Category Archives: mothering

the cost: a challenge to adoption agencies, from the families who are living it

Posted on by June 19, 2023

Thirty-seven thousand dollars. That’s how much it cost to adopt two of our children.

And that was – forgive me – a screaming deal. We adopted them at the same time, from the same country, on one adoption fee instead of two separate fees. Many adoptions cost that much or more just for one child.

the cost: a challenge to adoption agencies, from the families who are living it

Talking about the numbers and the money bothers me because children are not commodities. Ignorant people joke to adoptive families about buying or selling children, revealing their cluelessness about the reality of child trafficking. Adoption expenses are not a sale; it’s more like ransom money to get children out of institutions where they are languishing and put them into a family where they can heal.

And if you’ve adopted or have been a reader here for any length of time, you already know. Healing can take a long time.

And healing is worth it.

But here’s why I’m bringing up the money and numbers: Those costs do not come close to those incurred after adoption, literally and metaphorically. And people need to know that. People making insensitive jokes need to know; people thinking adoptive families get paid (what the what?!) need to know.

Potentially adoptive families need to know.

In discussing all the adoption costs with different agencies, it was never required (or even recommended) that we save for therapy. Personal health insurance was required, yes, but that doesn’t begin to cover the entire costs of therapy and counseling for multiple people in a family – parents, adoptive children, biological children – who undergo the turmoil, trauma, and secondary trauma those early adoptive years often involve. When you are replacing a destroyed mattress every six months for the first two years and repairing or replacing other damaged necessities, the copay for therapy becomes out of the question since it’s not a basic need.

We applied thousands of dollars to our international travel expenses. Hundreds of dollars were set aside to be converted to euro and lev just for meals. But also, it would have been good if we knew to set aside an account for therapy — $3000 to $5000 would have been a good start.

Why don’t adoption agencies require or recommend this? I mentioned it to a friend, and her response was, “They’ll never do it. Adoption agencies are making a sale, not equipping people for life after adoption.”

It sounds jaded, but from my experience I have to agree with her. Are we wrong? I hope adoption agencies will prove it.

It’s not just adoption agencies, though. Friends who adopted through foster care and private adoption said this:

NO ONE PREPARED US. And we know they knew. Other families were and are our saving grace in this area of support.

It would have taken just one home study writer or one agency worker thirty minutes to give us the real low down, and no one ever did.

I contacted our adoption agency three times about Upside Down after it gained the merit of being featured on Focus on the Family. I told them we hear from adoptive families all the time. Most of these families are desperate, and almost all of them tell us that Upside Down has the information they wish they had before they adopted. So I asked our adoption agency to consider making it one of their required (or at the very least, recommended) materials.

Three times I contacted them. Why three times? Because I never heard back. Not once.

We adopted two children with that agency. We are one of their families. And I never heard back.

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe they are more interested in the sale, and not interested in equipping families. Maybe they are concerned about losing a sale if they scare people off.

(Maybe, after the obligatory first two years of intrusive home visits by a 20-something social worker whose sole parenting experience was with her biological toddler in a two-income family, they figured we’d consumed the entire plethora of support they offered and we were on our own. Or maybe that was just us.)

But here’s the thing: If a family is easily scared off after reading a 100-page book or being told that part of the requirement for adoption is to save a few thousand dollars in an account for future therapy, those families should not be adopting in the first place. This is an easy filter.

I’ll be contacting that agency again soon, and several others also. We’ll see if the response is better this time. (UPDATE: After some emails back and forth over about 6 months, our former agency last told us they got a copy of the book and were still reviewing it — it’s a 40 minute read, front to back — and then declined to return my phone call or last email. So it sadly looks like they are in the business of selling adoptions, and not supporting adoptive families.) And if you are an adoptive family, you are welcome to contact your agency and recommend materials you wish you’d had when you were in process, too.

Meanwhile, though, what can we do for adoptive families now? How can we encourage and empower them, and help them toward wholeness? What can we offer to potential adoptive families who are rightly curious about what they might be signing up for?

We can be honest with them, because what we’ve learned hasn’t come cheap. We can be as transparent as possible while still honoring the privacy of our kids and families.

The core of adoption support is not going to come from professionals who don’t have personal adoption experience. Those services are basic and they can help, but the most impactful support to adoptive families is going to come from other adoptive families who have been there. If that weren’t the case, one of the most common things we hear from adoptive families wouldn’t be “I would never tell this to someone who hasn’t adopted, but I know you understand.”

But that’s what we hear, because we do understand. Nine years later, we’re still walking this out every day.

So here is some of that honesty from a mom who’s been there: Don’t Make Me Use My Mom Voice: Adoption, Attachment, & Discipline, a 1-hour training by yours truly. This was originally requested by an adoption agency who is actively equipping their families, and now we’re making it available to other adoptive (or potentially adoptive) families who need it. Foster families, too. This training will help you feel more equipped in all your parenting and relationships and personal wholeness.

