Category Archives: friendship

splash on me: light-yoked truth for friends with special needs kids

Posted on by October 5, 2023

We walked down the driveway in sunshine to piano lessons a few doors down. I held Finn’s hand and we both wore flip flops (or frip fwops, as he says), and the dirt path was scattered with puddles left over from the rain that morning.

splash on me: light-yoked truth for friends with special needs kids

I told him not to jump in them so he wouldn’t splash me. But of course he jumped in them a little. Probably on accident, mostly, just couldn’t help himself. He is a magnet to muddy water; by proximity, I tend to get muddy sometimes, too.

Recently I was on the phone with Grandma, and she told about some friends of hers who just moved somewhere in our neighborhood. We haven’t met them yet because I’m antisocial it’s hard to meet people when you avoid things like introductions. And our family isn’t, you know, the typical suburban white-picket fence type.

But she assured me they’re great people. “They’re younger, maybe middle aged,” she said. “Well, I guess they’re in their early 30’s. About your age.”

“I’m 41, Grandma.”

“What?! Where did the last ten years go?”

“Heck if I know.” I often wonder the same thing. Where did the time go? How did this happen? Our baby, that mud-magnet, turned three last week.

But if I think about it, I know it where much of the time went: the long adoption process, thousands of hours spent researching special needs and looking for help, going to appointments, praying for answers and wisdom and healing, and learning to communicate to our kids and our community in a way that walks the line between brutal truth and compassionate grace.

I scrolled social media at the end of a rough day last week and immediately regretted it. Satan must’ve been running Instagram that night because it was full of memes like this:

“The true evidence of someone who knows they are loved is that they love well.”

…And…

“The child is largely what the home has made him.”

Those were just a couple of examples. But they were a stab in the gut that night, after a kid repeatedly lied to me even when caught red handed.

For those of us who have kids with special needs, mental health issues, and/or pasts out of our control, these quotes come with a swift, hissing attack of condemnation:

He shuns everyone and pushes us away, so he must not know he’s loved…what are we doing wrong?

 He has a zero trust level and continues to sneak and lie, but he is what the home has made him…wow, have we failed.

Looking back, I believe a lot of what we experienced as judgmentalism or simply indifference grew out of a profound misunderstanding of and lack of experience with mental illness. And sadly, this seems to persist despite the greater availability of information today.

– Sally Clarkson, Different

Those smug sayings might mean well, but they don’t encourage parents of children who compulsively make destructive choices due to trauma or mental illness.

They hold absolutely no inspiration or truth for parents who bleed themselves dry trying to show love to a child who returns those efforts with barbs and snarls.

And they do nothing to strengthen parents of children whose affection swings hot and cold, who hang on to the slightest offense and carry the heaviest of yokes, refusing to see goodness around them or to grow through personal responsibility, or who cannot admit moderation in their view of themselves and others instead of fluctuating between one extreme of believing certain people are infallible, to the other extreme of utter disdain when those same people make an honest mistake and fall off the pedestal they never asked to be put on.

Those parents don’t need to be told that the home is responsible for how their children behave. They’re already doing whatever it takes. Those parents need compassion, respect, and a night out.

Let’s try this saying instead: If your hands aren’t willing to get dirty, your mouth should hesitate to spout off advice or expertise.

Until you have had a child with a severe mental or emotional difference – OCD, autism, clinical depression, PTSD, or others – you just don’t know how constant the disruption can be every day, all the time. So it’s all too easy to assume that the attitudes and outbursts that characterize life with these mysterious children are just the result of a bad attitude, a lack of training, or poor parenting in general.

To complicate matters, children who are undisciplined, unloved, abused, or traumatized can exhibit some of the same attributes and behaviors, so diagnosing children’s issues is a complex pursuit. In my mind, that’s even more reason to extend grace wherever possible and strive for understanding instead of making assumptions.

