Last week I sat on a couch cuddling my precious first born daughter. She is slight, delicate, small bones beautiful large brown eyes with impossibly thick curling lashes, her arms curl in, her shoulders drawn in, her thumbs hidden in the palm of her hand, her head sweet and soft pressed right under my chin. I keep her close, instinctive. Everything about her beautiful and precious to me, she is struggling, it tears my heart even while I smile and entertain our room full of guests. A part of my mind, worries, calms, wonders. Then out of the blue a question, “did her birth mom drink while she was pregnant?” my stomach drops. A battle in me against my natural openness and a mother’s fierce protective instinct ,“I don’t know” another voice enters the conversation, “I was thinking the same thing, you can tell through her eyes. Maybe not her ears but her forehead is so high” a stone in my stomach… I nod polite. We get through the morning. My guests leave, all fellow foster moms. Like a slow bleeding wound the pain grows as the days go by. Here five days later it is still a constant ache. There is a part of every adoptive parent that wants to forget that there was pain and trauma that brought their child to them. In order for adoption there had to be heartache. I think it is human nature to believe that certain things just won’t happen to you. Car accidents, cancer, fires, disaster… the list goes on. When we began foster care I just honestly believed that I would be adopting my daughter. Part was total faith. But part I believe was a certain denial that heartache would be mine. I did get to adopt, she is the daughter of my heart in all ways. But I also lived with a certain amount of denial that she would carry effects from the time she wasn’t in my arms. Yet as each milestone was missed, as each struggle became more apparent, I mourned. I don’t know what happened to her when her birth mother carried her. This week I mourned that there may be times in her life when a stranger may put together parts of her story by looking at her gorgeous little face. That hurts, and I mourn.
The things that filled my day today
We build a boat, we go on an adventure, we set sail, we fail, we dive, we giggle, we tickle, flotation, density, thrust. We learn
We paint. We process failure, we enjoy the process, we talk about patience and perserverance. We learn.
We eat. We serve each other, we grate, and clean, we direct and orchestrate, we wipe and wash bitty fingers and faces, we talk about grace and servant hearts, we talk about blessings and a God who loves and provides for us. We learn.
We conduct business, manners, responsibility, budget. We learn
We read. Adventures, and mysteries, the story of our world, a great painter, an explorer a country we have never seen, a culture we don’t know, how does it work? Why is that wrong? Why does that happen? We learn.
We add, we subtract, we count things we love, we write. We learn
This is why I homeschool
Being firmly rooted and established in love I want my kids roots to grow deep for their characters to grow strong, their soul nourished, their minds to love learning, for them to learn wisdom not just knowledge. I want them to take on the world, unafraid. Ready to do whatever the Lord has planned for them to do. I don’t homeschool to protect them from the world but instead to be ready and prepared to change the world, to be unashamed of the gospel of Christ. I am building for distance not speed. My child may not always sit still, they may not always ask the right question, they may probe and ponder. But their hearts are firm. They love God, they love others and the rest will come.
wondering what is ahead….
I took our boys to go and visit some dear and wonderful friends today. A family who has a heart for adoption and to further the kingdom in all they do. I love all different kinds of people but this particular friend speaks my language, so it made for an awesome morning. I also had a sitter for the little girls so it was just me and my bigs. So awesome. This family is about one week out from being ready to take another foster care placement, adding kid number five to an awesome family. Every day I think about taking another child. It crosses my mind at odd times. On the one hand I am so in love with how my beautiful little family is at this moment. I am treasuring each day like a precious jewel. My big guy, so wonderful, smart, sassy, growing in wisdom, growing in knowledge I savor these last times when the glimpses of his little boy self-become more and more rare each day. My precious J with his heart for people, an uncanny ability to charm anyone, and the sweet love he has for his God. My Boo, so suddenly bigger, talking (finally!) so amazing to see her become a preschooler right before my eyes. My Bells poised on the cusp of adoption. Every day I bond with her more and more, learning each part of her small little self, so independent and yet so attached. So I am in the sweet spot. But I walk around this house, this house that I love that God gave to us and I see too much room. A bed unslept in, a crib waiting. Who is meant for these beds? Who is meant for us? And how can I wait when I know our forever child is waiting as well? Praying almost constantly for more babies and children to find homes, praying for more families to take these little one, for a day for a week for a season or forever I want these beds full. “Lord equip me for more,” this is my prayer.
