*This post and most of the Wait and Listen series is now found in Oh My Soul: Encountering God in Honest, Unconventional (and Sometimes Messy) Prayer and is available for purchase at Amazon and anywhere books are sold.
Category Archives: food
Two fillets of cold cooked salmon are in front of me. A bowl of cold mashed potatoes and a few eggs are waiting to join the party. Most of us are finishing school for the day and I’m prepping dinner, fielding questions about fish from one child and questions about subtraction from another.
I’m flaking apart the salmon, pulling out tiny elusive bones. There’s a little pile of them on the counter.
Cham is next to me, supervising. “What are you doing? What is that? Why are you doing it that way?” She’s four…as if you couldn’t tell.
“Are dose the fishes bones? What are you gonna do wif ‘em?” My sleeve starts to slip down, and both of my hands are a mess. I swipe my arm against my hip to pull it back up.
Her sister is having woes with a math problem at the table. “Mom, can you look at this?” And I look…across the room at her, and then the project in front of me, and back at her.
My eyebrows are clearly saying, Are you serious? but my voice is saying, “Maybe if you bring it here…”
I mix in the mashed potatoes and some flour, and explain how to borrow from 6000 to subtract 4536. Throw in a few eggs.
This is no job for a spatula, and my hands go right in, mixing everything together.
The peanut gallery is still watching me, swinging her feet from the barstool.
“Your hands are slimy.” She’s right. Gelatinous goo from cold fish oil is almost up to my elbows and I pull my sleeve back up with my teeth.
She slides off the barstool and goes to a cabinet. “Are you gonna use dis?”
“Nope, we don’t put cocoa in salmon patties.”
Another cabinet. “Do you want the big pot?”
“Nope, I’m going to use this pan. Thanks, though.” Cutie.
But it’s time. Mama needs a break from it so we can get some work done.
“Watch out!” I wave my slime-covered hands at her. “I’ll get you!” She shrieks and leaves…for a few minutes, at least.
She wants to help and it’s adorable. She’s not trying to give me advice or run the show. She’s just trying to be with me in the middle of it. She would plunge her hands in the mess with me in a heartbeat if I gave her the chance.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that were always the case?
We make big life choices sometimes. We change plans for the better, out of our comfort zone. God’s current moves us out of the stream of the status quo and into a new ministry or career. We get our hands dirty in a deeper calling.
It’s awesome until people start questioning our sanity. “What are you doing? What is that? Why are you doing it that way?”
You might start wearing exoskeleton underwear with a cape, or packing a gun with you at all times or something.
Someone calls an intervention.
You have no idea what you’re doing. Please tell me you haven’t bought a pair of shiny red knee-high boots and a gold tiara in the last six months. We’re going to have to search your closet for bustiers, hot pants, and spandex leggings.
Suddenly our ability to make choices as independent, successful adults is called into question. We hear about the gossip and conjecture behind our backs. We get the nosy questions to our face.
Yep, you. I know all about it, friend. You decided to adopt…again…or have kids…again… or to move…or to change course.
You decided to go deeper. You’re making some big changes.
You radical, you.
You had the nerve to go out of your comfort zone. And it made the people around you…uncomfortable.
Sometimes it’s the smallest of things that bring busybodies out of the woodwork. Recently after much prayer and counsel, we made changes to some of our accounts. It was really just some routine maintenance that needs to happen every few years, no biggie.
A few days later when we were in the middle of making breakfast, a presumptuous 20-something emissary from an insurance company knocked on our door without an appointment and tried to insert herself into our morning because she didn’t want us to make any “hasty, uninformed decisions” about our future.
She apparently missed my last three posts on boundaries. Tsk, tsk.
No problem – Vince gave her a crash course in less than three minutes and informed her in a few words that the only hasty choice we were making was to make her our former agent. Cheers. We’ve got work to do and six hungry kiddos waiting for eggs and sausage.
Our hands are in the dirt and people who wouldn’t touch the mess with a six-foot spatula don’t hesitate to start making their general observations known. Armchair quarterbacks pitch their advice, emailing articles and suggesting books. And we think, Those sound marvelous. If I wasn’t already in the trenches, I might have the luxury of reading them. Thanks.
We’re in the middle of it, up to our elbows. Our hands are dirty. This is not the time for critics in the peanut gallery to shout their questions and advice, or for Captain Obvious to express his carefully worded observations.
You’re not looking for suggestions from those with polished shoes and perfect hair. I don’t need any of the wisdom that daytime talk shows can offer. We need comrades to partner with us, bringing a shovel…or just an extra cup of coffee. To have our back.