We need people who have been where we are – and are still walking that road – to come alongside us and say, You’re not alone. You’re right, you really do know what you’re talking about even when you don’t feel like you know nearly enough to do this. This is really hard, but we’re going to get through it.

And that’s cheaper than therapy.

as weird as you are: what homeschool really is

Posted on by March 10, 2022

Homeschooling has always been misunderstood, but 2020 didn’t do it any favors and now there’s even more confusion.

The fall of 2020 saw an unprecedented number of families transfer their kids from public and private school to homeschool. And this fall has been the same, for many of the same reasons; even more parents this year want to make the move to homeschool.

as weird as you are: what homeschool really is

It’s a bold, brave choice that requires a family to make significant changes, and it can be overwhelming. That has never changed; the overwhelm has always been there whether it was last year, this year, or sixteen years ago, when we started.

But this year I’ve noticed one difference: Many parents who wish they could get their kids out of public school have washed their hands of homeschooling because they feel like they tried it last year with the forced lockdown, and it was miserable.

So let me clear something up real quick. This is important:

If, because of lockdowns, you were forced into schooling at home, schooling online, or doing a ton of assignments with your kids that their school told you to do, then I hate to break it to you, but…you didn’t homeschool.

I hope that’s a relief to some of you.

Just because your child did assignments at home doesn’t mean it was homeschool.

If they were still registered with another school and doing everything that school told them to do, a repeat of that experience is not what you would be signing up for if you chose to (really) homeschool.

Because homeschool is not checking off a list that someone else assigned you. Homeschool is not hours and hours in front of a screen in zoom meetings or other online classes. Homeschool isn’t just doing the same things you would do at school, but moving the location to your kitchen table (or the couch, or your bed).

Homeschool is none of those things. So if you were given that impression last year and it left a terrible taste in your mouth, I am so sorry. No one can blame you for saying “We tried homeschool last year and we hated it” because we would hate it that way, too.

But we can show you what it really ought to be. And that should give you hope, especially if you wish there was an alternative to the indoctrinating mess that many public schools have become. If you are tired of the CRT and other agendas, the unhealthy mask mandates, the disregard of parental rights, and you want to make school about education again (whoa, what a concept!), let’s talk about what homeschool really is.

And right from the start, I admit that I can’t give you the full picture. Because homeschool is different for everyone, and that is the beauty of it. It is for you and for your kids, not for a predictable system so they will all go in different and come out the same after being squeezed to conform to a mold they may never fit into.

But here are some basic principles:

– We read. A lot. Out loud and quietly, to each other, to younger siblings, to older siblings, to Grandma, to the cats if they will listen. So many books, so little time. When someone’s sick, audiobooks work in a pinch.

– We do stuff: Projects and hikes and visits and crafty things and cooking and watching videos and I can’t even tell you what else. At home and elsewhere, on our own and with others, and we’re not limited to a 7 am to 3 pm schedule.

– We talk to each other, to extended family members and friends, and others. We discuss what we’re reading and learning. We visit people and talk on the phone, and we’re not segregated into only talking with those in our own age group, economic group, neighborhood, or gender.

– We try and fail and change things up, and try again. We’re not stuck with the math program that we hate. We try new language arts programs that might be a better fit. We don’t read the dry textbooks that put you to sleep.

– Our curriculum and schedule work for us, not the other way around. We are not a slave to the checklists and to-do lists (and neither are our kids). We adjust our school schedule to our lives instead of adjusting our lives to our school schedule. A new baby is born, or someone gets sick, or some major catastrophe occurs? We learn about basic skills and caring for each other for a few weeks, and the algebra and language arts can wait. There will be time to pick it up again when things settle down. We are flexible when we need to care for each other, help friends, do a major home repair, or get involved in community projects. So much that needs to be known is never learned in school…but it can be learned in homeschool.

Some of the most important learning is not academic, so don’t be afraid to go there.

So friends, if you want to homeschool this year but don’t think you can for a dozen or more reasons, listen to me:

You will be a terrific teacher for your kid. You’ve already been doing it a long time.

You can teach your kids. Yes, it’s hard sometimes. Yes, you’ll be sanctified. But you can go slow, read the books you want, do the activities you want, partner with friends, take advantage of online resources (they cover every subject or topic you could imagine), and make it your own. Make it for them. Make it for your freedom. Make it for their future.

We have all these preconceived ideas about what school should look like, and we feel like we can’t fit the mold. So, newsflash:

There was never meant to be a mold.

School is supposed to be as weird as you are. Go ahead and quote me on that.

