My hands were wrist-deep in suds, the two youngest were already in bed, Ruby sat at the table coloring a picture of two friends, one with brown skin and one with “tan” skin, holding hands, with twin bows in their hair.

Across the island, Cory and Calvin were mired in the angst of an almost-tweenager, and for the hundredth time this month, I was lost. What really helps in moments like these? Our words were even, but the temptation to cast guilt was ever-present, and I found myself wondering (again) about the invisible “they’s”. What would they think if they knew how he talks to us sometimes? They would never allow this. They would command more from their kids. They would know what to do. They, they, they…

(Who are they?)

I scrubbed oatmeal from our breakfast dishes while the discussion turned in circles and I thought hard about how I might have acted when I was ten. I do it all the time. I try to trip into the past and take stock on myself, my experiences, my parents, and all the air between us.

At ten, I found my first best friend and I must have been teetering on the edge of boy-crazy because when Glen – the epitome of fourth-grade cool – got hurt in a recess game of kickball, I tried to make myself cry. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I was one of two teacher’s pets that year. Everyone thought Mrs. Artz was so mean with her permed old-lady hair and the way she frowned without even trying. But I had cracked the code, and all it took was staying sweet and trying my best. Sometimes I offered to fill the mailboxes during free time. She liked me, so I liked her back.

Once, I screwed up a quiz so royally that I had to skip recess and re-do it in the hall. Stretched out stomach-down on the gray floors that smelled like old news and fresh starts, I scrubbed my eraser across my mistakes then flicked them away with the back of my hand. And I seethed. After everything was put back together, I stood up, walked to the drinking fountain, and said the F-word. Out loud. To myself. I tried it on, wiggled my skinny shoulders under its weight. It was as exhilerating as I expected, but my cheeks must have flamed like apples, because that was almost thirty years ago, and I still remember it like yesterday.

My identity was taking shape, and I had no idea.
I see myself in that little girl.

Maybe that’s why I wig out when I catch my kids at their worst.
They’re kids, yes. They’re figuring out who they are, and who they want to be.
But I know there are slivers of this reality that will be part of them forever.
It can be painful to watch.

I believe every kid has a few gold threads stitched into his fiber. They’re unique, outside the norm. They make him who he is, but they also make him stand out. (There might be nothing more terrifying to a ten-year-old than being different.)

We are dealing with so much “different” right now.
You can take the typical woes, like being cool enough, tall enough, fast enough, smart enough (i.e., not too smart, just smart “enough”,) funny enough. On top of that, we’re feeling an epic technology deficit, which appears to be monumental to a fourth-grader.

I wonder all the time if this stuff would matter so much if my child didn’t still believe he should be living half a world away.

It comes close and ebbs away, but it never, ever leaves.

A few weeks ago I found him sitting in my bed with his nose in a book, which doesn’t happen nearly as often as you might think. He read me these lines, “She felt a sudden, deep longing for her dead mother, and then wondered if it was harder to miss a mother you had loved, or, like Dallas and Florida, to miss a mother you had never known.”

There were no tears and we didn’t parse the words into a deeper meaning.

We didn’t have to.

I kissed his head and told him it was beautiful. I promised I would read the book when he was done, and I did.

I don’t know what to do from here. I have no idea where these turns will take us.

Our days are mostly just like yours. We laugh and grow and do all the things families do. We belong to each other, and it’s as real as the ground beneath us. But some nights are quiet enough to tell the other side of the truth, so we do. Morning always comes, but we can’t forget. I have never known this kind of pain, and it isn’t even mine.

I believe in adoption with my whole heart. I believe in family and forever-love, restoration and redemption. I believe there is no such thing as, “This is all he knows” or, “He doesn’t even remember that.” It’s an unfair loss, one some kids feel more deeply than others.

I probably sassed my parents when I was ten years old. But I know I was a good girl. A rule follower. I earned love and a good reputation. I was a girl who pretended to be boy crazy when all I really wanted to do was play with my Barbies. I was a child who didn’t know how to say no and only had the guts to say how I really felt when I was stone-cold alone.

Those aren’t the goals I have for my kids.

I’m still not sure what to do or say or how to fix small problems (hey, eye-rolling) or bigger ones.
But he trusts us. He still reaches out for my hand and he’s not afraid of wounding me with the truth.
Our love for each other is gladiator-fierce. (There’s so much room in one heart.) We love each other every day, and some days find us at our worst.

On this day, I want to champion all the ten-year olds. Let’s remember how weird it was for us and be open to the possibility that it’s even harder now.

Find a child who might not quite blend in (oh, how I wish my kids could see the beauty of not blending in!) and show her how the world couldn’t function without the particular glint of her gold thread.