looking back
It is cold this morning. Well at least California cold but still I am sitting cozy in front of the fireplace while oddly enough I don’t hear any stirrings from the little’s in my house. Yesterday we took down all the Christmas decorations and I don’t know which I love more putting them up or taking them down. Everything feels so clean and open when they come down. Granted I still have to put them all in their proper boxes as they are currently just hanging out in the garage on a table. Oh well a day at a time. It may happen today and it may not. Today I am excited because starting today we are doing respite care for another foster family who are on vacation. We will be having their adorable little boy stay with us for three days. This guy is the exact same age as my J and they are best buddies. We put an extra mattress in the boy’s room since it is just for a couple days and the boys are so excited to have a sleepover. I love this little guy because he is just the sweetest thing. He just rolls with things, eager to please and just a happy guy. It also doesn’t hurt that he is ten kids of cute. It has me thinking about my Bunny also the same age as my J but they were like water and oil and Bunny while also adorable was ten kinds of difficult too. It has been almost exactly a year since he left us to be reunified with his father. A year since I have heard anything about him. He left with promises of being in contact with us, even asking if we would help watch him sometimes and then nothing.
We packed up our Bunny a week before Christmas. The county had gone back and forth with reunification for about a month first saying he would be leaving then calling unexpectedly two days before and saying no something had come up and it would be at least three or four more months and then out of the blue announcing that everything was fine and he would be leaving in a couple of days. All his things more than filled the back of our large car. Boxes of clothes, toys, blankets, bicycle, even the rug from his room we gave to him. The day he left we had a kind of impromptu goodbye party. His favorite people came to say goodbye and we ordered pizza and had chips, I made huge homemade sugar cookies. He was thrilled. That day I let him eat pretty much what he wanted I had been so strict with his eating I wanted him to just have a regular fun last day. I have the best picture of him eating one of those sugar cookies with a huge grin. I packed everything into the car and about a half an hour before we were supposed to leave he comes in the kitchen and says, “Mama I don’t feel good” then he proceeds to throw up all over the kitchen floor. Uh, Oh! Sure enough he had eaten himself sick. Ever since he had come to us eating was a huge issue. Not eating, only eating certain things. And the other thing was overeating. He would eat the thing he wanted until he made himself sick. We had gotten to the place where he would pretty much eat whatever we served to all the kids. He would get a regular portion and eat and be off. He had his favorites and things he didn’t like but he could function. This was not the case when he first arrived. Most weeks when he would go to his visits he would come home with his pants unbuttoned because he little tummy was so distended from all the junk food he would eat. Towards the end when he would have unsupervised visits he would come home and be sick on the potty because his body wasn’t used to eating all the sugar and processed foods he would get on a visit. It made me sad because I viewed and treated him just like my own, but it was the prerogative of his father to feed him the way he thought was best and it was not a reason to not go back. So we took care of him and tried our best to instill healthy eating while he was with us. Anyway that day I had not been careful enough, poor guy. I gave him a quick bath and had him put on some warm p.j.’s, gave him his favorite blanket and tucked him into our bed to watch a movie while I finished packing up. He was super excited to go. It broke my heart a little bit to see him so excited. I know intellectually that it was good for him to be excited. But emotionally I was sad. Finally it was time to go and everyone wished him goodbye and gave him big hugs. He was anxious to go and not very interested in anyone else. J and JP wanted to give him hugs and he just wasn’t interested. While he was with us he did develop a friendship and relationship with the boys but most of the time they were in his way. For the first month he was with us he would refer to them as, “that one” and “the other one.” He really only wanted to connect with me. He was used to being in charge, of being the pampered pet he didn’t want siblings. We climbed in the car and listened to his favorite music. I prayed for him as we drove and we got there pretty quick as the drop off point was just around the corner from our house. As we pulled up behind his father’s van I turned off the car and looked over my shoulder. I had never seen such a sad look on his face before. Oh baby. He unbuckled himself and climbed as fast as he could into my arms sobbing as if his heart was breaking. I held him tightly and told him how much I loved him and that he would always be my bunny. He father seeing him cry gave us a minute. After a bit we got out of the car and I handed him over to his father. The storm had passed and now he was all smiles again. We loaded up all this things letting his dad know what was in every box and I said goodbye. I left pretty quickly knowing they were anxious to get going. That was it. It was four days before Christmas and we made plans to have him come over the day after Christmas to open the gifts we had gotten him and that would be the last time we saw