Realities Archives - Page 4 of 25

March 13, 2015March 13, 2015

The Day I Fell Apart

Something triggered her fear, and she snapped. I will never call them “fits” because that would imply she could control them. And she cannot.

We’ve learned how to handle her meltdowns over the last year. We restrain her safely, usually while rocking her back and forth and telling her in a quiet voice about how much we love her, no matter what.

This time, I let go at the wrong time, and her knee hit me square in the chin. I saw stars then told her I’d have to come back in a minute. I went to the bathroom and exploded into sobs. It was as if I’d put my carbonated emotions in a bottle and shaken them for months. Physical pain was the only thing that could release the pressure.

I cried on and off for days. I cried about issues I’d been thinking about for months, and I cried about things so ridiculous that I would laugh while wiping my tears. That’s a sure way to let your family know you’ve completely lost it.

It turns out when you wait a long time to let yourself have a breakdown, it takes a while to recover.

On day three of my incessant crying, Matt left to speak at a church in Kansas for four nights. He felt bad for leaving, and I was dreading single parenting in the midst of the rollercoaster. I prayed that my kids would show me mercy for the week. Bedtimes are very difficult right now for a couple of our kids, and they’re even worse when Matt’s gone. The most challenging part of the day comes when I have the least energy and patience left. So I prayed for my own strength as well.

The days went by, and my kids were amazingly well-behaved. I eventually cried all the tears I’d been storing up. Matt came back home, and things eased back into normal.

When I went to a meeting with my counseling supervisor the next week, I described the whole thing to him. He said, “So you’re saying that when you allowed yourself to fall apart, the whole world didn’t fall apart? You mean when you gave your family the chance, they actually rose to the occasion?” I told him to shut up.

But he was right (I have a love/hate relationship with his rightness). When I see my husband struggle, I feel like I have to stay strong. When my kids are dealing with hard things, I put my own challenges aside. And the pressure builds.

When I let myself be weak and fall apart, balance reigns. They rise to the challenge. I get to have bad days and feel sad. I get to cry for lots of reasons or no reason at all. Being the mom doesn’t make my emotions or difficulties mean less. In fact, I dare say that it’s good for our kids to see me feel all kinds of things and deal with those feelings in healthy ways. (Or, less fun to talk about, to deal with my feelings in unhealthy ways and then apologize to them).

Are you putting your own needs on the back-burner while you help everyone else cope with theirs? I’ve learned that my emotions will eventually make themselves undeniable, and not always at the most convenient time.

Emotional health is a discipline. The circumstances in which I most need to practice good self-care are the same situations in which it’s most difficult to do so. Therefore, I must be disciplined in taking care of myself, even when it feels unnatural. Even when it’s inconvenient.

Have you been storing your emotions away while you tend to everyone around you? It might be time to open up that bottle before it explodes.

**Disclaimer: The “meltdowns” are very rare now, and we have not always handled them well. If you’re in the middle of that struggle with your hurting child, you’re not alone. And if you’re not handling it with rocking and a quiet voice of grace, you’re not a horrible parent. It takes time and professional help to learn the best ways to help our kids from hard places. If we can help you find help, please let us know.

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Matt and Becca write about marriage, parenting, and life through the lens of a married couple, parenting team, and pastor and professional counselor. They share hope and restoration by giving a glimpse into their lives- the failures, the successes, and the brokenness and beauty of everyday. You can read more of their writing at WhitsonLife.

February 27, 2015February 27, 2015

What color is adoption?

what color is the dress We were eating muffins at a cafe this morning when a guy approached us, held out his phone, and asked us what colors we saw.

“Um…gold and white?”

He replied, “No way! No! It’s black and blue!” He walked away laughing; we sat there stumped.

We thought he was just a weirdo until Evan came home from school and showed me the same picture and asked the same question.

Apparently, this silly picture has nearly broken the Internet since yesterday. In 6 hours alone, this picture of a dress got over 16 million hits all from people arguing over what colors it is. Our own family has been duking it out this afternoon.

Experience is reality. When we see gold and white, it’s gold and white; anything else couldn’t possibly be. It doesn’t matter that the person next to us swears it’s black and blue. We just tell her she’s wrong and roll our eyes when she tries to tell us the same thing.

So, what color is adoption?

The black and blue abounds. Hearts spill out via words on screens about the emotional cost, the trauma, the brokenness, the loss, the hurt, the hard starts that beget more hard. I’ve read them; I’ve wrote them. And, I confess that when I have been focused on the black and blue, it’s pretty hard to see any other colors. There may have been glimpses of gold and white; a change in color for just a moment that caught my eye. But, moments later, I talked myself out of it. No, I was wrong. It’s really black and blue. I must have been seeing things.

