Shaken

“Before adoption, I believed I was a good mom. My confidence was shaken as I was challenged to become a PhD level psychologist/therapeutic parent overnight with the addition of traumatized children to our family.” -Lisa Qualls, from the blog One Thankful Mom

I read these words the other day and it felt like releasing a deep breath I didn’t know I was holding. I have been processing them ever since. Because they are so, so true.

In a typical child with a typical upbringing in a typical home with typical parents, you see typical development. Even if there are medical issues, learning issues, mental health issues, or emotional issues -- there is a typical foundation with which to work through those issues.

Now turn that sentence around to it’s opposite, and take those children out of their culture, place them into typical family but one composed virtually of strangers -- and there is nothing typical about anything anymore.

I am a learner. I am a planner. If I embark on something new, I want to be fully prepared. Before adopting, we read books and blogs and websites, we talked to other adoptive parents, we met with therapists and specialists. And yet nothing prepared us for the journey we have been on over the past two and a half years.

I thought I was a good mom. I thought I understood kids, and even kids with challenges. I taught for three years at a school for kids with special needs -- surely that gave me insight and tools. I was a dynamic babysitter, nursery worker, and Sunday school teacher -- surely my love for kids prepared me. I was a high school small group leader for nine years -- surely that prepared me to parent teens. Heck, I had thee kids of my own, and I was a good mom to them! We are a great family - stable, secure, loving, close, fun, accepting, and with huge hearts and extra bedrooms. And I was armed with an arsenal of information to boot.

Nothing could have prepared me.

As I talk and interact with other adoptive parents with similar stories to our own, there is a common thread, and it’s this: Navigating our new lives can only be done as a crash course, and the classes are very small.

I read this on another blog, and these words also resonated with me:

“It is like going to the school of what really matters. It is a crash course in getting over pleasing other people. If embraced, this new perspective quickly leads to a far less judgmental stance toward others – we are acutely aware that we never truly know what is under the behavior of that screaming child in the grocery store or that teenager who is “acting out”. We are forced to a deeper reliance on and wrestling with God and are wise to submit to a much slower pace of life. We receive a gift of often being able to see beyond the surface into the deep places of life. It is a portal to true joy.” --from the blog In Pursuit of a Tool Box

I am processing a lot right now, and I know I want to begin writing again. I am praying that God gives me wisdom to know how to do that in a way that respects all those involved in our story, while also attempting to be authentic. If you know me, you know I don’t do fake.

Right now I am searching for the ‘portal to joy’, and finding it elusive. I am wrestling with God over the details of our story. It’s especially difficult wading through dark and heavy in this season, when everything is shiny and bright. But this I do know: God is here.

I read these words yesterday for an Advent series I’m doing, and it brought some measure of comfort:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.” Revelation 1:8 ESV

There are times I long for what was, and other times I long for what will be. I feel caught in the middle right now. But God is. God is here, in my present, right in the middle of my mess. He always was. He always will be.