10th Birthday Surprise

Hello again!  I haven't posted since September and for that I apologize.  This thing called life got in the way.  Something happened this evening, however, that I had to get down into words.

Tomorrow is the twins' 10th birthday.  We decided to let them open a couple of gfits tonight (from the grandmas) since they were things they would want to wear to school tomorrow.  (Also, because they got new shoes and Celia has to use a shoe box to make a Valentine's box that's due tomorrow, so we needed the box, LOL)  So, after the FaceTime calls to grandmas so they could see the girls opening their gifts, they both went upstairs to their room.  They came down to the basement to find me riffling through my scrapbook stuff (with cobwebs all over it) to try to find some heartsy things for Celia to use to decorate her box.

"Here", they said as they handed me a pencil zipper pouch.  "What's this?" I asked.  "We've been saving up our money since Christmas, and with the birthday money we just got, we now have $100 to go toward our trip to Ethiopia."  Insert shocked face here.  They've shocked us in the past with their generosity (you can read about that here), but this was a whole other level.

As I've stated in a previous post we have been working with an investigator for nearly a year who found the twins' birthmother.  Our plan is to go visit her and the twins' sisters in Ethiopia for their 12th birthday.  We have had an ongoing relationship with their family through our investigator and our Ethiopian friends here in the states who can call their birthmother's phone and translate for us.  The girls know they are now our extended family and our families and friends united in the fall to send the funds over to pay for tuition for their sisters at the school of their mother's choice.  You can read about that more here.  It's been incredibly healing for all of us.

But, they are kids and that is some pretty heavy stuff to process.  I've given them time and space to process it and tried not to nag about how they feel about it all.  They tell me in small ways.  They all three sleep with photo albums of their birth families in their beds, and on a recent trip to Ohio for the holidays, they even packed them in their suitcase with no prodding by me.  I still wasn't sure how they felt about our plans to go to Ethiopia in two years.  Now I know.

One of our favorite people in the world is Amsale, my Ethiopian mama in Akron.  I spoke with her and asked if she would call the twins' mother soon to check in and see how they're doing.  She had the idea of calling her on the twins' birthday!  After the twins handed me the money, and I picked my jaw up off of the floor, I told them that Amsale was calling her tomorrow and I wanted Amsale to tell their mother about this.  Their smiles lit up the room.  I saw their love for this woman in their eyes.  A woman they feel so guilty for not remembering now.  A woman who stirs up some very complicated feeling for them.  But I saw the healing tonight in their eyes.  God is healing them through this incredible story he's using us in.

So this week we will go to the bank and open a new account.  Mike and I also got a good chunk of change as a Christmas gift from my parents to get this account started.  I recently started working full time so that we would have the extra money to sock away.  I also am starting on a journey of selling this nutritional drink that is helping my own health, with all of the income I make from that going straight into this savings account for our trip.  Our girls are aware of this goal we are working towards and they've decided to join us.

 The timing of this was critical for me.  They're kids, and as such they can be pretty big a-holes a lot of the time.  The twins are also getting close to that snotty, snarky age, which I have no patience for.  Every day I am shutting it down.  It's exhausting, and most days I wonder if they're going to turn out to be jerks.  It's rare that I have the energy, patience and grace to deal with the attitudes in a loving and teaching way.  I just shut it down and send them to their room until they're ready to be nice.  But, tonight I feel good.  Tonight I know that they are learning selflessness.  Tonight they are healing and value us working as a family towards a common goal.  Tonight I not only love them, but I like them and I am cherishing them.

A Very Different Kind of "Back to School" Post

My heart is overflowing with joy.  As I sit here the past two days on Facebook reading everyone's complaints and woes, I am struck at our country's lack of perspective and gratitude.  How spoiled and self-righteous are we as a nation when we complain about our "first world problems" whilst people around the world fight for their right to simply live.