8 years into our adoption journey. 5 years into parenting a child who joined our family through adoption. 4 years into ministering to other families built via adoption. I know the black and blue; the black and blue is real and on some days seems like it can be tangibly felt. But, I know the gold and white better. And, I’ve seen how the gold and white is fully able to overcome the black and blue.

Adoption is family. It’s redemption in loss. Adoption is hope despite the unknown. Adoption is connection and relationship. It is courage and resilience. It’s beauty so intense it can be tangibly felt and breathed in. It’s power to overcome. Adoption is delighting in each other. It’s being intentional to focus on the gold and white even in the midst of black and blue.

It’s amazing. life changing. an opportunity for healing. a blessing.

It’s everyday. It’s life.

It’s good.

What color is adoption?

It’s gold and black, white and blue, and every shade in between. Don’t even try to convince me of anything different.

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Kelly has a passion for supporting adoptive families, specifically to encourage parents to be intentional and understand their own hearts more clearly as they seek to care for their hearts of their children. Kelly cofounded The Sparrow Fund with her husband Mark in 2011 to serve adoptive families. After a long time using her Master’s degree in counseling informally, Kelly recently joined the team at the Attachment & Bonding Center of PA as a cotherapist. Married to Mark since 1998, they have 3 biological children and 1 daughter who was adopted as a toddler from China in 2010. You can learn more about their adoption story, how they’ve been changed by the experience of adoption, and what life for them looks like on Kelly’s personal blog, My Overthinking.

February 25, 2015

Adoption Isn’t Always Easy {And It Isn’t Supposed to Be}

Last year I wrote this post about how marriage isn’t always easy. And how it isn’t necessarily supposed to be.After that post, I received feedback from women all over the world. Women who were relieved to hear that it’s perfectly normal to have to work to keep a marriage strong. Women who survived struggles, setbacks and heartbreak to go on to many, many more years of successful marriage. Women whose marriages didn’t last but who offered up heartfelt, insightful advice.

Today I want to share something else. Something that many adoptive parents might not say and something that may come as a surprise to those who don’t have a best friend who is an adoptive parent or to those who have never had a late night conversation over coffee (or a glass of wine) with an adoptive parent.

Adoption isn’t always easy. Nor is it supposed to be.

Do you see a theme here? Perhaps I should also write posts on marathon running and how that’s pretty tough and on grad school and how that isn’t always easy either (nor is it supposed to be).

In all seriousness, there exists a big misconception that after all of the adoption paperwork is completed and after a child is “home” that life is a cakewalk. That the child is overwhelmingly grateful to have a family and that the other siblings are thrilled and that they parents are overjoyed and enamored with every word and movement that their new arrival makes. For most adoptive families, it doesn’t work that way. Not only is adoption hard, sometimes it is gut-wrenching, brutally, frustratingly challenging.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE ADOPTION and it is a big part of how we have built our family. As a little elderly lady, herself an adoptive mother, told me in Home Depot the other day, “It sure is a lot of work but there’s just nothing like it. The time and energy that you invest in your children will be your greatest asset some day.” And she’s exactly right.

Adoption is much more complicated than finding a child who needs a forever family, completing a daunting stack of paperwork, plunking that child into a home and living happily ever after. It is a delicate waltz of forward and back, a complicated patchwork quilt where, at times, only a single thread holds it all together, a lifelong immersion of listening and learning and trusting and embracing.

Like marriage, adoption takes people who may be very different from one another and forever seals them together. It is entirely possible that you might not like the new person sharing your space, the child who you’d previously only seen in photographs and who you envisioned to look and behave and respond in a certain way (and it is entirely possible that they might not like you!). Sometimes you peel back one layer of trust to reveal something that you don’t know how to handle or that was completely unexpected. Sometimes you may even wonder if you’ve made a mistake.

Adopted children may not look like you. They do not necessarily share your cultural background or common interests. Heck, they may even be your polar opposite. And, for many adoptive parents, it may feel like there is a long-term guest in the house for many, many years before normalcy returns.

Children who join your family through adoption may have been loved or maybe they came from a background of trauma. They may have behaviors that you never imagined having to deal with. Urinating on oneself for attention? Lying about the color of the sky because there is no foundation of trust? Drawing on/cutting/intentionally ruining clothing? Stealing/hoarding/gorging on/refusing food and anything else you can think of that could potentially make mealtime dreadful? Oh, we’ve been there.

When the newness wears off and things start getting real, it gets interesting in a hurry. And, while it may not be the instant love affair with your new child that you expected, don’t lose heart. As the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months and the months into years, your love for that child will grow and flourish. I promise. There will come a day when it’s hard to recall your life before that child joined your family. That realization is a monumental milestone. Some day those early struggles will seem so trivial and, as the layers slowly get peeled back, you will constantly be delighted, amazed and awed by the little person who you are raising.

