married since December 2017, in Boise since November 2018.
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))}We are very different people, and that's the whole point. Zach is the detail person, guided by facts and logic, capable of staring at a problem until it solves itself. Beth is faster, more emotional, and reads the people in a room before she reads the agenda. We've taught each other a lot about how the other half thinks, and we balance each other in nearly every decision worth making.
We've been through hard seasons (military deployments and relocations, two years of trying for a baby and the losses inside that), and they didn't pull us apart. They taught us how we work. We disagree well: quietly, with humor, and almost always before things harden. We celebrate every win we can find, big or small, and we look for the joy on the way to it.
Whatever this child needs, they will have two of us. Different, complementary, and on the same side.
We own a two story house in southeast Boise: five bedrooms, three baths, and a small backyard that does more work than it should. The bedroom across the hall from ours is currently empty; it's the one we'd make into a nursery.
Our street is the back of the neighborhood, so it doesn't get much traffic. On a warm afternoon there are typically a dozen-plus kids out riding bikes and scooters up and down the block. We're close with our next-door neighbors. Beth runs the riverpath alone and has never thought twice about it.
We're a mile from the Boise River and the bike and run paths that follow it. There's a calm stretch for canoeing five minutes from the house, a kids' park with a swimming beach ten minutes away, and downtown is fifteen. Bogus Basin, our nonprofit local ski resort, is 45 minutes up the canyon. We can drive into the mountains without passing a single stoplight.
Our parents are local or moving local. Beth has a sister and two nieces in Seattle; Zach is an only child. Two of our parents are educators by training. One of them was adopted himself.
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We have a tight group of friends in Boise. Eight or so people we hang out with most weeks, travel with, and lean on. They are the village beyond our parents and sister, and they will be in our future child's life from the start. Some of them you'll meet a few sections in: at the yurt every December, at the Turkey Trot every November, at the kitchen table on a regular Tuesday.
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How we spend our weekends, plus the weekday evenings that are good enough to remember. A child of ours would tag along to most of it before they were old enough to ask.
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The breakfast you cook, the question you sit with, the tenth reading of the same book. We want to be the kind of parents who show up for the small things, because we believe the small things turn out to be the whole thing.
Beth grew up in a family that pays close attention. She will be the parent who builds the structure: the routines, the gentle boundaries, the thank you note habits, the steady checking in. She is also the one who notices a half second before anyone else when something is off. Zach grew up outside, with a dad who taught him to fly a small plane in high school. He will be the parent who teaches a kid to fix a flat, set up a tent, work a hard problem until it gives, and trust their own hands. Both of us want a child who knows their voice is heard and their curiosity belongs.
We will be honest about adoption from the start. Our child will know their story, every part of it, and will know that the people who placed them are part of who they are, not a chapter that closed. Adoption begins with loss; we won't pretend otherwise, and we won't dress it up. Whatever shape the relationship takes with you, we want our child to grow up knowing they have two families, both real.
And we want to raise a person, not a project. We hope to learn who our child is rather than aim them at who we expected. The values we lead with (honesty, gratitude, hospitality, showing up) are the values we hope to pass on, by living them.
What our days look like now, and what we would be folding a child into.
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A few glimpses of the ten years we've built so far. The version of our life a child of ours would land in the middle of.
Whatever you decide, we are wishing you peace, clarity, and every good thing on the road ahead.
If you'd like to know more, or to meet us, your agency contact can arrange whatever you're comfortable with: a letter, a call, a visit. There's no rush and no expectation.