Category Archives: post adoption

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

Posted on by September 14, 2022

I never rearrange furniture, but here we were doing it, moving shelves and purging drawers and hauling a chest up two flights of stairs.

Somewhere in the process of measuring to see if everything fit, I lost the tape measure. It wasn’t clipped to my pants, wasn’t on one of the shelves, wasn’t anywhere on the floor amid the piles of stuff everywhere. So I hollered upstairs to Finn.

“Did I leave the tape measure up there? On the counter? Maybe on the kitchen island?” I heard him rummaging while I sorted stacks of unused picture frames.

“Found it! It was in the drawer!” he yelled back down.

eucatastrophe: brace yourself for hope and joy

I walked back to the stairway thinking, In the drawer? I didn’t put it in the drawer… and as I came to the foot of the stairs, he approached the top of the stairs at the same time – and an image flashed through my mind of him throwing the heavy tape measure at me down the stairs. Because he’s six, and he might do something like that without thinking.

And then he did it.

His arm moved and the tape measure hurtled down the stairs at me, and I screamed.

And then I stopped screaming as it unrolled and flitted to my feet, harmless.

Here’s what happened: I was expecting the same tape measure I had lost – you know, the heavy, metal, retractable kind – but Finn had found the tape measure I use for knitting, which is just a long, plastic ribbon 60 inches long. And that’s what he threw at me.

Life has been throwing a lot at all of us lately, hasn’t it? We often don’t realize how on edge we are, just waiting for the next blow.

A couple weeks ago we finally had Reagan’s assessment. After it was done, I sat in an office with the psychologist (not the first one we miserably encountered; this one was terrific) and we debriefed on what had just happened.

We had sat through three hours of questions and exercises and tests, and Reagan had not even spelled her first name correctly. She answered the simplest of math questions wrong. When the doctor asked her how old she was, she said, “I twenty-seven,” and told him her birthday was in September. But she’s sixteen, and it’s not.

I was devastated. Ten years of parenting, homeschooling, trial and error, endless repetition, and this is what we had to show for it. All I could think was, What must this man think of our efforts as parents? It was Reagan’s assessment, but I felt like I had failed the test.

The doctor and I went over the results, her responses, her IQ, her behavior at home, the anxiety of testing, and the complications with all of her special needs. The whole time, I was bracing myself for judgment, condemnation, the pitying shake of the head, the professional condescension.

But none of that happened.

Instead, he said this:

“You and your husband have done an outstanding job with Reagan.” He paused. “The fact that she can read at all is remarkable.”

Aaaand that’s when I broke down sobbing. The weight lifted and relief flooded over me. The psychologist frantically searched for tissues, having no idea what to do with a crying woman across the desk. But he kept talking and he wasn’t just being nice; he went over all the challenges again and juxtaposed our efforts and Reagan’s abilities over them, and the result was stunning. I’m still not over it.

We often try to protect ourselves by expecting the worst. We brace for the blow because we’ve been hurt before, and we’d rather be prepared than be blindsided by calamity that comes out of nowhere.

But what about the good things that come out of nowhere, too? What if instead of the crash you expect, the Lord has prepared a soft landing?

A friend of mine said this a few weeks ago: Have you ever braced for a hard impact only to end up getting a soft nudge that barely upset your balance? It was like that. I saw the redirection coming and I expected it would bring me to my knees, but in minutes, I could already see His plan was better than mine.

I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. We white-knuckle our way through these crazy days, expecting disappointment and catastrophe, resigned to the worst. But this is not the way of the Lord, and this is not what Godly surrender is.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

– Romans 8:18

This brings me to a word I learned recently, so here you go:

Eucatastrophe: the sudden, unexpected, joyous turn of events.

J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term, but the eucatastrophe is all God’s doing. And this, friends, is where we’re supposed to live. Our fear can give permission to the enemy for what we dread, but our trust and expectation make way for the breakthrough.

No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”

– Romans 4:20-22

Often, we have perfectly good reasons to brace for impact because we’ve seen how things play out. But we’ll have more peace in the preparation if we recognize that we serve the God of the eucatastrophe – the one who stills the storm, breaks bread for the multitude, and causes recklessly thrown projectiles to flutter harmlessly to our feet.

It is the story of Mephibosheth, the crippled grandson of a previous king who was called into the presence of King David. Mephibosheth had no reason to expect anything but slaughter for himself and his family; it was typical then to completely eliminate the previous regime’s offspring. He knew he’d been living on borrowed time, and it looked like that time was up.