him. It is strange to look back a year later and think about him. He was part of our family. I knew everything about him. Now I know nothing. We did our job with him. We loved him and parented him, it didn’t always make him happy but we did the hard things. We told him no, we gave him boundaries, we didn’t make him the center of our universe and that wasn’t comfortable for him. He much preferred to be in control, to be petted and coddled. It was hard. But I am so glad we did it. It gave me a deeper understanding and empathy for foster and adoptive parents who struggle with attaching to their children. It also made me more wary of what could come next and that is something I still struggle with. Right now I love my four. They keep me busy and my life is pretty full. My heart goes out to older children and I am reminded with this little guy who is coming for a couple of days that not all kids are like my bunny. I know this next year God will call us to something new. But for today I will enjoy the blessing that my family is and look back at what this last year has brought us. A year of blessings
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas! I took a break from blogging after the last court case with Bells. Mentally it was such a huge relief to be in adoptions. I can’t describe what a weight it was off my shoulders. We are now in the adoption unit. We have an adoption worker as opposed to an ongoing social worker she still comes and visit’s every month and in a couple months hopefully February our adoption day will arrive. Bell is awesome. She is 18 months old now and walking everywhere. She talks all the time, looking you seriously in the eye and babbling away. She is right on track with all her developmental needs. We still call her our sunshine, because in a family of four kids she is always the one smiling. When the final goodbye visit came it was heartbreaking. I chose to write a letter to the family and expressed my thankfulness for them and that I understood their pain. We have a plan to be able to have a limited form of communication. As Bells grows we want to be able decide if contact with them is appropriate or not. Right now we don’t know. We respect Bells birth family and we respect Bells right to know where she came from just as we do for our Boo. These are their stories, they should own them. Here on the blog I don’t use their true names however if you are reading this you most likely know us in some way. You have a window into our kids and their unique stories. I don’t share every detail of their birth families or even the details of what brought them into care. These are things that belong to my girls. They aren’t for discussion or dissection. Patrick and I will share their stories with them at times that are appropriate for them, they will know they came to us through adoption, that they have birth families that loved them but couldn’t make the right choices to care for them. They are precious and loved babies who God loved and had a plan for, they traveled through adoption it is part of their story but they aren’t my adopted girls, they are just my girls. They traveled through adoption but it isn’t who they are. Patrick and I work all love to share our stories, and I love to hear them. How each family felt called, was scared, prayed, stepped forward, went through pain and learned to trust God on a deeper level, and how the experience changed them and if it has reached the end how God has grown their family in an amazing way. We celebrated a post-Thanksgiving dinner we dubbed Friends giving and we had a full house. Out of the twelve kids seven were either currently in foster care or had been adopted through foster care. They were all baby girls and each as beautiful and different as could be and each so clearly belonged to their family there was no doubt that God had a plan for each of these babies. One of those babies left to fly to be with a biological aunt and her foster family has had to grieve over her and the loss of her in their lives. One sweet little one will be returning to a birth family in a very unsafe unchanged situation after 18 months in her loving home. It is breaking all of our hearts to see her go. In and out of foster care since birth, now four and a half her current home has been has been her longest placement. For one little girl we are praying right now for the best place for her she is the precious only child of a very sweet wonderful foster couple who adore her and we shall see in the next six months what happens. The last four are in their forever homes. Just a small glimpse into the lives of foster families they inspire me in so many ways. I am blessed beyond measure to have my precious girls in my arms, by handsome boys I could carry inside me and give birth too. As for our future in foster care, we shall see. We are far from done but I think we are at a pause. The kids keep me busy, busy, busy. We will foster and adopt again, God willing we would love a family of six kids, but for at least the next six month or maybe the next year we will stick with our four. We want to be there for the families we work with in our ministry who are walking this rough and rocky road and we want to see the vision for foster care and adoption continues to expand in our church body and community in a radical way. If you are reading this and considering foster I hope you will, I hope that nothing will dissuade you, and I can’t promise that it will be easy, but it will be worth it may be not who you expected and maybe not until eternity will we see the result but it will be so worth it. So stick around I plan on giving you some glimpses into our crazy everyday life with and into the lives of some of the most amazing foster and adoptive families I have met.