Let’s honor everyone’s story. Let’s refuse to default to the sort of parenting that leaves no room for every voice. Let’s lead with honor and guide with love.

Because I protect my kids’ stories with gladiator fierceness, I asked Calvin for permission to share some of what he’s going through right now. Though he sometimes says no, this time he said yes. I asked him, “What would you tell people about adoption?” He answered, “I would tell people that even though adoption breaks your heart, it’s in a good way.”

________________________________

Shannan Martin believes the turns in life that look like failure are often holy gifts, a lesson she chooses to embrace after the bones of her comfy farmgirl life were shattered and rebuilt from the toes up.  Together, Shannan and her family sold their dream farmhouse, moved to a disadvantaged area in the city, and adopted a 19-year old felon.  Nothing could have prepared her for the joy she would discover as her family began to live the simple, messy, complicated life they were created to live. In walking beside the forgotten and broken and seeing first-hand the ways she so cleanly identified with both, Shannan’s faith was plucked from the mud.  She and her jail-chaplain husband now live on the wrong side of the tracks with their four children. She blogs often at Flower Patch Farmgirl.

Two days ago, I swayed on my parents’ hammock in a stolen, quiet hour, devouring Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren. I was sucked into her story, immersed in her pain, gulping it down like it was the only air left in the room. If she’d been within my reach, I would have sobbed into her hair. I’d have kissed her on both cheeks and the forehead. Yes. This. You wrote my story, and now there’s no other option than for you to move into the vacant room in the basement. Don’teverleaveme.

Ten hours later, I sat with my mom in the E.R. while she suffered through a few tests (she’s fine!) Because she’s a trooper and one of the nicest people I know, she joked with the nurses and tried to put them at ease. When asked about her pain level she said, “Well, I’ve had kids. So this is a 7.”

For a split second, I thought she was talking about the pain of a torn-apart heart.

I can’t talk to you about contractions, epidurals, or mastitis. Oh, but I know a thing or two about bearing children. I could pen an anthology about all the ways a heart can break. If you don’t have time for that, I could show you the flattened gaze of a toddler in his passport photo, and you’d see a glimpse of everything. Some say my kids were too young to understand, but those same people run to their infants’ cries and spend their lives making the world safe and cozy. It’s what we do. If you think my kids don’t remember, I’d ask you to imagine your own without you. Just for a second, allow yourself to go there. Does it hurt? Do they feel it?

When I speak, I can’t get two sentences into my son’s adoption day without turning my back to the audience to compose myself.

It was one of the most beautiful days of my life.
It was hands-down the most painful.

And I’m just the mom.

Back when I doodled hearts on my notebook, back when I met a boy with clear, blue eyes, back when I walked the aisle a full head taller than my dad in a too-short dress, I never pictured this sort of motherhood, constantly leveraging the miracle against the loss.

This is adoption, the bearing of a shape-shifting weight. It’s holding something precious in your hands but getting lost sometimes in the fallout. Adoption is the gas-slick rainbows of my childhood – as magical as the regular kind, but far more complex, and with an edge.

Last night was a rough one.

There are hard parenting days, and then there are hard adoption days. Those are the ones that level me. A decade into this gig, I haven’t progressed beyond curling up in bed and sobbing so hard I choke.

I was not built to be rejected so persistently by someone who loves me so much.
(Or was I?)

I was not cut out for this job.
(Or am I?)

People get uppity when someone implies that adoption is harder than garden-variety parenting. It’s all hard. It’s all the hardest job we’ll ever do. I get it. Honestly, I have no built-in control group. My kids are all over the map and one feels almost no loss at all (yet?) I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. I’m not qualified to weigh in when it comes to comparing, and there’s really no point.

But I’ll do it anyway.

When hormones and dysregulations and sibling rivalry and boring ol’ disobedience end with someone sobbing because they miss their birth mom or they’re mad we didn’t teach them Korean or they feel unlovable at their core, “hard” veers off the cliff and we all crash and burn.

When your kid won’t stop lashing out and it’s turning your home into a war zone but for the life of you, you don’t know what else to try, you don’t know how to love everyone right, you would do anything/have tried everything/just want to make it stop, the air can rattle with the reverb of anxiety and fear.

When you’re lonely, but you’re terrified of being judged by people who haven’t walked the same ground, well, you do what it takes. You hoist yourself up and you hug those kids harder. You make new friends, because your family is so worth it. If you can’t understand us, you don’t deserve to. (That’s what you say to yourself on the worst days.)

I am tired of spit-shining my kids’ loss.
I’m sick to death of pulling my sleeves down over my contact burns.

We have so many good days. We’re working now, not nearly as broken as we used to be.
But we are entitled to these days, too. We’ve earned the right to sob our guts out until our hair clings damp against our foreheads and our eyes are rubbed raw.