On Wednesday we, as a family, watched a documentary on Netflix called "On the Way to School".  It follows the lives of four different children in four different countries and documents their journey to school every day.  None of the kids in the film walked less than an hour each way to school daily.  One child had to watch out for elephant stampedes, while another pushed their brother, who was in a wheelchair, through very rugged terrain for over an hour.  Yet we complain.  After the film I was struck when the first words out of Charlotte's mouth was "When are we sending the money to send my sisters to school?".  Little did she know that I had been working on this very task over the past few days with our friend Workineh in Ethiopia.

I want to preface this post with the fact that Mike and I are no saints.  This story is of God and only possible through God.  We are simply following God's call on our lives.  He is the one making all of this possible, so please join us in praising Him and not us.

As many of you already know we hired an investigator back in May and were able to locate both birth mothers of our girls.  You can read ore about that story here.  We knew the twins had two sisters, one is now 7 and the other is 12.  In the interest of their privacy I will refer to them as K and N.  Once we found them I had a strong desire to make sure these girls were in a good school.  Since May I have been working with Workineh (our investigator turned friend) as well as our Ethiopian friend here in the states to determine what the best way to go about this would be.  Mike and I wanted to make sure we weren't trying to swoop in and be all "white savior" about the way we wanted to help.

This summer, while visiting family in Ohio, we were able to call the twins' birthmother, Abinet, ON THE PHONE!!!!  Our friend, and Godsend, Amsale in Ohio had her phone number from when the investigator told us that Abinet did have a phone.  Amsale happened to be in Ethiopia visiting her family in May when Workineh found Abinet, so she was able to talk with her on the phone 2 times while she was there.  We were sitting up in a bedroom in Amsale's house.  Our main goal of the phone call was to let Abinet know how we would like to help and find out what kind of school she would like the girls to go to. 

An interesting side note is the twins' response to our phone call to Abinet.  One girl wanted to stand in the room to just listen, but did not want to say anything.  The other wanted nothing to do with the call.  I mention this to emphasize that these are BIG and COMPLICATED feelings that they are sorting through.  They each sleep with a scarf tied around their waist that Amsale brought back for them from Ethiopia that she told them was from Abinet.  They love their first mother, but yet, there's so many feelings!  Mike and I are very intentional about letting them lead as far as how much, and what, involvement they want in this whole process. 

In Ethiopia a boarding school is the most prestigious school.  In my gut, I didn't think she would want to send them to a boarding school.  She already had to part with two of her kids due to terrible circumstances and I felt that she wouldn't want the other two out of her house.  I was correct.  She was so moved by our offer and asked why we wanted to help her.  All of us were crying.  We told her, through Amsale's translation, that she is now a part of our family and we help our family.  We conveyed to her how much we loved her and her other daughters and how we wish to come to visit her in three years.  At one point in the phone call she said "God made these girls (the twins) for you."  My response was "No, he made them for you, but we are so blessed to help."

She chose the school she wanted and let Workineh know how much tuition, the entrance fee, uniforms and school supplies would be.  The total for BOTH girls was...$310 for the entire year.  We are blessed with an incredible group of friends and family who all waned to participate in helping our new family members, which allowed us to send some extra money for school clothes, shoes, etc.

I sent the money to Workineh through Western Union on Wednesday and he traveled to their town on Thursday.  He sent me some pictures.  God is so good guys!

 Here are K & N modeling their new school clothes, shoes and backpacks.

 These are some of their new school books.

 This is the fabric that has been taken to a tailor to be made into their school uniforms.  School starts on September 18th.

 N, Abninet and K showing the photo album I made back in May for them of pictures of the twins from the entire time they've been with us.  Workineh delivered it to them on this trip.  

Here are the girls standing outside the school compound.

I need to express to you that through this entire process we have been very transparent and open with the twins.  They know everything, every detail we discovered about their birthfamily.  Some of it wasn't ideal, obviously.  This has brought the twins so much healing and helped them bond with us on a whole other level.  Their trust in us has grown exponentially.  They see our love for them shown through our love for their first family.  It helps that they no longer need to worry about what ever happened to their first family, especially their sisters.  We will always keep in touch and make sure they're ok, as much as is possible.