____

Need a quick resource for more info? HSLDA has a terrific site right here, with everything you need to know (legal, local, academic, and otherwise) to get started.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light

Posted on by May 20, 2021

I’m not proud of it, but lately my domestic abilities are extremely…how do I put this? Minimalist. I don’t rearrange furniture, I don’t buy cute décor, I don’t keep up with style blogs. I suffer through necessary cleaning like everyone else. And now that Vince and I both work at home, our oldest kids do most of the cooking.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light (shannon guerra)

The only household chore I truly enjoy is rearranging books. But thanks to seven kids who never reshelve anything (insert strict librarian scowl here), I get to do it almost daily.

Vin knows I love moving books around and he recently left one of his new books to my disposal. It was light brown, clothbound, and he said I could put it wherever I wanted. So I looked around, pondered, and dragged the piano bench across the library. Then I stacked the new book on a high shelf with some of his other books.

He didn’t notice for a couple of days. Then one morning he found it and protested, announcing “it doesn’t go there.”

“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t go there?’” I laughed. “You said I could put it wherever I wanted.”

He threw up his hands in exaggerated despair. “I trusted you to respect the book, and you put it way up there! It’s a beautiful copy about the War of 1812. And I didn’t expect you to put it on a stack, sandwiched between a book by Ted Koppel and an old copy of The Silmarillion!”

The nerd is strong with this one. As you can see, he is a closet book rearranger, also.

That was in the morning. By the afternoon we’ve reached the part of the day when I am at my desk to write, and the ideas and motivations are just…poof, gone. I sit and stare. I open and shut files, open and shut my journal. Look at my notes. I rearrange things on my desk, and somehow it’s not any neater after a few minutes of doing so. And I sit and stare some more.

prayer like clouds: shannon guerra

Yet on Sunday night when I was getting ready to take a bath – on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and in a place I don’t have any writing material whatsoever – all sorts of ideas just flooded over me.

The creative thoughts are supposed to come when I’m conveniently in front of my laptop, or at least have a pen and paper handy. But it almost never fails; the creativity flows without effort in the most unexpected places. The expected place requires work, and concentration, and discipline. Which looks like a lot of sitting and staring.

I don’t think it’s Murphy’s Law so much as it is the need for fresh oxygen to stir up new thoughts, creating opportunities to observe and notice new things. Up here in my office, in spite of all the windows, the view doesn’t really change all that much: The desk is a mess. The floor is lined with throw pillows and crates of books and yarn. Usually there’s a few blocks or toys scattered all over. And out the window, trees are trees.

But…not really. It’s spring and the leaves are unfurling outside. The aspens are covered in millions of pale green stars that flash and twinkle in the breeze. Sometimes the sky is classically blue, but on this day it was cloudy and dramatic, steel grey, shot through with shafts of sunlight against chartreuse new leaves. My favorite. Or one of my favorites, at least.

And there, noticing life around me, I have a few sentences to write about. They string together and start to accumulate into something substantial.

That night I drove to Bible study, and prayer came the same way as I sat and stared, driving down the highway. It came out in small phrases, thinking of what we needed for the night: Good conversation. No one feeling awkward or out of place. Everyone to be at ease, comfortable in their own skin. More concerned with encouraging each other than with impressing each other.

Sometimes they were real sentences, and sometimes they were just one-second thought prayers: Safe driving. Peace in hearts. Healing. Truth. Just sentence fragments, because God knows how to fill in the blanks better than I do.

And I wondered about the weight of those instant prayers. Do they really do anything? They feel so effortless, just thoughts directed at God.

I turned off the highway and drove up the hill, noticing the patchy clouds in a grey sky. And His answer was right there: Some clouds are darker and heavier than others, some will drop rain sooner than others, but all carry a measure of water.

They all accumulate, contributing to the provision for those who are thirsty.

And, hey Love – answering prayer has never been about your efforts, anyway.

This is abiding, the thought-life directed Godward. Unpolished, unpretentious, unrehearsed. Our incomplete thoughts at scattered intervals, strung together and brought back to Him in surrender. Some of them are intercessory, filling the cloud for someone else. Others are internal, our own thoughts and concerns and desires, and they condense as Living Water that washes through us, irrigating our hearts, and bringing wholeness.  

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
    and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11, ESV

That night in our small group of women, we sat around a long table with steaming tea in paper cups and discussed the book we’re reading together. And we’re learning so much just from the reading, but we go so much farther when we hear each other’s perspectives and questions. We ignite thoughts in each other we didn’t know were there if they hadn’t had the chance to come up in conversation.

We notice more when we put our thoughts in different places. I didn’t know I thought that, until I said it out loud.

I didn’t realize that was true until I typed it out.

On the way home, rain spattered the windshield and rinsed the highway. It soaked the ground, and the leaves will be bigger tomorrow.

I thought trees were trees – that is, until the sky changed color behind them and they shook in the breeze, demanding me to take notice.