My beautiful Boo
My Boo has been in pain. Monday greeted us with a low grade fever, and…. It had been two days with no poop (sorry, it’s true this happens too much). My Boo, she wants your arms when she is sick and even then she still cries. She doesn’t want to sleep, eat, nothing but your arms and tears will do for her. I love to hold her. I love her slight little fiery arms fiercely clutching my neck. I love every little part of her. Her sweet little body, her sweet little heart I adore her. It hurts me. I hold her and feel her little arms slapping my side, screaming all the while burrowing her head into my shoulder. She is in so much pain, not really the fever this time but the other. It hurts her, her little body hurts. I hate the advice. Well meaning. I know. I just hate it. Yes, we have taken her off dairy, yes she drinks plenty of water, for goodness sake she drinks prune juice three times a day! How great your little Suzy is all better now. Really don’t you just see that it is killing me to not be able to make her feel better? I don’t know if I had birthed her if I would handle it differently. But I didn’t. So I wonder. Her little insides are a mystery to me. My heart breaks. I push her little legs up, hold her tightly in my arms, massage her itty bitty belly and she screams. I finally start crying too. I love you my daughter, I hurt with you and I am angry that I couldn’t carry you inside me close to my heart. I couldn’t sing you to sleep, and stop drinking coffee, take multi vitamins, and let you hear your daddy’s voice. I wasn’t there to see your first breath and I couldn’t be the one keeping you safe when you needed me. I couldn’t feed you from my own body and give you the very best. I have to deal with the reality that your birth mommy made choices that hurt you when you had no defenses. I don’t have a lot of patience anymore for the dramas of pregnancy and birth, for the debate on breast feeding, natural child birth. Who cares if you had a C-section or gave birth in a pool with no pain medication, you gave birth. There are no medals for you. The truth is that if you gave birth under anesthesia, and gave your baby a bottle of formula the minute your baby was born. You are blessed. There are babies that had none of that, babies who have lost their mamas, babies who are left in fields for rodents to chew on their ears, babies who are fed toxins through their mamas that change how they are formed, babies who have no food, babies who are left alone, newborns who are allowed to sleep for 12 hours with no food, babies who die. I had the privilege of giving birth twice, praise God. I chose this path. But I know the pain of not giving birth. I am accepting that I have to be a detective of her little body. Wishing I didn’t have to be a detective does me no good, I am. This is my daughter; this is the path she took to my arms. I wouldn’t change one thing about her for my sake. I adore her, pure adoration. She will catch up, she is just her. She is the way God allowed her to be and that is beautiful. I am blessed to be her mama. But sometimes I still cry.
The answer
Yesterday at six in the evening I received an email with the news that the judge had ruled to terminate parental rights and had ordered that a final goodbye visit be scheduled. She is ours. I cried. The feelings are overwhelming and layered in this journey. I cried in the moment for her birth family. Today my heart still feels heavy for them. The tears are at the edge waiting to fall. Yesterday an orphan was created. I need a moment to grieve for that loss. That she is in her forever home, that she is in the arms of her forever family when that moment came is a gift. Not for us but for her. I know in my deepest moments with the Lord I shared the desire of my heart to keep this precious bright, beautiful gift in my arms forever. I held her with open arms. I had to confront the reality that she belongs to God not to me. I had to surrender my will to His. I prayed through pain that He be the judge. From the beginning God has been her advocate. This process tore away my illusion of control and made me be still before a loving God. I could do nothing but pray. Praise God. This is my forever daughter. Placed in my arms by no power of my own. Today I add another page to the life story of our daughter. Yesterday was for loss. Today is for Joy. Today is a new day of forever. She is ours! Now I feel joy. Overwhelming, Joy. This is the moment. Can you see? My daughter placed in my arms, I know her already, I love her forever. The labor has ended and God has knit us together. This day is a miracle. This is my heart for adoption. God places the lonely in families. She is no longer an orphan she is my daughter.
waiting….
We are still waiting. We have been waiting for almost five weeks for a resolution to one court decision. It is frustrating every week there is some kind of event that leaves me feeling emotionally spent and needing rest. Everyone handles stress in different ways, and God created each of our unique personalities with strengths and weaknesses. Some people would be railing against the system with its flaws and inaccuracy, against a judge that can go directly against what the law states and make decisions based on their own ideals. Some people would be angry at God. Some people would just roll with the punches and somehow separate their emotions from the situation. But the storms, the trials, these are the things that make us grow. These are those times where we learn what faith is, what ministry is, what a loving powerful God we have because we are weak. I have absolutely zero power in this situation. This situation encompasses my entire heart. This is my family, my kids, my home, my future. No matter how God made your personality or what your coping mechanism is ultimately he wants us to give all power and control to him in every part of our lives. This ministry, this trial like most trials shows us that this is true. It feels yuck. Really truly honestly I want it to be done. Don’t we all want to hop out of the fire when things are hard? But there is an end game and this I desire more than anything else. I am running my race; the race God chose for me to run and that feels good. We can go to church on Sundays, we can have lunch with friends and “fellowship”, we can volunteer to make a meal for the homeless, we can go to a mid week Bible study, we can do lots of “Christian” religious type things. All good things but there are reasons why James said that true religion is caring for widows and orphans in their distress. Because justice is close to the heart of God, yes! Because they are the most at risk, yes! But I have seen it is also because it forces you into a deep and abiding walk with God. When you can’t turn off ministry, when it wakes you up at 3am (literally it is screaming for me), when you give your whole heart with no promise of a return to stand in the gap for the most defenseless in our society you must trust God. You put into practice all those Sunday school lessons, all those mid week sermons. You are opening your world to those in need. You are growing your faith muscles. It’s not perfect, we fail sometimes, but God is right there to pick us back up, forgive us and hold us close.