In no way has this discovery made me feel any "less" their mother.  I have not felt threatened in any way.  I feel closer to them knowing their history.  It has made me love their first family like they're my own.  It has opened my eyes and broken my heart for what breaks God's.  It has brought me closer to God.  He has been in every small detail of this whole experience.  I pray for Abinet everyday.  I wear a bracelet that says "enat" {mother in Amharic} to remind me to pray for her.  

I sleep better at night knowing I am doing all I can to help them.  It has brought our whole family here, and friends, together for such an amazing reason.  Our family has made us feel so loved, and again it shows the twins that they can trust all of us.  I sleep better knowing that this woman halfway around the world knows she's not forgotten.  She knows her babies are loved and cherished.  She knows that God has heard her prayers and is using us to help answer some of them.  That is an incredible honor.

Blessed By Birthmothers Across the Globe

Last week we hired an investigator halfway around the world in Ethiopia and this week we have pictures and information about all of our daughters' birth mothers.  MIND BLOWN.

It has literally been a million times easier to find these women in rural Ethiopia, living in mud huts, than it has to get my license plates switched over from Ohio to Pennsylvania, which still has not happened and we've lived here nearly a year.

Mike and I have been saying for the past 4 years that as soon as we got our 2011 tax refund, which includes our adoption tax credit, that we would hire an investigator to look into the twins' birth family.  Because this tax refund took a whopping FOUR YEARS to get straightened out, this has seemed like an elusive goal, something out of our reach.  Thanks to my superhero tax attorney Uncle Mike we were able to finally get the refund and not 2 weeks later I saw a question on an Ethiopian Adoption Support Group page I follow on Facebook.  There was a woman asking for a recommendation for an investigator and it just so happened that my friend Scott commented.  I sent Scott a message to ask more about this man he was recommending and his response was that this man was like a part of his family, a Christian and one of Scott's best friends.  SOLD.

I reached out to this man on Facebook, who lives in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  I gave him all of the information I have from the paperwork from their adoptions.  I've had a few friends go through this process and find out that most, if not all, of the information that was in their adoption paperwork was a lie, so there was no guaranteeing this information I was giving him was factual.  I figured we'd wait a couple of months to find anything out.

Imagine my surprise when only a couple of days later he was in the village that the twins were born in.  He had information.  Mike and I held our breaths when opening the email and reading his report.  

We hardly knew anything about the twins' story, beside what they could remember and verbalize to us in their broken English when they were four.  They talked about a mom figure, but called her by her first name.  This mom was on the paperwork once as their mother and yet on another set of paperwork she was listed as a guardian.  We weren't certain if she was the mom or an eldest sister.  They also spoke of an older sister and a baby sister.  Charlotte named all of her baby dolls after this baby sister and missed her dearly in that first year with us.  Even after being with us for nearly 3 years I remember a night where she broke down and wept because she was worried about her baby sister in Ethiopia.  My heart broke not being able to give her those answers she was craving.

Now we had the information in our lap and we prayed that it was good news that would be healing.  We opened the report and read it together before sharing it with the girls.  It turns out it was their mother and she is well, living with the other two daughters.  While the paperwork said that their father died, it turns out he just up and left once the baby sister was born, leaving their mother with no way to support her family.  She was in an impossible situation.  She relinquished custody of the twins when they were 3 (6 years ago) and had not heard a word about their whereabouts since.  She was so happy to see the pictures of the girls that we sent with our investigator.  She wept over them for a long time, he told us, and she had a hard time speaking.  I cannot even imagine not knowing where your children were and if they were ok for SIX YEARS.  The girls' sisters are also well, looking to be about 13 and 6 years old.  The younger one looks like a crazy awesome combination of the twins. 

When we showed the twins the pictures and shared the information they were beaming from ear to ear!  They loved seeing someone who actually looked like them!  They no longer have any conscious memories of their life back then, but I could see how healing it was going to be for them to have this treasure of information.  Seeing their first mother crying tears of joy when looking at their pictures.  She LOVES them, she MISSES them, they were wanted.  She made a selfless and impossible decision to give the girls a chance at a better life.  

