Category Archives: special needs

not alone

Posted on by October 16, 2019

It’s all the same. Whether your assignment is to give a kitten a bath, dose them with de-wormer, or remove their head from a tight spot they’ve gotten it stuck in, you follow these directions (or a close variation) every single time:

Collect a few towels.

Put a fresh box of bandages nearby.

Arm yourself with your widest range of Christian-approved profanity.

And get ready to rumble.

Or, take the alternative to all that: Wait until your husband is home, and make him do it.

But I went with the first option, and learned that God made kittens adorable so you could forgive them when they draw blood with their little-bitty meathooks. All over my right hand, between fingers, around the side of my palm…only two of the gashes were in a spot that could actually be covered. An awkwardly-placed band-aid protected the awkwardly-placed wounds, but a good part of the damage had to be exposed because to cover it would cause more pain than it was worth.

not alone: first aid for adoptive families (Copperlight Wood)

There’s no one-size-fits-all process with kids, with adoption, or with special needs, though. No quick-fix band-aid covers the bleeding, and when we hide all the wounds people assume there is no problem in the first place. We walk a fine line between transparency and privacy, praying that people remember that they can’t see it all, even when so much seems to be public and on display.

Many adoptive and special needs families feel alone. They are misunderstood. Frequently under attack and struggling with depression. Often churches, family members, organizations and professionals make well-meaning attempts without really knowing how to help. It feels incredibly helpless and frustrating when the resources that are in place to help families actually end up causing more pain out of ignorance or pride. Or both.

A lot of these families – more than you might think – eventually quit going to church. It ought not to be this way.

Some of the damage has to be exposed because covering it causes more harm than healing.

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Last spring I wrote a series about this, and every day during the weeks it went live I received emails from adoptive parents, family members, and organizations about how it was impacting families working through attachment.

They realized they weren’t alone.

They realized their situation was common, but rarely talked about.

And they realized there were different ways to communicate their family’s very special needs to the communities around them that they desperately needed support from. In turn, some of these communities started to understand adoptive families a little better, and they began rallying around them with advocacy – while respecting those oh-so-important boundaries that were in place for their child’s healing, of course.

The blog series turned into an eBook, revised and expanded with resources and links throughout. Not too expanded, though – it still sits as an easy read at 49 pages total, all in one place.

It’s called Upside Down and it offers hope for adoptive and foster families (and the lowdown for those who love them) in roughly 100 pages.

Because you are not alone. We are covered, but we don’t have to be in hiding.

 

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from just outside the bleep-bloop room

Posted on by August 5, 2014

The last time people gave me questions to answer in a blog post, you guys (you know who you are) delivered seven questions ranging from easy-peasy to tough as nails. That was about a year ago, so I’m feeling brave again…and also, these looked easier.

from just outside the bleep-bloop room: behind the screen at Copperlight Wood

Here goes. Each blogger asks a few blogging friends to share their answers to the following four questions in a blog post.

1) What am I working on/writing?

Right now, an eBook version of the Upside Down series. I hoped to have it out in May or June-ish, but stalled because of trying (or, to be honest, not trying) to figure out how to make it easily downloadable from the website. Turns out it’s pretty simple, but technology makes me nervous and I didn’t want to go into the cyber back room of the website, where the walls are covered with dials, buttons, and lights flashing. The bleep-bloop room scares me.

It’s probably because I can barely work an iPod. I do like electricity – I use a flat iron on my hair. It has two buttons, easy. Coffee pot? One button, perfect. But the TV/VCR/DVD nightmare with three separate remotes? You’ve got to be kidding. Completely hopeless, don’t even ask me how to turn it on. I think it needs plugged in first.

After Upside Down is launched, there are a couple of other, bigger projects that will quickly move from the backburner to the front burner. More on those later…

2) How does my work/writing differ from others of its genre?

Ten minutes of typing and deleting and I still don’t have a good answer for this. Unless there’s a specific class for non-fiction adoptive homeschooling bookish Alaskan slightly-crafty increasingly-crunchy mommy devotional blogs, I guess I’m not organized enough to focus on a genre. So I cheated and asked Vince. He said, “You show humor in the details of everyday life that most people don’t think of, and you reveal honest pain at a level that most people would be afraid of writing about.” He’s completely biased and doesn’t read any other blogs by women. Love him.

Aside from abusing sentence fragments, one thing that might really be considered different in my writing is that I think and write in analogies. He speaks to me in symbolism, and I love writing about what He teaches me when life’s minutiae means more than it seems to on the surface.

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3) Why do I write what I do?

(cough) Because it’s cheaper than bail?

Besides that, the details of motherhood are worth having their moment of glory. The reality of post-adoption life deserves even more awareness and compassion than the dramatic adoption process that occurs before the kids even come home. Jesus speaks into the mundane minutes of our workday instead of just the pews for an hour on Sunday, and when I neglect writing them down (here or wherever), I feel like I’ve lost something that I should have kept.

When I am feeling unsure about my writing, it is not because I am worried about the difference between adult and juvenile fiction, but because I am worrying that I am neglecting other responsibilities, and so misusing my freedom; I’ve gone through periods of confusion and downright stupidity. It was our eldest child, with her remarkable ability to see accept what is, who said to me a good many years ago, “Mother, you’ve been getting cross and edgy with us and you haven’t been doing much writing. We wish you’d get back to the typewriter.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle Of Quiet

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4) How does my writing process work?

Throughout the day I scribble illegible words and thoughts in my planner or notebooks, but most real writing happens late at night until the hour hand is pointing at single digits. When I’m at the computer, I look at those notes and a theme emerges. I’d love to say it all just flows out, but it almost never does (this post did, though). Regular blog posts and articles are never completely thought out, figured out, or planned beforehand, and more than once I’ve gotten to the end of a piece thinking I was about finished and then realized with great vexation and gnashing of teeth that it needed to go an entirely different direction.