You will come to realize that, just like marriage, there is no foolproof “How To” guide for raising any child, not to mention an adopted child. You will learn what works and what doesn’t. You’ll make mistakes, some of them pretty big. You’ll learn from them and your child will forgive you so, in turn, you need to forgive your child when they make mistakes. You’ll see a side of yourself that you did not know existed and it may be an ugly, hateful side that you are ashamed of. You will feel emotions that you did not know that you had.

Just remember, you are getting shaped and molded as a parent just as your new child is getting shaped and molded as a loved, valued member of a family. Parenting is a constant learning experience regardless of how many children you have or how long you have been a parent. The good news is that the more you practice, the longer that you are a parent and the more experience that you gain, the more tools you will have to handle the challenges that your children face and the more prepared you are for the next adventure. It will get easier to laugh at the things that won’t really matter in the long run and to make an action plan for handling those that really are a big deal.

Adoption isn’t always easy. But few things worth doing ever are.

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Ashlee Andrews is veterinarian and a mother of five (soon to be six!) children, two of whom joined the family through international adoption. She is the Albuquerque, NM director and producer of the Listen To Your Mother Show and she blogs at The Kitchen Is Not My Office (www.thekitchenisnotmyoffice.com).

February 23, 2015February 23, 2015

Including Your Children

People often ask if it was hard growing up with foster siblings- if it changed me or stripped my innocence out from under me in ways that left me psychologically scarred.

Of course it was hard; there’s a vulnerable edge to loving again and again, knowing the small person you’ve come to accept as a sibling will be taken away in a matter of days, weeks, or months. There’s a deep uncertainty and anxiety in anticipating a loss with no time frame to draw from, not knowing if a foster sibling will end up adopted in your home, or will never be heard from again. Even before I was able to verbalize the feelings of uncertainty, they were there; when I sat at the top of the stairs and listened as my mom spoke with a caseworker regarding a case, I was acknowledging that I cared deeply and would be torn apart when someone came and took my sibling away.

This is loss. It is something that every single human on earth deals with in both varying degrees and varying circumstances.

The idea of humanity’s reaction to loss is something even the most educated psychologists and counselors are still researching and probably will be until the end of time. It is such an encapsulating topic, but what I find especially fascinating is how we know what pain feels like and take great measures to actively avoid it. Whether it’s simply an embarrassing moment or the mind-numbing grief following the loss of a loved one, the common defense it to search for ways to avoid falling into the same situation a second (or third or fourth) time. Perhaps life experiences leave us seared just enough to look for healing outside the line of fire, or maybe it’s the minds way of protecting the heart. We like safety. I’m finding that it often happens at a subconscious level, but still, when I look for it, I spot walls going up all over my life, barricading me (although often unsuccessfully) from the discomfort of pain.

As a child growing up in a stable family, I didn’t have the life experience of pain to drive me toward that same defense mechanism. When caseworkers surrendered children into my parents’ care, I loved deeply, even knowing it was just for a season. There was no other option. I think that even if I had truly wanted to withhold a piece of love from my foster siblings (knowing, of course, a loss was looming), I wouldn’t have been able to do so. The love for my foster siblings was so real – it crossed a depth of love I have rarely experienced since then. I couldn’t help loving; it was the natural reaction to living with little people who were already fighting situations I never even knew existed.

Of course having a revolving door snatched away a little bit of that naivety and innocence that my parents had so carefully guarded. There were nights of uncontrollable tears and a deep grappling with heavy topics. I questioned physical abuse before I even knew the term abuse.

“Why would a father get so mad he would break his infant’s bones? What are drugs? Why would a mom use them while pregnant, if she knows it’s bad? What is prostitution? How does she not know who the father is?”

There was pain and that pain has had drastic implications on the way I live my life. I don’t know that it’s possible to take your children on this journey without letting them hurt. But maybe if the goal is to protect our kids from pain, we’re cheapening Calvary’s love. The reality of the gospel is the very thing that drives us to the marginalized and oppressed, even to the extent that we devastatingly fall down at the cross with a new load of pain, surrendering it all to Him once again. That utter surrender is the kind of love we’re called to know.

If we seek to teach our kids how to love one another, then is there really any more practical way to do this than in the safety of your home, where you, as a parent, can be the one guiding and facilitating the hard conversations?

It makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean it’s easy or that there will be times placements will have to be turned down, for the safety of those in your home. I know it wasn’t easy for my family and I can guarantee there were days when my parents watched us struggle and questioned their decision. There were repeated times throughout the ten years that my parents temporarily closed our home, giving our family time to rest and recuperate.

Even still, taking their children along on this journey made sense to them, and fourteen years later, I am so thankful they made that decision.

On a bookshelf in my parents’ living room there’s a photo album with pictures of all of the kids who spent time in our home. On the front page, surrounded by each child’s face, Matthew 25:40 is written: “to the extent you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it unto me.”