A couple of days later we got word that our investigator was in Celia's family's village as he sent us pictures and a report.  Her birth mother is very young and very poor living in a home made of branches and sticks.  Once again the story of Celia's birth father being deceased proved to be untrue.  He also disappeared once Celia was born.  Her birth mother was so poor she was unable to feed herself enough to be able to produce milk to feed her baby.  Celia was very malnourished when she came to the orphanage.  She is now remarried and just recently had another baby, a boy.

Celia is only 5 right now so this information is a bit much for her to be able to process.  We told her about her baby brother in Ethiopia and her response was "I know, I remember him."  Umm yeah chica you left the country before you were one year old and he was just born, so no, you don't remember him, but whatever!  I feel good that as she gets older and does have questions that I will have some of the answers she is seeking.

As I look at the pictures of these beautiful women on the other side of the world I realize how incredible it is to be able to love someone this much without ever even meeting them.  I love these women.  I feel like our family has grown.  I never thought that we would have the opportunity to have any form of an open adoption when we adopted children from another country, but God has now opened that door.  Through our investigator I can now send letters, more pictures and other items he thinks might be helpful for them.  Mike and I are also looking into what it would take to pay for the twins' sisters to attend a good school.  We are praying about what we do next now that we have all of this information.  We feel a responsibility to help our new family members in any way we can.  While I set out to do this for the girls, I have realized it was just as much for me.  I needed to know that these mothers knew that their babies were well, loved and had a family that would never let them forget where they came from.  I feel lighter somehow.

We do plan on making a trip over there once the girls are older and when we go we will most definitely spend time with their first mothers.  I can't wait to hold them, cry with them, laugh with them, pray with them, cook with them and thank them for the gift they gave us and our girls.  These girls are going to do BIG things, and that began with their mothers making a very brave and scary choice of giving their children life.

God's timing is pretty amazing.  All of this happened just in time for mother's day.  Best gift ever.

Unexpected Parenting WIN!

If you follow me on Facebook you may remember this status I posted sometime just before Christmas:

Tonight this scenario played out while Celia was napping:
Caroline- (counting her money from her wallet) "Charlotte, let's go downstairs. Mom, you can't come since we are talking about something that's a secret. It's for Christmas, but it's not a present, it's something in an envelope."
She then proceeds to come upstairs to ask me how to spell "orphanage", 5 minutes later she comes back to ask how to spell "charity" and finally a few minutes later she needed me to spell "Africa". They asked if they could use the sharpies to decorate the envelope.
I know it's a surprise and I have "no idea" what they're doing ;) but I have a feeling I'm going to be an incredibly proud mama!!!

Well on Christmas morning we found this envelope under the tree:

(It says "Clean Water fo(r) all people")

And inside was this note along with $30 in cash:

(Dear Mom and Dad, Caroline and Charlotte are sending money to charity to build a well in Africa.)

Wow.  I was blown away.  What 9 year old thinks of this?  How did we get here?

It is true that they are from a rural area of Ethiopia where, when they first came to our family, they recounted to us how they remembered bathing, going to the bathroom and DRINKING water from the same river.  When they first came to America, like nearly all Ethiopian kiddos who come here, they both had intestinal parasites that were remedied with a couple of rounds of antibiotics.  Some families I know didn't have it quite that easy.  Their life involved dealing with these parasites, and sometimes worms, for months after the child(ren) were home.

Because of this realization, Mike and I looked into finding a reputable organization that was building clean water wells around the world, and particularly in Ethiopia.  That's when we found out about charity:water.  