He had no idea that God was already moving on his behalf, that the eucatastrophe was already in motion. He could never have imagined that King David was looking for a remnant in his family line not for the sake of hunting them down, but for the sake of showing kindness to them out of love for his old friend, his best friend…Mephibosheth’s father Jonathan, who died years earlier.

And Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan, son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and paid homage. And David said, “Mephibosheth!” And he answered, “Behold, I am your servant.” And David said to him, “Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always.”

– 2 Samuel 9:6-7

We keep expecting more situations like what we’ve already lost. But loss is not what God gives us when we turn to Him. Our losses are not compounding; they are recompensing.

Be glad, O children of Zion,
    and rejoice in the Lord your God,
for he has given the early rain for your vindication;
    he has poured down for you abundant rain,
    the early and the latter rain, as before.

The threshing floors shall be full of grain;
    the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.

I will restore to you the years
    that the swarming locust has eaten.

– Joel 2:23-25a

I had a dream recently that Vince had been emailing back and forth with someone about a history course he offers. The man’s name was Bao Leng, and when he purchased the course, Vin said, “Bao Leng came through!” In my dream, I immediately heard the Lord say, Look up the meaning of that name. So I tried to do it, but as often happens in dreams, things didn’t work – I tried typing letters into my phone but they wouldn’t enter correctly, the search engine was all messed up, and my laptop was just as useless.

But as soon as I woke up, I looked it up. And here’s what I saw:

A breakthrough. Huh. Not like we haven’t been talking about that at all lately.

Okay, so now we have two new words in our vocabulary. Let me give you one more.

Respair: The return of hope after a period of despair.

And this is also where some of us are being called to. We were never meant to walk in fear, talking ourselves out of the big things He’s called us to instead of getting to experience the eucatastrophe of His grace on us.

She had been setting her teeth and clenching her fists for a terrible blast of lion’s breath; but the breath had really been so gentle that she had not even noticed the moment at which she left the earth.

– C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Yes, situations are hard and the world right now is a circus on psychotropic drugs. But no, fear does not get to win the day. Fear doesn’t even get to take a backseat and come along for the ride. Fear needs to be shoved out the door while we’re hauling down the highway.

This is not the season to entertain fear. This is the season for eucatastrophe, for bao leng, for respair.

What if our “what ifs” have been all wrong?

What if some of the struggles we’ve accepted as just part of life were actually just part of a broken mindset? What if some things are meant to be easier, and not harder?

What if the things we’ve struggled over in time-consuming labor came effortlessly in comparison? What if the path was made flat, the boulders moved out of the way, and we could spend more time enjoying the view?

What if the Lord is still turning Sauls into Pauls? Because He is, and each person transformed changes the trajectory of our culture in this era.

What if instead of bracing for impact, we braced for breakthrough?

While we endure, God is working on our behalf in ways we would never imagine. So we trust Him with great expectation. That hope is not wishful thinking; it is the powerful currency that buys us time before the eucatastrophe.

yes: the hymn of a special needs family

Posted on by July 25, 2022

The day we met Reagan is the day we made the decision. We’d read all the translated paperwork and what little history there was to give us. We understood about delays, physical, emotional, and cognitive. We knew there would be years of catching up to do.

And then she walked into the room, and all that changed. No eye contact, a little overly compliant in some ways, and constant stimming movements that indicated institutional autism. Still, at almost seven, a toddler.

yes: the hymn of a special needs family

In retrospect, the paperwork we’d received was a positive spin on things, leaving out crucial information that we filled in later as best we could. And I guess I followed its lead, because during that first week of getting to know Reagan, I blogged only a few times and put the same kind of spin in those posts. There was too much to think about and process. And I don’t remember when Fetal Alcohol Syndrome came into our daily vocabulary, but we knew that first day that her needs were not what we thought we had signed up for.

That first day, meeting her in her orphanage, we realized we needed to make a different kind of decision.

Will you still say yes? the Lord asked us. And we did. We have said yes every day for the last ten years. It has been imperfect, victorious, clumsy, gritty, and stubborn, but it has always been yes.

So I guess I don’t like it when professionals who are new to our family decide to lecture me on things I have lived with all these years while they have sat comfortably behind a desk.

“FAS can be very…ahh…” The doctor hesitated, apparently looking for the right words. “Difficult…to live with. And…long-term…there are many issues that need to be considered –”

“We adopted Reagan ten years ago, and it was a two year process. We’ve had twelve years of considering. We know what we signed up for, and it wasn’t to foist her off onto some government program as we get older.”