So, friends: I love the dirty work you’re doing. You can do this. It might smell funny for a while, but it’s going to be amazing.
People with grit under their fingernails, unite. High five. It’s messy right now, but we’re on a mission and we’re not finished yet.
And the others? We will wave our slimy hands at them…and send them off shrieking. We have work to do.
Act 3. The curtain rises. It is months later.
It is a hard day, and I’m holding a fighting boy who is mad at the world.
He’s mad at his choices, mad at his consequences, and especially mad at his mama for not letting him drive through the fence. (see part 1 here)
I look into dark eyes and tell him not to fight me because I am on his side, and when he fights me, he fights against himself…and he is the one that loses. (see part 2 here)
RAD is so bizarre and parenting them is so backward in many ways. It really is an experience where you learn about God’s love for us though, because it is often years of loving them with no love in return. If other adults give them attention, it only makes it worse and prevents them from attaching to the parents longer. So many parents, though, feel so judged as they try to parent these kids.
In order to parent them effectively you have to quit caring about what others may think and care only about what is best for the child. Hard to do as a first time RAD parent and I think why so many disrupt. Hard enough to have your child not love you, but then to have others judging you too is just too much for many. I try to remind people that if the child is “reacting” then it is because they are “attaching” even if you aren’t seeing it and feeling it. If they didn’t feel themselves wanting to get close to you then there wouldn’t be so many behaviors.
– Amanda, adoptive mom
We make it to lunchtime.
It’s a treat for most of us on this day because we have veggie sushi. I know Andrey and Reagan don’t like it, though, and there’s just enough cucumber in the fridge to make an alternate meal for them – tarator, a traditional Bulgarian cold soup that they love. I don’t usually accommodate with options, but we need to use the ingredients up anyway and it sounds good to me. Perfect.
I’m grating cucumber. “I don’t like sushi,” Andrey announces from the table, amid cheers from the other kids who love it.
“I know. I’m making tarator for you and me and Reagan.”
I finish grating the cucumber and start chopping mint leaves (not sure if these are traditional, but I like them).
“I don’t like soup. I want sushi.” I mix in yogurt, drizzle in olive oil.
“I want sushi.” Sprinkle salt and pepper. I’m getting tired of these announcements and make one of my own.
“Today I’m not going to feed you food that you complain about. If you complain about something, you will not get it, whether you change your mind or not.”
Silence. I can hear him coming to a realization. The wheels are turning.
I arrange seven dishes. Sushi for four kids, tarator for Reagan and myself. Bread and apples for everyone.
Bread and apples for Andrey. And he says nothing, but his mind is learning. Those wheels are still turning, and he’s trying to decide if he wants to steer down the straight and narrow, or try driving through the fence.
Someone asks for tea, and I start pouring.
“I don’t like tea,” he announces.
“That’s okay, you have a water bottle.”
A few minutes pass. We have prayed and we are eating. We are happy…six of us, at least.
“May I pwease have tea?” he asks aloud. But what he is really asking is, Did you mean what you said when you said I couldn’t have something I complain about? Or can I get you to let me get away with pushing the rules?
Can I set a moving target?
And the answer is no. No, no, and no. “You have a water bottle,” I remind him. Remember to smile, mama.
“I don’t like my water bottle.” And then he gets a look on his face that clearly says, Oh, crap.
And he is learning what I want to teach him, instead of the other way around. We have set a boundary and he is learning to respect it. To respect others. To respect himself.
We know there’s progress. There has to be. If they didn’t feel themselves wanting to get close to you, there wouldn’t be so many behaviors. But it doesn’t feel like it when we’ve hit our one-year anniversary and both kiddos seem to be regressing in one form or another.
What we’re doing must be working to some degree because they are rejecting it. Sincerity pushes them out of their comfort zone, and a year into this, suddenly basic routines are out the window and met with defiance.
Not asking to be excused at meals. Not asking to have a chore checked. Not flushing the toilet (so help me) without being reminded.
It’s a game that’s not fun for anyone. The reminder isn’t necessary.
Patience is. Also, liquor.
Just kidding.
The lunch scene replays itself shortly after our one year anniversary. Sushi for some of the kids, tarator for others.
“Oh! Yummy sushi! I wike sushi! I wike soup, too!”
Well. You don’t say.
We don’t want to over-prune, and neither can we under-prune. We must prune with a purpose, working toward the vision of a thriving life that will bear much fruit.
It’s hard to walk the line every day. We’re not heroes. We continue to covet your prayers…and your occasional gifts of coffee and chocolate.
May adoptive families find encouragement, healing, and grace as they walk the line throughout their community, in all of their days. The victory is here.
End of Act 3. Curtain closes.