In December of 2011 charity:water happened to be raising money to build a well in Tigray, Ethiopia.  So, instead of going to a store and buying a gift for the adults in our families we decided to make donations in their name for this well.  We did something similar the previous Christmas after watching a documentary on Netflix called "Making the Crooked Straight" about an American doctor, Dr. Rick Hodes, who practices in the capital city of Ethiopia treating people from all over the country who have tuberculosis of the spine.  This is a curable condition that needs surgery.  We were so moved by this documentary that we made donations instead of buying gifts and on Christmas morning we showed our families the documentary.  We have continued this tradition every Christmas since, with choosing a different cause to support each year. 

For those of you thinking "You don't give your kids presents on Christmas????!!!" you can relax.  Our children receive more than their fair share of gifts (mostly because of their grandmothers) but Mike and I have consciously tried to reduce the amount of gifts they get from us and Santa (who by the way I am super sick of, why does he get all of the credit for the gifts I BUY?!  But that's a separate post).  Partially because they all have sensory issues and get overwhelmed easily and partially because we want to be conscious of making sure that our kids know that this holiday isn't about gifts.  

Another tradition we have started with our girls is that when they have a birthday party where they invite their friends, we allow them to choose a charity or cause to support then we ask for donations instead of gifts on the party invitation.  I remember the first time we did this I got a few calls from panicked parents.  "Can we just bring a small gift?  My daughter doesn't understand that she can't take a gift to her friend at her party."  No.  Explain to your child that we are collecting money to send to people in Ethiopia (we donated to Feed the Children for their first party) so they can have enough food to eat.  I realize these kids were 5, but why not start them early understanding that there are less fortunate people in the world?  Each year the twins have raised around $100 for whatever cause they've chosen to support.  This past fall was Celia's first experience with this and she decided to collect pet food and we took it to our local shelter.

Again, not to worry for my poor little girls, they get plenty of presents from us and our families for their birthdays.  My favorite thing that has come of us starting this tradition with our girls was the day they came home with a birthday party invitation.  It was for one of Charlotte's classmates, and she was asking for food donations for a local food pantry instead of gifts.  You know who it was from...that panicking mom I spoke with on the phone only a couple of months earlier!  The twins were so excited that she was doing the same thing they did, and it was not lost on them that she got the idea from their party.

So I guess to answer my own questions...they learned it from all of the little philanthropic efforts God has inspired us to make as a family.  We've modeled to them that it means so much more to send your money to a good cause in someone's honor than to spend money on something at a store.  We are blessed with a little extra spending money so if there's something little I'd like for myself, I can usually buy it for myself.  For the majority of people around the world "spending money" or "blow money" is an unknown luxury.  I am so glad that my children are soaking in this concept of helping others.  I know this is planting the seeds for what GREAT things God has in store for them in the future!

Celia... One Year Later

Today marks one full year since the day we first met Celia in a courthouse in Ohio.  She was so sweet and quiet, in fact she didn't speak at all for about 2 hours.  Part of this I'm sure was a combination of shock, and awe, nerves, confusion and wonderment, but we had also been told by her first family that she was a very quiet child.  We didn't hear a word out of her until after we left the parking lot of the courthouse and asked her if she wanted to go to McDonald's for lunch.

 What we found out later was that she had not been prepped AT ALL for what was about to happen to her.  I had sent pictures of our house, cats, the twins and us for her to see, none of which had been shown to her.  All she was told was that she was going to go live with another family.  That's it.  We also realized that in her first family the rules must have been pretty stringent (military family) because she associated being a "good girl" with being quiet.  All the time.

 Oh what a difference a year has made.  Quiet would be the last word in the galaxy one would use to describe this child.  She learned pretty quickly that in our family we do loud, we do mistakes, we do emotional, and all of it is ok.  Do I miss that sweet, quiet little lady at times...YOU BET...but I know now that she wasn't allowed to be her true self in her previous placement.  I feel good about the fact that she has bloomed with us.

In the beginning the twins adored their little sister and wanted to help her with everything.  They doted on her and were so sweet.  Yeah that's LONG gone!  As it should be I suppose.  They are real siblings now, they fight and argue over everything and the older two take any opportunity to boss little one around.  Although I have an older half-sister, we did not have the pleasure of growing up together, so the drama of sisterly interactions is all new to me.  With my little brother it was totally different, always physical, rough and tumble, no drama.  With sisters, from the intel I've gathered, it's all of the above PLUS a huge dose of manipulation and drama.  Deep breaths.

