Category Archives: attachment

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Posted on by September 27, 2023

The days are long, but the summers around here are short and this one is gone. We were a month late in planting the garden this spring because of morning sickness and all sorts of I-couldn’t-even, so here in the middle of September we finally have zucchini blossoms galore…and three miniscule zucchinis, smaller than my pinky finger.

losing no time: how we make up for past choices

Did we miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. We did what we could. There’s always next year. And we grew plenty, just not veggies.

My belly is growing. People seem skeptical when I tell them Kavanagh’s not due until December – the other day I almost knocked myself over just trying to put my socks on while standing up.

Oh My Soul, the book I started four or five years ago and spent the last four or five months finishing, launches October 16th. The Kindle edition just came available for preorder, and the paperback and hardback should follow next week.

(And now it makes sense that so many people teased us about having twins earlier in the summer because, yes, all these babies – it’s just that some of these babies were books.)

We’re ordering school materials, and to Chamberlain’s delight she discovered only three assignments left in her math book and I completely forgot to order the next level, leaving her math-less for a minimum of three weeks until the next ones ship up here. But I made a quick phone call to our umbrella school, and to my delight, we discovered they had an entire set on hand and we won’t miss a beat. Sorry, kiddo.

So much of what we do is not on an academic plan. Reagan’s language arts involves reading story books and picture books, and I document that it’s for “learning sentence structure and speaking in full sentences” but it’s also for understanding the relationships between birds and trees and seasons, how people interact with each other, and constant repetition of simple concepts we take for granted that fall through the holes in her memory.

Andrey has art on his curriculum, and the materials include cross stitch – not because he loves it (though he doesn’t hate it), but because it is good practice at following instructions and obeying, and gives an almost immediate reward or consequence for whether or not he does so. Botched string and knots to untangle are a remarkable illustration of not following directions; clean stitches that match the picture are clear rewards for obeying.

A few nights ago we talked with a new friend who worries that certain choices he made before he was following Jesus were the wrong ones – and he wasn’t talking about the easy, cut-and-dry kinds of choices. These were the kind with no obvious answer, the kind that people still struggle with even after surrendering to Jesus. They were the kind that force us to lean in hard and listen close, and even after the choice is made we wonder what would’ve happened if we’d chosen differently.

Did he miss out on the growing season? Yes, and no. He didn’t have the intimacy with God to move forward confidently when he had to make the call. But is he growing in that intimacy now, and losing no time in his forward progress? Sure looks like it.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

– Psalm 32:1-2, ESV

God is above time, and yet still in time, and on time, and never wasting time. He knows our weakness and where we’ve dug in our heels against correction, and where we’ve been moldable and allowed Him to move us. He’s not a parent like me, looking at a child still dealing with the same stuff from years ago and shaking my head, desperately wanting to say, If you had dealt with this earlier instead of shoving it under the rug – which has long outgrown the ability to hide the pile of detritus underneath it – you wouldn’t be dealing with it now, and the last several years would’ve been more pleasant for yourself, and for all of us.

I’ve been in Psalms. It’s a long book, I’m only forty-some chapters in out of 150, so I’ll be here a while. But last week I was in Psalm 32, and I keep going back to it.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long. (verse 3)

For when I pushed things under the rug and refused to deal with my issues, refused to repent, to apologize, to make amends, to acknowledge the truth of my actions, I diminished into an ever-shrinking ball until sparks shot out of me from the friction of my choices.

And I’ve been here, too; I’ve dug in my heels and been the stubbornest of sinners. Maturity isn’t shown by perfection, but by the ability to recognize sin and turn from it earlier than we were willing to before.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. (verse 4)

He wouldn’t let me get away with it; He loved me too much to leave me shrinking and imploding. He held my feet to His fire, and when I burned myself with my own behavior He gave me reason to move. And now as parents, He’s teaching us to hold our kids’ feet to the fire, too.

I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not cover my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. (verse 5)

The pain forced me to admit reality. When I confessed and repented of the ways that had never worked for me, His light broke through and irrigated the stench of infection. Fear, doubt, shame, despair, vanished when I agreed with Him.

Therefore let everyone who is godly
offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found;
surely in the rush of great waters,
they shall not reach him. (verse 6)

We don’t have to drown in the fire of our choices; we can yield to His presence before we’re in over our heads. He pulls us out when we admit our need for Him and our inability to save ourselves.

There is no shame in the turning, only in our insistence to keep drowning – to stay tied to the millstone while sinking, to stay behind the gravestone He wants to move out of our way.

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.”  

Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

– John 11:38-40, ESV

Martha is just like us. We look at our hard hearts, our hard situations, our hard children, and we ask, Do You not know how impossible this is?

Don’t you know that we’re out of time?

Are You not aware of how deep this hole is that we’ve dug for ourselves?

Do you not see how his heart is like that stone?

Do You not know that her brain was repeatedly blanched with alcohol while she was in utero and the damage to her memory, speech, cognition, and intellectual and social maturity are said to be incurable?

And He answers, Have you heard of what I can do with stones?

Did you forget that I am above time, outside of time, but never out of time?

Do you not yet know that I’m in the business of doing the impossible?

In spite of everything in her past and every diagnosis against her, Reagan is learning to read.

You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with shouts of deliverance.

– Psalm 32:7, ESV

He is the shelter, the Savior, and the celebration. And He tells us, Hey Love, the impossible is what I do.

_____________________

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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.

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.