To one of the least of these. I believe so firmly that caring for the least of these and understanding the power of the cross go hand in hand. Not that our hearts are able to fully understand the magnitude of the gospel, but that through loving hurting souls who belong to Him, we then know His redemptive power more intimately.

My heart is to share that it’s okay to take your bios along on this journey. That it gets hard and messy, but that this kind of messy love-in-action can be life-forming for all the little souls within the bounds of your home.

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Kylee recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social work and is currently working at a child-placing agency while going back to school to pursue a masters in social work. Her parents jumped into the crazy world of foster care just days before her 8th birthday and cared for numerous infants and toddlers over a ten-year time span; four of those kids later became permanent family members through adoption. Kylee is passionate about learning how to better love her siblings from “hard places” and loves sharing about this journey and passion on her personal blog Learning to Abandon and on her Instagram @kyleemarissa.

February 11, 2015February 10, 2015

Adoption Guilt

Our family has an imperfect adoption story.

It’s the story of a young woman with a heart as big as a mountain and a brain as small as a pea.

Someone who went out to change the world by adopting a helpless baby girl, envisioning all the ideals without acknowledging any of the challenges.

How many of us are in that position? When life gets tough and our idealistic notions lie in fragments at our feet, how many of us look back at our early selves and beat our present selves over the head with a rubber hammer, mumbling, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”?

Maybe it’s just me.

Let me be clear, I don’t think I’m stupid for adopting my daughter, who is now thirteen. No way. She’s ours and we love her. I am thankful to God for working every out so we could officially adopt her.

If I feel stupid for anything, if I beat myself up for anything, it’s for trying to be her mother when I was so ill-prepared for the challenges.

My first novel recently came out, and a reporter from a local paper wanted to interview me. The phone rang after the time we expected her arrival, and, in trying to disconnect it from the charger, my daughter inadvertently answered it.

What followed was a disaster. I was across the room and saw my daughter’s dismay. She held the phone at arm’s length, all her phone-answering skills abandoning her.

“Just say hello,” I whispered.

She exploded. “I don’t know what to say, Mom! She wants to talk to you, not me! Duh!”

I managed to get the phone away from her, but it was too late. She was embarrassed and volatile, slamming a cupboard closed, stomping, yelling her way down the hallway. And the reporter got to hear it all.

That’s what life is like for us right now. Some very good days, but then there’s a trigger (that I can’t always pinpoint) and everything falls apart. It’s painful, it’s raw, it’s emotional, and our whole family takes a nail-biting ride on the roller coaster.

For me there’s a lot of guilt associated with that roller coaster ride.

We didn’t do things the “right way” when we adopted our daughter.

We were too young by Chinese law to adopt, but we were living in China at the time, so when I spotted a newborn with a cleft lip and palate at the orphanage where I was volunteering, I asked the director if I could bring her home.

My plan was to foster care for her. She was failure to thrive and I’d found her lying flat on her back one day, a bottle propped in her mouth. The orphanage ayis were too busy to give her the attention she needed. I wanted to save this baby’s life. I wanted to make a difference.

My husband and I had been married for two years. He was away at fall camp with his students when the orphanage director gave her approval for us to foster. There was no ceremony. The ayi put her in a disposable diaper, a clean, threadbare sleeper, wrapped her in a blanket, and handed her to me. Every month after that, for seven and a half years, I brought our daughter back to the orphanage to “check her out,” rather like a library book.

For the first ten months of her life we were fostering her for a family in the United States. That family’s adoption fell through, but by then we were attached to this ten-month-old with the huge smile and couldn’t imagine taking her back to the orphanage. That’s when we made the commitment to be her real parents, even though we had to wait almost seven more years for everything to be finalized.

So whenever my daughter has one of those fall-apart moments, when one of those triggers gets flipped and she freaks out, the enemy pours accusations into my head:

You would have treated her differently from the beginning if you’d known you were going to adopt her. You were holding back a piece of your heart all those years to protect yourself from getting hurt. You were too young, too naïve. You didn’t even ask your husband if he supported you bringing home a baby that day. You listened to everyone’s advice and got a lot of things wrong. If she has anger issues it’s YOUR FAULT.

But what does God say?

Trust me.

The past is behind you.

I’m teaching you, I’m molding you. I will never leave you or forsake you.

Haven’t I provided for you before? I’ll provide for you now.

The hard days pass and spring comes for awhile. It’s late and my daughter, who is quite the night owl, peeks through my cracked-open bedroom door. “Can I snuggle with you, Mommy, just for a little while?”

These are the moments I treasure—the calm in the eye of the storm, the promise of better things to come, the assurance that there is grace even in our brokenness and failure. And forgiveness. I’m learning to forgive myself for not being perfect.

