what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

How hard is it to read the word “graph” when you know all the sounds? On a good day, not hard at all. But on a rough day when you’re operating from fear and control, impossible.

“What do the letters ‘ph’ say together?” I ask. He knows this.

what we know: tools for adoptive and foster families

Not only does he know this, but I just coached his sister through reading the word “sphere” two minutes earlier, so he just had a refresher course in the “ph” sound. And that might be the very reason he’s choosing this hill to die on – it makes it all the more obvious that he does know, but You Can’t Make Me Tell You.

“Ape,” he says.

We both know it’s wrong. He does a quick extra chore to regroup while I work with someone else.

I ask again. “Ape,” he says, knowing it’s still wrong, it will always be wrong, never in a million years will “ph” ever say “ape,” but if I asked him what his name is right now, he’s just as likely to answer “Hippo.” Or, you know, “Ape.”

Another chore. Wash some windows. Specifically, “Wash the two windows behind you,” I tell him.

He starts doing a third window, though. So I say, “Go ahead and finish that one. You can do three.”

He stops half way through the last one.

“I’m done,” he says. We both know it’s not true.

“How many windows did I tell you to do?”

“Three.” Okay, kind of. I’ll give him that.

“How many did you wash?”

“Four.”

“Really? How’s that?”

He counts the panes, two on each window – one, two, three, four.

“So how many did you wash?”

“Three.”

Because two plus two is three. Because what he’s really saying is, Ef you. You can’t make me.

And I can’t. We both know that’s true. But what he doesn’t understand yet, is I don’t want to make him.

I want him to do it himself. For himself. Because he is loved, and he is valuable, and his days are valuable. I know it’s true. Some days, I think he might finally believe it’s true, also. But not today.

Not all days are like this. It used to be, for years, that every day was like this and worse (so much worse), but now he goes in phases – good days and bad days, great weeks and terrible weeks.

But it’s Christmas time, and right now he’s having some really hard days, because festivities and gatherings and events, oh my. The turmoil this brings up for kids with a background of trauma can be immense, sometimes catastrophic.

But it’s nothing like it used to be.

It used to be, we had to avoid almost everything that involved people because people didn’t know how much their well-intentioned interactions with our kids cost our family.

It was easier to just avoid them. We could at least avoid those triggers…but isolation also cost our family.  

Eventually we learned how to communicate what our kids’ needs were to the people around us – family, friends, our church, our school, our medical professionals. And that quickly helped us discover who “our people” were – they were the ones who respected the boundaries our kids needed. The ones who didn’t, weren’t.  

If this sounds familiar to you, I have some quick resources for you to help the holiday season be more fun than a root canal without anesthesia. Been there, hated that. Some days, as you can tell, we’re still there. But it’s nothing like it used to be.

This post explains the Why Behind the Weird Limits to our people. It helps family, friends, teachers, and other professionals understand exactly why it is such a no no to overstep attachment boundaries with kiddos who have a background of trauma. It’s chapter 2 from Upside Down: Understanding and Supporting Attachment in Adoptive and Foster Families.

Or there’s this: The Upside Down Cheat Sheet is a quick, one-sheet reference. Don’t be afraid to click on it; it’s a free download, no signup required, with a few basic principles to remember. Print it out and give it away as much as you want. If you charge people for it (good luck with that), I will find you…and I’ll ask you to share your savvy marketing skills with me.

And, need the whole book? It’s just 100 (ish) pages – a quick, easy read, and it’s funny. Because I’m funny. At least, my friends think so. You can buy it in stores everywhere or get it directly from us and take advantage of our discounted prices for buying multiple copies. It’s also now available in audio here. Everyone needs this information and we want to make it easy for you to have it, because adoptive and foster families need real support and understanding from their people. If our community can learn, yours can, too.

So that is a look into our fishbowl, seven years into this. At least the windows are clean.

May your gatherings be filled with joy, and your home be filled with peace and as little aftermath as possible. What you’re doing is hard, but you’re doing a good job. And that’s the truth.

work that God sees: for mamas in the midst of the overwhelm

Finn is randomly stitching on a piece of cross-stitch fabric. It’s an old project that Cham started when she was about his age, and it has waited for years in the yarn cabinet’s drawer for an enthusiastic preschooler to pick it up again. It’s a beautiful mess – scrap threads, random colors, no pattern to follow. Just lots and lots of tiny stitches.

work that God sees: a series for mamas in the midst of the overwhelm

And after many attempts, I’m pleased to announce we’ve finally achieved that sweet spot every crafty mama longs for: He can now thread the needle himself, instead of me needing to do it for him every 1.5 stitches.