I would give my right hand to erase their hurts, but I know the scars aren’t wasted. I’m not confident in my ability to say the right thing or explain it perfectly to my kids when I can’t wrap my own head around it, but I do know this: 1) I will love you every single second of your life, no matter what. 2) I will never give up on you. 3) You can say whatever you’re feeling and you won’t be in trouble. Tell me the truth. Tell me.

We were made for each other, not by a God who inflicts pain, but by a God who is famous for the way he can make a solid Plan B almost feel like it was always meant to be.

I believe childbirth is the most intense pain a woman experiences. I don’t have to have felt it myself to trust it’s true. If there’s someone in your life who has adopted, you can offer them the same. Be their safe place. Get loud about the ways you see them. Cheer them on. Root for their kids. Do they parent in strange ways? I sure hope so. Do some of their kids have massive feelings that spill out in some pretty frustrating and annoying ways? I’m sure of it. Love them anyway. Love them just the same as if they were quiet and tidy. Let them be sad with you. Celebrate success. Believe what they tell you.

Morning came, just like it always does. Today is for eating French toast with puffy eyes and forgiving each other for the thousandth time. We’ll pray for grace we can’t manufacture on our own, and we will find it somewhere in that asphalt swirl, where the light catches a hard place and makes it gleam.

__________________________

Shannan Martin believes the turns in life that look like failure are often holy gifts, a lesson she chooses to embrace after the bones of her comfy farmgirl life were shattered and rebuilt from the toes up.  Together, Shannan and her family sold their dream farmhouse, moved to a disadvantaged area in the city, and adopted a 19-year old felon.  Nothing could have prepared her for the joy she would discover as her family began to live the simple, messy, complicated life they were created to live. In walking beside the forgotten and broken and seeing first-hand the ways she so cleanly identified with both, Shannan’s faith was plucked from the mud.  She and her jail-chaplain husband now live on the wrong side of the tracks with their four children. She blogs often at Flower Patch Farmgirl.

Before we adopted for the first time, I had only a vague idea about “orphans”.  I knew they existed in damp countries where townspeople wearing shades of brown and gray stood in line for bread rations.  I pictured dark-skinned babies with distended tummies and Chinese orphanage rooms lined with rickety cribs.

Not in a million years did I picture faces that would one day form my family.

One of the magical things about adoption is that God always knows.  It doesn’t come as a surprise to Him.  His walls are lined with family pictures that would take our breath away if we were to get just a glimpse. We think the one hanging on our wall is it.  We think we know things, or that our family is already complete.  But we don’t even know the half of it.

Fifteen years ago, I daydreamed about knobby-kneed, fair-skinned kids with sticking-out ears and (fingers crossed!) Cory’s blue eyes.  But God had already decided something better for me.

Our family grew, and I forget sometimes that we don’t share blood.  We share time and space, a history that is whole enough to carry us home.  We share laughs and germs and rants and prayers.  We are a family.

And still, we grow.

This afternoon I rushed between dinner prep and homework when the front door opened and Robert and his best friend Fernando tumbled in, all long limbs and pierced tongues.  They sat at the island for not nearly long enough and somewhere in between their stories and nonsense, Fernando referred to Cory as “Dad”.  Oh, I saw this one coming. It made me smile.

Because family is so much more than blood.  And no one was meant to be alone.

The needle draws us together, pulls us near, and with every stitch, we’re closer to what we were always meant to be.  And with every stitch, our love grows, covering us and all the ones left standing cold around us until the shivering stops and we know that what we are together is real.

I can’t say for sure that you’re meant to adopt.  But chances are, you’re meant to be impacted by adoption. In one way or another, I believe you’re meant to see that what the world calls brokenness can be a thing of sure beauty, adorned in the best possible ways, unexpected and entirely holy.

It could be a niece, a nephew, a grandchild, a godchild. Maybe your best friend will adopt, or your neighbor.

Maybe you’re not as close to “done” as you thought.

_______________________

Shannan Martin believes the turns in life that look like failure are often holy gifts, a lesson she chooses to embrace after the bones of her comfy farmgirl life were shattered and rebuilt from the toes up.  Together, Shannan and her family sold their dream farmhouse, moved to a disadvantaged area in the city, and adopted a 19-year old felon.  Nothing could have prepared her for the joy she would discover as her family began to live the simple, messy, complicated life they were created to live. In walking beside the forgotten and broken and seeing first-hand the ways she so cleanly identified with both, Shannan’s faith was plucked from the mud.  She and her jail-chaplain husband now live on the wrong side of the tracks with their four children. She blogs often at Flower Patch Farmgirl.