Psalm 84:5-8
Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion. Hear my prayer, O Lord God Almighty; listen to me, O God of Jacob. Look upon our shield, O God; look with favor on your anointed one.
My best explanation of the process….
A child is placed into care. Within 72 hours a case is presented to the Judge for the removal of the child the Judge gives approval and a court date is set for three weeks for the county to create a case for the removal as well as make a case plan for the parents, or just mom, or just dad to ‘work’ for the next 6 months to reunify with their child. At the three week court case then the judge approves the plan and the placement of the child during ‘reunification’. Reunification begins, in our county this begins with once a week one hour supervised visits, the parents (mom or dad or both) either ‘work their plan’ and all goes well or they don’t or some combination in between. Somewhere about 4 months in you can usually see where things are headed. Usually the case worker will be able to tell you what the county is recommending one of three things, to place back with parents, to continue service because it is a borderline effort from parents, or to move to terminate rights. Sometimes children are returned before the court date if things are going well. They can be sent home for a 60 day visit and be with the parents by the time the court case is heard. At the next court case the judge hears the case presented by the county and the parents and the child also have attorneys present (foster parents are the invisible party; we aren’t taken into account at all). The judge makes his decision “most” of the time siding with the county. If the judge does decide that it is time to move to terminate parental rights a date is set for what is referred to as a .26 hearing. This is set for 120 days from then. During this time the county finds a permanent adoptive home for the child (if they aren’t in one already) that home then begins their adoptive home study and the case gets assigned an adoption worker. The county works to make their case working with the county lawyer to present the case for termination. (This is where we got our Bells). At the .26 hearing the judge can either terminate rights or wait pending an appeal from the parents for more reunification services (This is where our case went). It should be noted that parents have the right to their weekly visits this entire time. If parental rights were terminated the parents can appeal that and have 60 days from the time of termination to do so (this is what we believed had happened at first, oh the joy of miscommunication). 90% of the time an appeal is made. Then an appeals date is set and the judge decides if there is warrant for the appeal if so then he hears a case for more reunification services and decides. If the appeal is denied then it moves to adoption completely. A final goodbye visit is set. The adoption worker does their paper work, the adoption home study is completed if not done so already, and a date is set for the adoption day. At this time the parents are legal strangers to their child. This is very simplified and only to the best of my knowledge. There are really no set rules and every case takes a slightly different rout. This is also not taking into account all the extended relatives who may or may not pop up at different times. This is also specific to our county and every county is different and every judge is different. Hopefully this helps.
Today is foggy and grey
Today the court case is heard. I don’t understand or see why we have waited this past month and whether I see that reason in this life or in eternity I know there must have been a reason. It’s hard to try and explain why this has gone on and on and part of me worries that people will stop praying and lose the passion to go to the Lord in prayer. I like immediate answers; I know I am not alone in that. Last night my friend asked me how I was doing, or if I just wasn’t thinking about it. Yesterday I just wasn’t thinking about it. Today I can’t stop. The butterflies in my stomach are waging war with the scripture in my brain. Today I wish for someone to sit with me and just be. I don’t know what will happen today. I know that God could do anything and that all the circumstance and arguments will mean nothing if He has already decided the outcome. What that is I don’t know. So I go back to the only thing that I do know and that I have known since we started these two years ago. I love God, without him I am lost. If the only thing I can say at the end of this is that I still love the Lord who gave his son for me then that will be enough. I heard one of my favorite singers a couple years ago share that she had been having huge anxiety over worrying that something would happen to her only son while she was traveling. She shared with a friend in a dark moment that she didn’t know if her faith could survive if something happened to her son while she was out doing what God had called her to do. Her friend responded, “Then your faith isn’t surviving now. If you can imagine a scenario when God isn’t God then he isn’t God now.” This is what I believe. My God is God in all situations. This is what my faith looks like. Tear stained, hurting, battered but surviving. This is my ministry, this is my heart and all that is in me serving a loving God. Who will sit with me today, stand by me while I wash dishes, kiss my babies, change diapers, cry in the hallway, read books, and wait for an answer? My God, he sits with me.
myfoundlingfoxes 