He’s worked steadily for about five minutes with a long off-white thread, and then he comes closer to me.

“Can you help me wif bein’ fast?”

He chose that pale off-white color and he can’t see the work he’s doing or the progress he’s making. Stitching is slow work for most of us; it runs like cold molasses for a four-year-old.

“There’s no fast, buddy. This isn’t a fast project. You just keep going.” Slow is fast, when compared to doing nothing.

Two more stitches and he’s done – finis, he can’t take it anymore, stick a fork in him – and I teach him how to pin the needle in the corner of the fabric so it’s ready for him next time. And he’s off, no cape required, to some other little boy adventure that probably requires way less sitting still and way more dirt.

I don’t blame him. I have been him so often, with the almost-invisible thread and tiny stitches, not seeing progress and wondering if all the work I was doing was going somewhere. Because that’s what mothering is – a million, trillion, bazillion tiny stitches, one at a time.

But God sees every one of them.

Every day is a new scrap of thread – and our baby is teething, which means he’s not sleeping, which means we’re also not sleeping, and the days run like cold molasses for exhausted parents and all their frayed edges, and there have been many days when I wanted to quit early. Finis, stick a fork in me, I can’t take it anymore.

And God sees.

And we don’t have to be reminded that the days are slow but the years are fast, because we are the irrational ones who ask God if He can “help us wif bein’ fast” as we go through the monotony and the madness of some of these days while also asking Him to stop time on other days. We know it’s not a fair request but for crying out loud, our kids are growing up and learning to thread their own needle and our oldest is living on his own already, and I haven’t seen his face in forever.

But God sees.

He sees all these days and efforts and stumbling and trying again. He sees the results we can’t imagine. And He reminds us that we are capable, and we are allied. We are growing, we are steadfast, we are resilient. And we are seen. And we might be something else, but He hasn’t told me what yet…so that’s what we’re sticking with for now.

work that God sees: new series

So we’re launching this new book that was His idea – if it were mine, it would’ve been way more ridiculous, probably involving countless petitions about random color palettes for cover templates and everything…oh, wait…

Anyway, it is packed full of candid encouragement for the mom who has no time for anymore nonsense – no sugar-coating, no la-la rainbows – just real truth to hold onto in the midst of the overwhelm, reminding you who you are:

Capable. Allied. Growing. Steadfast. Resilient.

Seen.

Moms, you are doing the work that God sees. And you were made for this.

dealing with the mess

A week ago, a large bag of wooden clothespins showed up on my desk and it’s been squatting there ever since. And it wouldn’t be a big deal except someone opened the bag, which means that over the last several days the contents gradually hemorrhaged everywhere. A variety pack – dozens of clothespins, all different sizes, decorating the surface of my desk.

The clothespins need to go into a big jar, but all of the jars are downstairs in the kitchen, and why they didn’t stop there first to deposit themselves properly is beyond me. Why I can’t remember to take them back downstairs to the kitchen during any of my daily 138 trips up and down the stairs is also beyond me.

dealing with the mess: what we do, what God does, and what He can't do for us

I do love having a clean desk. But aside from moving everything to the floor (my normal method of cleaning it in a hurry) I have yet to figure out how to keep it that way.

The desk is smothered under stacks of books as I type this: notebooks, school books, research books, books I’m reading. Keeping all these company are pens, sippy cups, and other detritus constantly trafficked in and out of the office, aside from the aforementioned clothespins sprinkled everywhere. Also, there’s a half-emptied basket destined to become yarn storage that I’m planning to move to the bookshelf, which will give me more surface area on the desk. But that will have to wait, because it’s currently storing Knightley, instead.

dealing with the mess: Knightley in a basket

And just to be clear, when I say “stacks of books,” the word stacks should be interpreted loosely. Very loosely. As in, some books truly are placed on top of each other in a (mostly) congruent, vertical direction. But others are…um…just overlapping, sort of like a giant, bloated, bookish version of Jenga.