Our adoption story isn’t completely written yet. I will cling to hope and leave guilt behind.

___________________________

A.L. Sonnichsen is the author of a newly published middle-grade novel. In it a young orphaned girl in modern-day China discovers the meaning of family in this inspiring story told in verse, in the tradition of Inside Out and Back Again and Sold.

Kara never met her birth mother. Abandoned as an infant, she was taken in by an American woman living in China. Now eleven, Kara spends most of her time in their apartment, wondering why she and Mama cannot leave the city of Tianjin and go live with Daddy in Montana. Mama tells Kara to be content with what she has…but what if Kara secretly wants more?

Told in lyrical, moving verse, Red Butterfly is the story of a girl learning to trust her own voice, discovering that love and family are limitless, and finding the wings she needs to reach new heights.

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Raised in Hong Kong, A.L. Sonnichsen grew up attending British school and riding double-decker buses. As an adult, she spent eight years in Mainland China where she learned that not all baozi are created equal. She also learned some Mandarin, which doesn’t do her much good in the small Eastern Washington town where she now lives with her rather large family. Find out more at http://alsonnichsen.blogspot.com.

February 2, 2015May 16, 2022

When You Mother the Broken

The day we pulled up into our driveway with them — into the home that had been full of empty bedrooms for years while we waited for them — we sat with the keys in the ignition while they, buckled into boosters in the back, slept off days of sleepless travel and we sighed.

Done.

We’d finished the hardest part, hadn’t we? They were … home.

They transitioned almost seamlessly into our home — but for some minor hiccups with attachment that an ergo and night-time bottle feeding (eye-to-eye) seemed to cure.

My little girl smelled like me. (She was mine.) My son even looked like Nate, aside from his chocolate skin. They slept through the night and played for hours like best friends and made our family of four feel easy.

A year later and we were adopting again. Insta-family.

And somewhere between that cloudless day when we brought our first two home and the one when we had five packed into our rusty suburban, the seamless days of adoption had vaporized.

The days when it seemed easy were distant.

What had been long-hour stretches of innocent chatter and pretend-play became lives and histories of once-strangers who were now siblings, rubbing up against each other’s life-losses.

What had been remedied, after our first adoption, by eye contact and skin-to-skin holding – little daily steps to build that bond of attachment – had now grown into heart-issues that needed more than simple strategies.

I started totaling the years of fatherlessness among my children, blushing that my home study never surfaced how grossly under-qualified I was to parent them.

I’d signed up, naively zealous as if I were running for student council, not taking on decades of life with children who, mostly, only knew loss.

Seven AM, for me, meant that I would walk outside my bedroom door and face gaps that needed years of holding, not just a quick morning prayer. Their lives were bleeding and I’d never been trained with a tourniquet.

So I cowered.

I shriveled.

What mom wants to watch herself fail … in the face of tear-stained cheeks and expectant eyes that needed a win?

What mom wants to watch herself fail — period?

I shrunk. I folded.

And it’s here that He began to give me a perspective on my motherhood.

And for life.

Adoptive mama who is wondering how the “yes” you mustered to open your door and your bedroom and your late-night hours to that little life … dropped you right here, one bleeding, reeling mess with a bleeding, reeling child: today is where He tells you who you are.

Today is when He tells you who He is.

Biological mama who is almost wishing she could label this brokenness away. Who stares, deep, into eyes that look like yours — but which carry a kind of pain and disconnect that you aren’t even sure where it came from.

Today is when He tells you who He is.

She buckles (in public). She kicks and screams underneath that sullen shoulder shrug and angry eyes – the day after you stopped the globe to celebrate her birthday – and God says you get to find Me …”when they cannot repay you” (Luke 14: 7-14).

You pour yourself out for the child who can still barely respond to a hug and He tells you that He sees you in this secret. This child ties you to a reality that’s more than flesh in front of you.

The dinner-date you planned that never happened because your son melted down– with years of feeling rejection from someone who wasn’t you – left you homebound and aching. And it gave you a new chance to weep, at His feet. Your heart had never needed to open like this – to Him – before.

When they cannot repay you, you get to find the One who can fill up your insides — better than any repayment.

When we mother the broken we meet the Father of the broken. We can’t just quote His Word by rote and pray pious prayers, anymore, we have to wrap our little-girl fingers around His once-flesh and cling with all we have left, if we want to “more than survive” these years.

What the world tells us is loss – these children who might smile big for our Christmas cards but cry themselves to sleep well past when they should be sleeping through the night – is crazy, beautiful gain, in Him.

We gain. Him.

The way into His heart is to go down, mama. And you now have an invitation, with this child who cannot repay you.

The four once-down-trodden under my roof have held my hand with their lives and gently led me to a measure of the love of God I didn’t need when I was successful.