– Sally Clarkson, Different

 So, parents of special needs kids, listen up: We have to remember – and sometimes remind each other – that our home, our families, our parenting, and our children do not fit the easy, over-simplified cookie cutter mold. This peace is for you. Not those other pieces of veiled criticism and condemnation. Those pieces are not for you.

Those inspirational graphics and pep talks might be a self-satisfied pat on the back for perfect families with perfect kids, but I don’t know any of those. I know hard working, tear-spilling, question-asking families who already wonder if they’re doing enough – or if they will ever be enough – for their children’s needs.

They are struggling through parenting children with learning disabilities, or walking through grief and loss. Some of them are navigating what to do with a child with mental illness or addiction. And others are pushing through major life transitions, like launching kids out of the home and into adulthood, and they are so aware of their own past mistakes that they’re grateful their children have come out alive and thriving at all. Not all of our friends have kids with special needs, but they do all have real kids with real stuff – fears, attitudes, struggles. None of them always have styled hair, impeccable manners, and collars buttoned to the chin.

None of our close friends are perfect parents with perfect children. If they were, we wouldn’t be friends; our life is too messy. We’ve splashed on each other over dinners and coffee, during hikes, in courthouses, in living room prayer, through late night texts and phone calls. We speak light-filled, light-yoked truth to each other without condemnation and offer perspective that we can’t always give to ourselves.

These are the ones we listen to at the end of the hard days. They, too, have dirt under their fingernails, and they aren’t afraid to come within arm’s reach or get splashed on a little. Those are our people.

____________

Need more encouragement on adoptive parenting? Here you go, a whole page of resources and posts.

correspondence: we are what we keep

Posted on by January 21, 2020

Our boxes are (mostly) unpacked and we (mostly) know where everything is here at the Lighthouse. We can even find obscure utensils in the kitchen. But up ‘til now we had plenty of frantic moments trying to find stuff – for example, when you’re on the phone and need to write down information and the only thing in sight that even remotely resembles a pen is a blue Nerf dart.

correspondence: we are what we keep (copperlight wood)

Or when a child falls outside and comes in bleeding, and you can’t find the bandaids anywhere – not in the boxes, not in the cabinets or bathroom drawers, not on top of the fridge – until finally one of the boys confesses he has a stockpile of them in his closet, which turns out to be a good thing because in lieu of a real bandage I was this close to cleaning out the wound and slapping a feminine hygiene product on it.

Before we moved, I cleaned out all the neglected catch-all spots in the old house – those places that accumulate old papers and nostalgic items, the stuff we don’t know what to do with but aren’t sure we can throw away. And you may not believe this, but I was actually looking forward to the prospect of moving twice because it would force me to purge through these items more than once and really get them weeded out.

It was a brutal gift to be able to sift twice through things that had been shoved aside and buried, a forced priority that I knew would bring freedom once I put the work into it. And cleaning out the physical spaces dovetailed with cleaning out the heart spaces – What am I holding on to? Why am I holding on to it? Are my motives pure? It’s life-giving routine maintenance if we can bring ourselves to do it.

All the closet corners, neglected cabinets, and old boxes were examined. I went through art projects, physical records, old correspondence, concert tickets, birth announcements, photos, and obituaries. The Keep file was slim; the Burn pile fed the woodstove for several nights running.

Some of it was easy to get rid of. Some of it was emotionally hard to sort through. And some things I wanted to keep for the wrong reasons, but He reminded me Love keeps no record of wrongs and I didn’t need to pass a legacy of offense onto my children. So those were burned, too.

I was pretty ruthless about it. Newspaper clippings, letters, a high school friend’s obituary – most of it was prayerfully tossed. I didn’t even keep all my old notes from Vince.

One particular letter I kept, and I never even knew the person who wrote it.

Through an odd string of events, in college I became friends with an elderly woman who I met through a mutual friend at the airport, back when you were actually allowed to meet people as they got off the plane and say goodbye when they left again. We must’ve been there to see off our friend, but I can’t remember the details. I do remember that afterward, she took me out to lunch. She listened to me talk about my struggle as a flailing, failing, compromising Christian, living with my unsaved boyfriend. And she didn’t lecture me; she loved me.

