Our Happily Ever Aftermath

 Hey friends. I'm going to cut right to the issue. I screwed up. I mean, I do that often enough it shouldn't be noteworthy but this one is stuck deep in my mom guilt so I'm going to put words to it and try to figure this thing out with all of you.  See, my oldest son just graduated from high school and is on his way to college in the fall. I am so impressed with him. I am so proud of his accomplishments and the strides he's made as a person. And that made me want to change the narrative of our life to the other kids that are living in the house.  It started innocently enough. The girls were complaining that school was starting again too soon. I said, "Well, your biggest brother is starting college in the fall so I bet he's nervous about school starting too."  The tears ya'll. I thought that perhaps framing big brother living elsewhere in a normal transition type of way would help. What actually happened was I made the girls deeply sad that now they wou...

 Confessions:  I haven't written anything specifically for this blog in months. I am apparently regressing to my 10-year-oldish self that was obsessed with Lisa Frank. Erego the Giraffe. Sorry, not sorry.  I've done a great deal of deconstruction of my faith and while I am still (and likely will always be) rebuilding Im happy and confused to realize Jesus is still an integral part of me. Some of his followers though, ya'll. Glass houses and stones and whatnot but man I think more of us brothers and sisters need to do some soul searching instead of holding onto lies. Ugh. It was much easier to exist as a human in this world before I started searching for truth and compassion. It is so much worse caring about people I would much rather "other" and move on from. It is also super gross to recognize that some of my past actions, thoughts, and postures towards others were at best unhelpful and at worst hateful and unfair. The number of times I have full-body cringed thi...

I'm not sure if you've noticed it. In the past few years, there is a surge of women between the ages of 30 and 40 walking away from Christianity. Seemingly legions of religious leaders are suddenly struck down from their pedestals and outed as rapists, molesters, abusers, and liars. Now people are finding the very foundations on which they rested their faith crumbling to dust.  After decades of being admonished to not build our faiths on the sand, but on solid rock, we are collectively looking around in disbelief. Horrified we are just now realizing the rock we chose was fragile soapstone. The second a crack developed the whole thing fell into a pile of debris.  Now, traumatized, horrified, and in disbelief, we are having to, as an entire generation, sift through the mess and find the pieces that remain intact.  Some of us are finding that nothing at all is left worth saving. They are using heavy equipment to move away the detritus of their past. Now the place their faith...

                              Today marks 5 years since our first 3 kids were adopted. A teeny baby girl and two older but small boys became officially ours. Since then we added two more little girls to our family. Adoption days are complicated anyway without our added family trauma. In the past, we have had a special meal or gotten ice cream.  This time last year our oldest wasn't with us. He had been in residential treatment for a while by then but I was still so deep in my grief over what he had done, and the fallout from it, the adoption anniversary didn't feel worse than all of the other days. Now that we all have truly begun to heal in earnest, today feels like a punch in the stomach. I find myself reliving the moment I found out my oldest son had broken our family. Facebook shows memories of 5 years ago, our beautiful, happy, smiling family.  Instead of being thankful I have childr...

If  there was a song dedicated the end of myself reliance, to its being lit on a funeral pyre as it floated out to sea, it would  start with a low whispered sticato of no no no no no no. The  crescendo would lift into a loud,  long high pitched wail and fade eventually into soft gutteral sobs of acceptance.  I have always been a pull yourself up by your bootstraps person. Not so much out of choice but of necessity.  I would encourage anyone who listened to get the help they needed while silently, slowly bleeding to death. All of that started to change when we first became foster parents. Being an island just wasn't an option.  Too many people routinely in and out of our lives to do it on my own.  The day, however that I finally broke, that my stubborn will and stubborn heart finally shattered was the day I found out my worst fears had been made real.  My worst case scenario was one of my children being molested. Not only had that ...

I get it. It's a weird, kind of long name, and also apparently the name of an episode of a TV show I don't watch. Regardless,  it fits. The aftermath is the part after the storm.  Where you survey the damage and assess what to do next. You are joyful to have survived and frightened about what you may find.  In 2008 Tim and I spent a few months in Mississippi doing post-hurricane Katrina clean up. I remember hearing a story about a house that got absolutely destroyed by the storm surge and hurricane winds. When people were cleaning up they found one perfect China teacup that looked like it had been gently picked up and deposited on  a pile of rubbish. They continued to find odd things. Pictures undamaged in one place but utterly ruined in another. It was all the same storm but it affected every home and every person in different ways.  Adoption is a lot like that. A family had to be broken for my children to be mine.  Their lives were tur...