Adoptive mama, biological mama, step-mama — staring at what feels like your failure, this oozing life that has kept you from a neat and tidy motherhood might just be exactly what you need to crack your heart open to God (the One whose eyes bore with love into your broken one … the One whose eyes bore with love into your broken you).

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Sara is a wife to Nate and a mother of five whose arms stretched wide across the ocean to Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life she was introduced to pain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. Her book, Every Bitter Thing is Sweet released October 7, 2014 via Zondervan, is an invitation — back to hope, back to healing, back to a place that God is holding for you—a place where the unseen is more real than what the eye can perceive. A place where even the most bitter things become sweet. She writes regularly at EveryBitterThingIsSweet.com.

January 30, 2015

Why We Don’t Celebrate Gotcha Day

She stood in the middle of Build-a-Bear, clutching her new stuffed bunny, with tears streaming down her face.

We were there to continue the tradition of letting each child choose an animal, stuff it, bathe it, and name it. And each time a child goes through the process, my husband and I sneak off to record our voices onto a little device, which is placed in the animal’s paw. At bedtime, or anytime they just need to hear us say we love them, they can press the stuffed animal’s hand. We loved watching our daughter take great care in making the bunny her own.

Finally, she took “Stuffy” in her arms and pressed the hand. Our recorded voices started, telling her how much we loved her. She looked up at our excited faces and started sobbing.
As much as we wanted to believe her tears were due to her overwhelming happiness, I knew it wasn’t true. We were spending the evening celebrating her one-year anniversary in our family with dinner and a trip to Build-a-Bear. Because Matt and I were going to be out of town on her homecoming anniversary, we went the week before. We wanted some family time before we left anyway, and we loved the idea of leaving our voices at her fingertips while we were gone.
We presented the evening as a celebration of one year as a family of five, not specifically about her. But she’s a smart girl. She knows we are only a family of five because she’s in it. And so the tears came.

For adopted children, sometimes celebrating a new family is a stark reminder of the family they lost. Often, the times we think will be most joyful- birthdays, holidays, “Gotcha Day”- actually bring up the deepest pain.

So we tread lightly. And when unexpected tears come, we hug harder and don’t try to force words. We love them, we cry with them, and we try to imagine what that pain might feel like. Some have called the loss of one’s biological family a “primal wound,” and from parenting two adopted children, I would have to agree. There’s no way for me to explain the pain that comes from that loss having never lived it. But I witness it often.

For some adoptees, there’s the added pressure of feeling like they need to seem happy about their adoptions 100% of the time because the alternative would be a betrayal to their adoptive family. One of our goals in adoptive parenting is for our kids to know they can be sad or confused or angry about their adoptions, and we will be there with them in it. They can talk to us without worrying if we’ll take their pain personally and make it about us. As we have said repeatedly to them, they can (and do) miss their first families and love us at the same time.
Their grief is not about us.

I was talking with our son the other day about how we can respond when others say things that feel uncomfortable to us. That’s a pretty common experience for any adoptive family, and even more so for a transracial, adoptive family. One example we talked about was what he thinks or can say when someone says he and his sister are lucky to have been adopted into our family. He looked at me with genuine disbelief and said the perfect thing.

“Lucky? But I lost my other family.”

That’s why we don’t celebrate Gotcha Day.
__
Every family and every adoptee is different. I can speak only to what works for our family right now (it might be different in a few years even). Every family has to do what’s best for them at the time.

____________________________

January 14, 2015

Broken

There were lots of things, about China in general, that I wanted to post. And maybe I will sometime. I was going to now. But something happened. Lucy happened. She is everything now. Lucy is the world.

The days, and mostly the last few hours before we met her for the first time, I always felt like I should be preparing somehow. But there was not much I could do.

And nothing could have prepared me for that moment. I thought I had cleared it in my head that she was real. That she was a person, not a picture; something I could touch, and love on and hug. But I guess I hadn’t.

I was expecting to have more time to get ready (like time would help!) but we just walked into the room and there she was. It was shocking; life-changing.

I expected Lucy to be wonderful. I expected her to be beyond my imagination—but I didn’t expect her to shatter my world like this. I didn’t expect to come to pieces over her.

It’s been three years so I don’t remember everything, and I wonder if Michael shattered me like this. And I wonder how many times I can shatter before I just break. I hope it’s a lot. Or maybe I hope it’s not very many. Because maybe we’re supposed to break. Because there’s pain in this world, and brokenness. And I think it shatters God’s heart too. I’ve been praying lately that HE would give me his heart. Well, maybe he has.

We’ve had reality-checks, sure; but I’m in love. And that’s a dangerous thing. Because when you really love someone you are willing to sacrifice everything for them. I’ve worried before that after Lucy comes home I won’t be able to play by myself—swing by myself—what about reading? And writing? And in the car on the back from the Civil Affairs building, I realized: it didn’t matter. If I could be with Lucy, I would give up anything.