She told me to pray for him. She told me, picking up the glass of water in front of her, that every time I took a drink, to pray that my boyfriend would be thirsty for Jesus. And that I would be thirsty for Jesus.

She must’ve known I wasn’t, but I wanted to be.

We exchanged phone numbers and caught up every few months or so. She sent me cards, and mentored and counseled me through my fledgling relationship with Jesus. A couple years later she came to our wedding, and mentored and counseled me through my fledgling marriage with that unsaved man. Then I got pregnant, and during that pregnancy the man came to know Jesus. And seventeen years ago when the baby was born, I sent her a birth announcement with our Christmas card.

The following March a letter arrived. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but I knew the last name.

Her husband wrote to tell us she had died in her sleep a month earlier. He wrote, Her death was as unexpected as it can be at our age. Our marriage was the best 30 years of my life and I miss her. We received your Christmas card. Congratulations on your new baby. He included a copied slip of her obituary.

I kept it, envelope and all. I knew her for less than five years, but she was one of a few women who poured into me when I had less than nothing to offer back and needed the investment desperately. She helped shape me.

I looked up her husband, thinking he must’ve died years ago. He did; it was shortly after we moved out to the Valley and his obituary said his memorial service was held at our church. We were so new here I’d had no idea.

At that same church a couple of weeks ago I got to help a friend teach a class on prayer. She had collected a bunch of books to give away to the students at the end of class, and after everyone had chosen one, one was left for me – a little green paperback about a Welsh missionary I’d barely heard of.

…the first thought that came to Rees was, Had he correspondence with God? Could he say the Saviour was as real to him as his mother? Did he know God as a daily Presence in his life, or did he only think of Him in the prayer meetings?

– Norman Grubb, Rees Howells Intercessor

I took it home, thumbed through it a little, and put it aside. The next morning I was drinking coffee with Vince and picked it up again. The inside of the front cover had an old bookplate with another friend’s name on it, which was a happy surprise. Houses or books, it’s a joy to live among things that have already been loved by people we love.

Then I noticed that there was another, smaller bookplate under that one. I held it up to the window to read through the page, and I recognized that name and address, too.

Before it belonged to me, or my friend, or the church library, or my other friend, it belonged to my mentor, Virginia.

And it turns out that since God played the nicest trick in the world on us and we’re not moving twice but instead we’re buying the Lighthouse (the story’s here in the newsletter if you missed it) we still had to purge twice. We cleaned everything out when we packed it up, and we combed through it again as we unpacked, before we even knew we were staying.

We’re holding on to the things that make a home – our books and projects, plants and pets, and each other. But if you come over and need a bandaid, well…

Just kidding. We’ve got those, too.

_____________

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in port

Posted on by January 23, 2018

We knew the tether that held us to it was thinning when we started calling it “the old house” instead of “home.”

in port

We ate weird meals in attempt to clean out the fridge and freezer until we started sleeping at our new place. One day I served biscuits and gravy, which sounds normal except that the biscuits were actually English muffins and I served them with a side of lettuce (I mean, salad) and the last tablespoon of some balsamic dressing from the 1940s.

That night I wandered through the kitchen looking for dinner, but I’d already fed the kids all the leftovers, I didn’t want to cook, didn’t want to scramble up a couple of eggs, and didn’t want to eat the last of the stale bag of tortilla chips. So I took one for the team, and dove into the vanilla ice cream and topped it with cranberry syrup.

The walls were bare and our voices echoed. We touched up paint and trim, using a wood stain marker over every scratch we’ve made over the last ten years in attempt to conceal the fact that we’ve had enough children here to populate Gilligan’s Island.