“Ohhh, well, good. Yes, I completely respect that.”

But then she hesitated again. I was pretty sure I knew where she was trying to go, and she confirmed it with her next sentence.

“The, um, challenges involved with Fetal Alcohol damage are lifelong, and I don’t know how old you are…”

Why is it that professionals with letters after their name and only two sentences of information about our kid feel it their duty to tell a parent the obvious? Which one of us has spent years caring for the child, twenty-four seven?

Frustrated with the beating around the bush, I brought out the chainsaw to help her out.

“We already know we will never be empty nesters.” No cure, irreversible damage, yes, we get it.

“Ohhh, okay,” she said, obviously relieved.

But I wasn’t done. I’m not sure what kind of idiot parents she usually deals with, or if she’s just another professional without personal experience who assumes parents need the expertise of someone who has spent more time studying special needs than actually living with them. But ignorant condescension fries me.

“We’re not contacting you because we’re new at this,” I said. “We’ve been her parents for a long time. We’re not suddenly at a loss for what to do with her.”

“Oh!” she said, surprised. “Why are you contacting me?”

“Because apparently Reagan needs to have this testing done in order to stay in her current school program.” It’s a hoop we have to jump through, nothing else.

“Oh!” she said again, and once on level ground, we finally got into the details of the assessment.

But really, this assessment is more than a hoop. It will be an IQ test and several other “instruments” (alas, not the musical kind) that test Reagan’s cognitive functioning and achievement. It will be results, and labels, and numbers. It will be many things I don’t really want to know, and many other things that we already know that will suddenly, miraculously, become official because an expert who will spend less than an hour in Reagan’s presence will finally verify them.

Yippee. Pardon me if I don’t applaud.

I am completely torn about it. We adopted her to keep her from being a cog in a wheel she would not have survived. We homeschool to keep our kids from being plugged into systems that strip nearly all individuality and innovation. But Reagan is now officially in high school, and to keep her current homeschool program that she enjoys and is gaining small measures of victory in, she must be slapped with codes and spectrums and assessments to validate her presence there.

“It’s just a number,” the doctor hastened to reassure me. Yes, I agree…but it’s so much more than a number, too. It is like the brain scan conundrum – for years we toyed with the idea of having one done, curious about the amount of damage Reagan is actually living with. But if we saw it, would it matter? Would it be a relief? Or would it leave more questions than answers?

Here’s the real question: Would it remove our faith for a miracle? That’s the one that causes bile to rise and my eyes to water. Sometimes we know too much, and it gets in the way of what God wants to do.

I had a dream once, years ago, that Reagan could speak clearly, perfectly, just like you and me. Long, clear sentences, enunciated words. In the dream she was an adult, a beautiful woman.

She’s getting there physically, at least. Sixteen and beautiful, but not an adult. Without divine healing, she will never be an adult.

Behold, the Lord God comes with might,

and his arm rules for him;

behold, his reward is with him,

and his recompense before him.

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;

he will gather the lambs in his arms;

he will carry them in his bosom,

and gently lead those that are with young.

– Isaiah 40:10-11

Every year on her birthday I am astounded by her new age, but I think we’ve finally hit the point where it no longer surprises us and that grieves me, too, because it feels like jadedness. In a few years it’ll be, “Oh, Reagan’s twenty.” Later, it’ll be “Reagan just turned 27.” And people will continue to drop their jaws in polite disbelief, not understanding or having any frame of reference for her abilities, or lack of them, or for how far she’s come, or what she went through to make it all so difficult in the first place.

In typing that, I pull my hands away from the keyboard, and cover my face with them, and weep. It is the hymn of a special needs mom.

I do not know if she will change. I do not know if we did enough, or are doing enough. I know what I would tell a friend in the same place, of course, and what you would probably tell me, but I also know there are so many things I could and can be doing differently.

But like most special needs moms, I am tired. Exhausted. Overwhelmed. I feel lazy if I take a break, but I need breaks, so I take them, and then I accuse myself of laziness. I waver between radical hope and weary cynicism, and the whiplash between the two makes me dizzy and confused. The future is coming fast and I can’t control it. She will always need help, and we may not always be here to give it to her.

For crying out loud, I know.

I know that when we signed up for this, we signed our biological kids up, too, and I also know that wasn’t fair for anyone. But what Reagan was born with and went through and lives with isn’t fair, either. For her to live at all required a family to step up for her, and God called us to be that family.

So there is no fairness; there is only goodness and endurance and love.

There is the sacrifice of praise.