I’m in love. And it’s dangerous. But I don’t even care. I thought I knew what it meant to love her. I was wrong. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to be her sister. It’s not what I expected. But very few things are! And I like her the way she is. I’m glad I was wrong.

I was kind-of caught up in the fact that I WAS GOING TO CHINA at first, and I’m still excited about that, but Lucy is what’s most important.

I remember when I was on the plane, shortly after I’d spent hours trying to sleep next to my comfortably snoring parents, as I was sitting there in a total haze, only sort-of coherent; I thought, “what if this whole trip just goes over my head in a wave of jet-lag and I can’t even enjoy or really remember it?”

And then I realized: it did not matter. The trip isn’t important—it’s what we’re bringing home. ‘Cause Lucy is forever. Forever and ever and ever. That’s what family is all about: foreverness. Always being there for each other.

Lucy is a sister. She belongs; as much as I do. And someday I’ll probably forget sometimes that we had to do without her for eight years. Someday she’ll just there. The seven of us. And it will be the most natural thing in the world.

______________________________________

My name is Hanna Rothfuss. I am 14 and in eighth grade. I have lived in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska for my whole life. My interests are reading and writing, mainly about fantasy and orphan care–often adoption. I have four siblings, two of which are adopted. I’m a homeschooler and a child of God. I pray that all my writing is encouraging, empowering, and brings glory to Him.

You can read more of Hanna’s writing on her blog: Taking My Time.

January 12, 2015January 12, 2015

Let the Grief Begin

“When did we start believing that God wants to send us to safe places to do easy things? That faithfulness is holding the fort? That playing it safe is safe? That there is any greater privilege than sacrifice? That radical is anything but normal? Jesus didn’t die to keep us safe. He died to make us dangerous. Faithfulness is not holding the fort, it’s storming the gates of hell.”
–Mark Batterson

We have been home almost exactly two months. It’s kind of funny how I let myself think that since some issues haven’t surfaced yet—they are not going to. Not! I have seen grief this week, like never before. I was not expecting it, yet somehow I felt prepared for this moment and did not react negatively when the grief was displayed in a manner directed towards me. Emotions erupted over small issues that could have easily been mistaken for something other than grief. Thankfully the Lord has given me the discernment to see beneath the surface of these outbursts.

My response? I did not take an ounce of this personally. I let the emotions purge from a broken heart and sat, just sat (almost silent). I was determined that I would not shrink back in fear of what I was seeing. I sat for hours, watching as ugly outbursts erupted like a volcano. Words and feelings were often directed towards me, as if somehow I was responsible for the pain, yet I could see that I was just a safe place to let it all out.

This is one of those posts that well, might seem like too much information. Still, I share it because for those praying us through you can know exactly what we need and for those who are in the same place or who will be soon, it’s good to be prepared for the grief.

You see as beautiful as adoption is—it is also very ugly.

In order for us to have the privilege of adoption there had to be great loss for our children. This is the part of adoption that tends to be glossed over when we talk about going across the world to become a father (and mother) to the fatherless. It all seems so wonderful and good that surely it should be easy right? They will see just how much we have done for them and wake up every day and thank us from the bottom of their hearts. Only they cannot. They cannot thank us for security when they cannot begin to understand what security is. They cannot begin to trust when their trust has been repeatedly broken.

This is the part of the journey that I had prepared for and understood fully that I would never really be able to prepare for it. I recognize that this is just the beginning. There is more to come, I am certain of it. So, what then? I can fear this grief or trust that the tears, the anger, and the hurt are the path to healing.

Pain precedes comfort. It’s part of the process. It’s the step where the hurt is purged making way for the comfort.

So often when hurts come we don’t want comfort—what we really want is to be comfortable. There is a difference. Comfortable is the state of ease, but God does not promise us that. In fact, he offers us the opposite, “in this world you will have trouble.” When we are grieving, the process of healing comes through feeling the pain. It literally hurts. Comfort comes as we are strengthened through our pain, not necessarily out of it.

So, as I sat yesterday, waiting and watching the torment of emotions purging from my child, I was helpless to remove the pain, but I could be present hoping that in some way it would offer some small comfort in that not-so-comfortable place.

Though I cannot change the circumstances, remove the hurt or even begin to fully understand the pain—at least I can be present. Having a mom to be present in the midst of hurt is something new for these little ones. It is what I have to offer. So I bring it, praying my actions will point towards my comforter—Jesus.

Grief hurts. It hurts to watch and it definitely hurts to experience.

Though I cannot fix it, I am reminded that in the moment when I love my children despite their unlovable behavior, I am the tangible evidence of God’s unconditional love. What better way to teach them about the gospel? After all, unless I live out the gospel message in the day-to-day moments, it remains just a story in a book; but faith lived changes hearts.