The highest concentration of scratches was on the corner cabinet by the lazy Susan, where Sophie used to paw when we were slicing meat for sandwiches, cooking burgers, or carving the turkey. I cried covering them; her grave is in the woods over there, and I grieved over leaving it more than anything else.

I moved to the stairs and worked my way up that railing with the stain marker, covering pale spots where the wood was exposed, trying to make them blend and look new again. We put on a lot of miles here in ten years.

It’s a beautiful house, but it’s been loved and lived in, and we hope the new owners appreciate it – not just the work we did to prepare it for them, but that they appreciate the home that’s been made here and continue that legacy. I hope they know the wear and tear are from living life, and they will have many years of adding their own dings and scratches.

Iree said she hopes the people who bought the house have kids so the woods, trails, and clearings will still be played in, instead of growing over neglected. And I hope the owners of our new house – wherever that is – feel the same way.

I hope they’re being good stewards, cleaning up, touching up, praying for us. I hope they love their house and have similar mixed feelings about leaving it. I hope they’ll want us to love it there.

Maybe houses are like people: As children, those of us who have learned attachment early are able to attach in healthy ways later, and maybe a house that has been loved-in by one family is increasingly able to be loved-in by another family.

During our last week there I was mostly on an even keel, but at times out of nowhere the thought of not being in these walls made me all emotional. Overwhelmed. Leaky. After so much waiting and working to move, suddenly it was time and I wasn’t sure if I’d crossed everything off the list.

We get this way with life events and transitions. Am I ready? Did I do everything I was supposed to? Do we have everything we need?

I berated myself because it’s just walls, floors, and air, and I’m not sentimental. But it’s also memories, and more than that – it’s a milestone.

Because what we really mean when we ask all those questions is, Does this mean I passed the test?

This was the place we brought four kids home to. This was the place we learned to fight for healing in the midst of black brokenness. This is the place we got our war wounds, where we learned about friendly fire and mutiny, and about brotherhood and who we bury the body with. It’s where we learned that fear dreads the curveball, but faith knows God will catch it.

This was our battleground.

Just air, and space, and walls, and floors. But the Breath of God moved in this place.

The morning of the day we moved, I prepped dinner in the old kitchen so it would be easier to make in the new kitchen that night. As I chopped veggies, this song was on repeat and my eyes started welling and stinging, I swear it was the onions – and I threw the kitchen window open to 17 degrees and prayed it wouldn’t kill my aloe plant before we moved it to the new house.

We ran out of time to finish the puzzle and in disgust resorted to breaking it into chunks to pack in its original box. It was a sorry mess when I opened it again; the edges of every section had crumbled in the transfer and loose pieces that I’m certain had been fixed in place were everywhere.

This is ironic, I thought. You think you’re putting something together, and this is what happens.

But we’d already learned that starting over is not the same as going back to the beginning. Sometimes it moves the starting line forward. Sometimes it means the tether has snapped, and a gust of wind fills the sails to send you where you needed to go.

He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly,

who despises the gain of oppressions,

who shakes his hands, lest they hold a bribe,

who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed

and shuts his eyes from looking on evil,

he will dwell on the heights;

his place of defense will be the fortresses of rocks;

his bread will be given him;

his water will be sure.

– Isaiah 33:15-16, ESV

And that is where we are right now. In between, if you missed the newsletter, we’re renting a beautiful place from a friend while we wait for the next direction.

We’re on a bluff and the views are incredible; we can see for miles and pray over the highway in both directions. Our kids have room, our books have shelves, and after three tries, we even figured out where to put the catbox.

It’s a lighthouse for us, a temporary refuge to recuperate and rehabilitate after so many years in choppy waters.

Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.

– Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

It’s not where we thought we’d be, not where we planned to be. We’re not sure how long we’ll be here.

And now that we’re looking back, we can see that that’s been the story of our last couple years. Except before, we thought we knew what we were doing, and now we know that we don’t…and we’re okay with that.

We’ve made port in safe harbor. He is the anchorage. We’ll rest until He moves us again.