It’s not just my mess – you heard me mention the sippy cup, right? – but it is my mess to take care of. No one can clean it for me. Even if they wanted to, I have to do it myself. God help them if they try; hell hath no fury like a writer-mama (or wife) who can’t find the stack of books she needs to pull citations from that took her half a day to round up from all over the house in the first place.

Of course, it would help if people would stop spewing their mess in my space. I have my own junk to deal with, but all we sinners share the love, and we have a tendency to give each other more to forgive and clean up. We all add to each other’s messes.

Oh, wait – I was talking about physical messes. Not the other kind, when we are hurting and we hurt others, and the mess goes everywhere, and it’s so much harder to clean up than a hundred scattered clothespins.

May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

– 2 Peter 1:2, ESV

Finn is on the floor by my feet, putting together a puzzle. He knows he can play up here while I’m working as long as he’s quiet. And our versions of quiet are two different things, but normally he’s fine.

And usually Knightley is in here, and normally she’s fine too, except when she walks across the laptop and makes me bless the inventor of the Undo button, so help me.

The mess the kids leave on the floor is usually theirs to clean up. But when the mess bleeds onto the desk, with all my own stuff in various states of organization and disarray, it becomes my job to take care of. Mostly, I take care of them by not allowing them to be made in the first place. Boundaries, rules, whatever you call it – the desk is my space and the kids have mostly learned to respect that.

Prevention is the easiest way to take care of everything, right? If we could just keep the hurtful words, the hard feelings, or the negative habits of others out of our headspace, life would be so much easier. I have my own thoughts to take captive, and that’s a job of its own to deal with. But once those other things penetrate, they’re my problem, too.

Oh, wait, I was talking about physical messes. I keep forgetting.

It would be easier if it none of it ever happened in the first place – the physical or emotional messes – but the world is a bloody battlefield. It would be easier to just not enter the fray, but we can’t prevent everything…and really, would we want to? We’re made to help each other navigate the mess.

But we have to be invited to do so. And if the mess is ours – whether we made it, or we just inherited it and now it’s all over our space – we have to be the one to initiate the cleaning.

I read this verse a few weeks ago and haven’t been able to get it off my mind:

The LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.

– Zephaniah 3:17, NAS

Most versions of this verse end with “He will rejoice over you with singing” but when I read this version and the phrase “shouts of joy,” the Lord told me something new.

When do parents shout for joy over their children? He asked me.

Well, I thought, parents shout for joy when they see their kids achieve – when they succeed, when they score a goal, when they win something big, when they hit a milestone. We cheered over Kavanagh getting his first tooth, and we’re ready to whoop and holler when he takes his first steps.

But as adults, all of our success, achievement, or milestones are things He does for us, and through us. We know we’re not doing them on our own. So why would He shout for us when He’s the one doing the work?

I don’t, He said. I shout for joy over you when you do something I can’t do for you.

What can’t You do for us? I asked.

I can’t choose surrender and obedience for you, He said.

I can’t choose for you to clean up your mess. I can help you do it, but you have to want it first.

I can’t choose for you to stay steadfast in the battle, still fighting and standing, in spite of everything around you. I can want those things for you, and I can help you through them, but only you can choose to move forward in growth, instead of retreating.

That is what I shout for joy over. 

 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, 

and virtue with knowledge, 

and knowledge with self-control,

and self-control with steadfastness,

and steadfastness with godliness, 

and godliness with brotherly affection,

and brotherly affection with love. 

For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

– 2 Peter 1:5-8, ESV

Just as the main battle we fight is less about violent movement and more about steady abiding, the victories He shouts over in our lives are the small-but-huge efforts that come in the quiet:

When we choose truth over rumor, or grace and forgiveness over hard feelings.

When we address our own bad habits, and choose healthier thought patterns.

When we choose to pray and thank God even when things look ugly.

When we tackle the hard-but-necessary conversation when it seems easier to let it slide and pay the consequences later.

When we push forward in doing the good things: Gratitude, repentance, teachability, honor.

When we stop to hug the kid, kiss the spouse, and clean up our mess…even if someone else started it.

He can’t wait to for us to take those first steps, and to cheer us on as we keep moving forward. It’s our obedience, and integrity, and gritty steadfastness that He shouts over.

dealing with the mess: clothespins

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This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume 6: Surrender to Win, available here.