I pray that God would strengthen me to be faithful in this journey.

_____________________________

Tiffany is a wife to Kirk and mother of eight including six biological and two newly adopted from China. With a looming financial crisis at the outset of their recent adoption, God took their family on a journey of faith. Having been home just over ten weeks, they are currently working through the transition phase of their new adoption. Tiffany writes an honest account of challenges of adoption and the redemptive work of her savior Jesus Christ at Extravagant Love. Though her faith and limits have been tested, she points that adoption is paving the way for her to grow and experience God’s presence as never before.

January 9, 2015January 9, 2015

This is Adoption

I remember the yellow hue of the hospital lights in Moscow. Not the warm, buttery kind of yellow that warms you up inside, but the dingy kind. The kind too dark to usher the relief that light usually brings into the dark.

I was there with my husband John, a translator, and our newly adopted son Arie. He wasn’t sick. We were there for his visa exam: the one that would grant us permission to go home.

For me and for John this was a momentous step forward: one of the last details to check off our long but dwindling list that would make our adoption complete.

For Arie this trip to the hospital was terrifying. He whimpered in my lap, fighting back the urge to cry with as much courage as his two-year-old body could muster. I held him tight, reassuring him as best I could as a relative stranger with a foreign tongue.

“It’s the smell,” said our translator, trying to explain the fear on our usually happy boy’s face. “It reminds him of getting his shots.”

Indeed, it did smell like alcohol swaps in that waiting area. Our translator whispered some encouraging words to Arie in Russian. He started sucking his thumb feverishly.

When at last it was our turn to see the doctor our boy’s demeanor turned around. The crinkle of the paper on the exam table and the happy tickles from the jolly Russian doctor distracted him from his fear. He laughed! Soon the exam was over and we were on our way back to our temporary apartment. Ever closer to home.

Two years have passed since that day, but I remain forever changed. Forever changed for having witnessed the inner turmoil of a child scared and alone. My husband and I were there with him of course, but oh how little Arie knew of us. He called us Mama and Papa, yet had no way to know what those names truly meant. He didn’t know we were going to be with him forever; to him we might have been two more faces in his ever changing sea of caregivers.

Today Arie knows exactly what Mama and Papa mean. He knows we are forever. He knows he is safe and secure. Just this morning I took him to the dentist and rather than wail in terror as he did at first, he climbed into the dental chair and laid back without hesitation. He giggled as the hygienist “tickled” his teeth with raspberry flavored toothpaste, glancing occasionally in my direction with a goofy grin.
These days when he is scared, Arie searches out my comfort. A normal action for most kids; a milestone for those who have had a lonely start like his. In the night, if he wakes up in the dark he cries out for me and my husband. Those suppressed whimpers we heard at the Moscow hospital have been replaced with loud cries for help. Where my foreign words formerly provided him with little relief, my simple presence is now his favorite comfort. He falls against my chest; the sound of my heart and the whisper of my voice quiet his wailing. He sighs deeply and snuggles in.

This is adoption. This is a picture of redemption. This is something that was lost, found. Broken, put back together. Injured, healed.

Adoption is not easy. Not for the child, not for the parents. When I say that I have been forever changed, I mean it. My eyes have been opened to a world I would rather have not seen. I know that today there are thousands of children just like my son who wait. Hundreds, at least, who have been brought to hospitals not by new parents and not for a simple visa exam, but by a nanny or caregiver- maybe known, maybe not- sick or for surgery or an extended stay.

The caregiver will leave when her shift is over and a new one take her place. Or maybe not. Maybe the child will be left alone, under the care of nurses and doctors who have to check his chart to remember his name. They do their best, I know it- those caregivers and medical staff- but they are not Mom. They are not the one he really needs to walk him through his fear. Not the ones to hold him in his time of need.

We do not adopt out of obligation or sympathy. We adopt because we long to hold the hand of the one who needs us. Because every child deserves to know the love of a family. We adopt because we were made to live for more than ourselves. Because we know what it means to be redeemed. We adopt because in Christ we know what it is to have been chosen.

We love because he first loved us.

Do you have more love to give?

_______________________________

Jillian Burden is still adjusting to this beautiful thing called motherhood; she and her husband are parents to a son by way of a Russian adoption. While her belly might not have expanded, her heart and her faith sure grew as her family did! You can read about this soul stretching journey to parenthood on her blog.

Blog

Category: Realities

The Day I Fell Apart

What color is adoption?

Adoption Isn’t Always Easy {And It Isn’t Supposed to Be}

Including Your Children

Adoption Guilt

When You Mother the Broken

Why We Don’t Celebrate Gotcha Day

Broken

Let the Grief Begin

This is Adoption