A writer is someone for whom writing is much more difficult than it is for other people.

– Thomas Mann

I get stuck and give it more time, more tea, more space…in other words, procrastinate…or I’ll take a shower, which is sure to produce an amazing solution because it is the only place I have nothing to write with.

With the exception of the 31 Days series from last October, I spend several nights and rewrites on every piece, and the final message usually feels like it’s just snuck up on me. If He doesn’t surprise me, it’s probably a lame post.

To be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are. The novel we sit down to write and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ.

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

Let me introduce you to three friends of mine, fellow artists approaching the light:

patty

Patty is married to her beloved surfer husband and she educates her two sons at home. Her writing is transparent and heartfelt, chatty and beautiful. She writes at Hearts Homeward.

kathy

Kathy is a full-time artist in Arizona, and her blog is a lovely tour of watercolors, ranch living, desert wildlife, and honest thoughts. She is also an awesome adoptive grandma. Kathy writes (and paints) at Tapestry 316.

cynthia

Cynthia is a fellow homeschooling, business-owning adoptive mama. She is fiesty, funny, and also the reason that my friend Kathy (above) is an adoptive grandma, because she is her daughter. I think somehow I must be related to them, though we haven’t been able to prove it yet. Cynthia writes at Cultivated Graftings.

I hope you love perusing their blogs. I’m going to storm the bleep-bloop room, armed with coffee, and wrest an eBook out of it.

cover me

Posted on by July 25, 2023

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees: Prayerful Motherhood in the Midst of the Overwhelm.

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A glittering day. The sun is up, but not awake yet – its light is still copper, like a red-haired child with curls sticking out every which way, rubbing his eyes. Morning came early and my hair is still damp from last night’s shower.

Three girls are up and bickering, requiring intervention at an average rate of two minutes per child, so in six minutes I’ve thrown the covers back three times. I give up and grab the coffee, and start throwing it back, instead.

cover me: resting in the waiting, when we want to hurry up and smell the roses (Copperlight Wood)

The day moves into breakfast, chores, lessons. You know how this goes – small details, a few more assignments every day, success gained in baby steps. Like the new blanket that will warm us in the fall, growing stitch by stitch – we work on it for a while, check our progress, and by golly – it doesn’t look any more finished than it did three weeks ago. It’s not nearly big enough to cover us. It’s nowhere near the size it’s supposed to be. And yet, there must be some progress, because I can see the colors changing.

The Word is full of vital force, capable of applying itself. A seed, light as thistledown, wafted into the child’s soul, will take root downwards and bear fruit upwards.

– Charlotte Mason, Home Education

cover me: resting in the waiting, when we want to hurry up and smell the roses (Copperlight Wood)

But we are impatient. Many days it feels like we’re caught somewhere between the need to enjoy the peculiarities of this season, and the need to rush some changes so we can enjoy this time more effectively. It’s a weird uneasiness, this hurry-up-and-smell-the-roses feeling.

That afternoon, on the couch with a sunburn so radioactive that NASA is probably tracking me, I’m trying to finish the last twenty pages of this Charlotte Mason book I started reading two years ago. I’m struggling mightily with that “power of attention and will” she speaks so highly of because there are five kids outside the open window telling stories to each other, eating lunch in a fort they made from a tarp and the patio table.

Over the clink of forks on plates and rustling of leaves in trees, I hear Iree, in an overdone British accent. “Loooong agooo, before the pushmi-pullyu was extinct—”

Andrey interrupts. “What is dat? It stinks? Ewww!!”

“No, extinct. Dead. No more of them are around anymore.” I can hear someone snickering – probably Afton, that red-haired child with curls everywhere.

The wonder that Almighty God can endure so far to leave the very making of an immortal being in the hands of human parents is only matched by the wonder that human parents can accept this divine trust with hardly a thought of its significance.

– Charlotte Mason, Home Education

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That night, like so many nights after the kids are in bed, we decompress and evaluate the day. Sometimes we look at the week and year ahead. We look at behavior and progress, in us and in our kids, and we wonder if the colors are changing.

We wonder if a child is ready for more freedom. We wonder if another child is ready for more responsibility. We wonder about our own faith – sometimes it feels like it’s not nearly big enough to cover us. It’s nowhere near the size it’s supposed to be.

We pray, and Vin puts it into words for me. “God, we’ve planted a lot of seed. We’re waiting…but we’re tired of looking at just dirt.”

And I remember something a friend said to me recently about attachment: The best progress is the slow progress. The best healing is the deep healing. Growth, and grief – they both process slowly.

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For the wife, sister, friend, daughter, mama – for the overrun one who finds herself crouched on the bathroom floor, elbows on knees, head in hands: When we feel like we’re making bricks without straw, we run to the unruffled One who calmly used a basket of loaves and fish to feed thousands.

Never fear, whatever may happen. You are both being led. Do not try to plan. I have planned. You are the builder, not the Architect.

Go very quietly, very gently. All is for the very best for you.

– God Calling, edited by A.J. Russell

cover me: resting in the waiting, when we want to hurry up and smell the roses (Copperlight Wood)

On Sunday I sat with a child who never knew how to be held by a mother – who didn’t know how to relax in affection but would only submit in stiff fear: body rigid, legs unbending. She’s been our very own push-me-pull-you as she learns about body space, gentleness, and appropriate touch. And now she leans, rests against my side during the church service – not in fierce pushing as before, but gently laying her head on my shoulder. She nestles there, hands folded, legs hanging off the chair, one sandal kicked off. Resting.

It’s only because He is big enough to cover us, all of us. We can see the colors changing. Slowly, stitch by stitch, we make the blanket that warms and shelters.