There is the Word, and His promises in it that never fail and are always fulfilling. As long as she is young, He will lead me gently.

There is the Yes of Surrender that makes room for the miracle, and sometimes the first miracle is what happens in us as we give it.

turning it up: support for adoptive families comes to audio

Posted on by April 11, 2023

Here’s a confession that those of you who are regular readers here already know: I go in phases of sharing about adoption and special needs. Sometimes I forge ahead in it and share several posts here or on social media, and other times I pull back to recuperate.

It’s hard to share. It’s super personal. The issues are painful. But those issues need to be seen.

Not everyone will stop to notice. Most will probably keep scrolling — no shame, we all need a little mindless scrolling sometimes — and some will click “like” on the posts without even reading them because they’re too long.

I get that. I skim or skip posts sometimes for the same reason.

But we miss things when we’re always too busy to stop and notice them.

And adoptive, foster, and special needs families are collapsing from people being too busy to notice them.

These families are in our churches and neighborhoods — until they’re not. Until they give up on church or they give up on marriage. Until it all becomes too much because people are so busy scrolling past, giving a thumbs up to the concept of adoption but having no clue about what’s really going on in these families.

How do we move upstream to prevent divorce, depression, abuse, and suicide? How do we draw people into the church and community instead of driving them away from it?

By seeing people. But we have to look past the surface and stop scrolling for a few minutes to do it.

So I’ve collected my adoption posts in one place here. They are full of the stuff under the surface, behind the curtain, while we try to walk the line of privacy and transparency. They are by no means the full story, but they are enough to give the respectful, caring observer plenty to think about…and to send a message to other adoptive, foster, and special needs families. Here’s that message:

YOU ARE NOT ALONE. And you’re not going crazy. You are seen and loved and understood. 🖤

I know some of you are done with church. Some of you are done with marriage. Some of you, for the sake of younger children and your entire family, have been done with adoption and had to disrupt.

(If you’re not one of those families, that means they had to give up their adopted child to be adopted by another family — and face all the judgment, condemnation, and assumptions from a society that doesn’t know what goes on behind the scenes and is also unwittingly ignorant of the role they may be playing in the disaster and heartache these families endure.)

None of this should ever happen. Adoptive families should never feel alone and be left by the communities around them to quietly implode behind closed doors.

We can intentionally be part of the solution. 

And we need to be, because there are plenty of people who seem intent on being part of the problem, too busy reveling in their know-it-allness that they cannot fathom there might still be something to learn about this — like the Goodreads reviewer who gave Upside Down a mere 2 stars because I am “only an adoptive mom” and not a trained, lettered professional who actually (smirk) knows anything about attachment issues, mental health, or adoption.

That’s right; instead of studying for years behind a desk, I have only lived this out in my own home, 24 hours a day, for more than twice the amount of years it takes to get a bachelors degree. Clearly I have no expertise on the subjects of adoptive family support or adoptive parenting worth sharing.* #blessherheart

When I originally wrote Upside Down as a series of posts, I got emails, messages, and phone calls every day from adoptive, foster, and even biological parents who were going through the same stuff — but they thought they were alone. These were their most common responses:

“I thought we were the only ones who went through this.”
“I don’t know who to talk to.”
“I didn’t know how to explain this.”
“I thought we were alone.”
”I wish everyone we knew would read this.”

But you know what the most common response is from non-adoptive/foster families? It’s this:

“Whoa. I had no idea.”

No wonder these families feel alone.

It’s past time to change that.

And now there’s no excuse not to, because Upside Down is now available in audio (as you read that, you should hear it in a victorious sing-song voice, like TA-DAHHH!) and the first three segments are totally free and full of the inside scoop people needed yesterday, before they did that thing that triggered the adoptive kiddo to regress. So grab them here and share them with your friends, teachers, pastors, nosy neighbors, favorite aunt who stillll doesn’t get it, and anyone else who needs to know how they can truly support adoptive and foster families without unintentionally causing further harm.

Because we’re gonna change this thing. The world will see that what adoptive and foster families are doing is vital, but the work cannot be done without understanding and support. And we shouldn’t have to anymore.

*In case you’re wondering, I have similar inept, unprofessional, raw, untrained experience in pursuing God while being a mom of many, dealing with special needs and fighting depression and encountering other messy life circumstances in motherhood — so you should *definitely* stay away from Oh My Soul and ABIDE and Work That God Sees too, since I don’t have the right letters after my name and therefore have nothing worthwhile to share in those, either. Seriously, those books are only for the rest of us. xo