I can see both sides of their stories.  Little sisters are annoying.  In fact, I told Caroline she could keep a journal of times that she wants to punch Celia in the face (along with how many punches each infraction is worth of course) and once Celia turns 18 she can go for it.  I don't feel at all guilty about this seeing as Caroline can't keep track of anything for longer than 23 minutes so the odds that she's maintain and know the whereabouts of such a journal are astronomical.  Listen folks, don't judge, if we didn't laugh over here, we'd be crying...a lot.

So, yes, Celia has bloomed into what I can only surmise to be a more true version of herself.  That being said, it's NOT all butterflies and rainbows over here.  She is still hurting.  She is angry, and I can't blame her.  Although she just turned 5 years old, emotionally she is functioning more on the level of a 2 year old.  I think this is because she wasn't allowed or able to process the raw emotions that come with being adopted in the first place, as well as just being a pain the a$$ toddler in her previous family.  Now add onto all of that a tremendous, rational, fear of abandonment, and you've got a very emotional little girl.

Her attachment to me began immediately upon meeting her in the courthouse.  She came and sat in my lap right away when I motioned to her to see if she'd want to.  We sat for a while while I showed her all of the pictures I had hoped he had already seen of her new sisters, home and cats.  It seemed to me that she had been craving a motherly connection for years and since her first adoptive mom wasn't able to bond with her, she just had not had that in her life for the past 3 years.

Her attachment to Mike is still a work in progress.  You see, she adored her first adoptive father and he adored her.  He was devastated in the courtroom, while mom had no affect, zero, it was eerie.  I promise to write more about her disruption story soon which will give you a little better picture of the background here.  Because she felt so connected with this former father, you can tell she struggles with the question "if I let this new dad into my heart, am I betraying the old one?".  Of course most of her anger and feelings of betraying are directed at this old dad as well, who isn't around to take it, so Mike, the poor unfortunate soul, becomes the target of all of it.   She's come a long way in a year though and heart healing takes time.

I'm going to keep it very real here folks.  There have been many a day that the twins have finally started grasping the concept of sleeping in and Celia's up at the crack of dawn and I ask myself "Why did we do this?  Things with the twins were JUST started to get a bit easier!  Why'd we have to rock the boat?!"  Also, although I'm only 33 years old, my soul is much older.  I wasn't cut out to do this toddler thing.  Ain't nobody got time for that.  I prefer to be around those who are able to think rationally.

Of course I wouldn't change it for the world.  God has taken us on such a crazy roller coaster the past year.  It has taught us so much about listening to Him and His will and plans for our lives, even when it doesn't seem to make any sense to anyone else.  I can see this little girl's heart healing right before my eyes and it's all God's doing.  Beauty from ashes.

A SHELTER???? MEOW!

Ever since our twins joined our family back in 2010 we had lived in Medina, OH.  Mike and I both grew up in this small Cleveland suburb, so we knew a lot of people around town.  Anyone I didn't know personally was accosted with adorable photographs if they went shopping at the local greenhouse and farm where my mother worked.  Sometimes people would come up to us on the street and say, "Hey, aren't you Charlotte & Caroline?" even though I had never seen said person before in my life.  That could've been the result of the girls going to every VBS in town for two summers straight.  Don't judge, using Jesus as free respite isn't again the rules, we talked, He's cool with it.

This being said, the girls were never really approached with very many questions about their adoption.  Add in the fact that they were still young enough that kids didn't notice racial differences and that every November (Adoption Awareness Month) I have gone into their classrooms to share a book about adoption and answer all of the children's questions about it, there hadn't been much opportunity or need for them to stand on their own two feet and answer the tough questions alone.

Then we moved.  We moved to PA, outside of Philadelphia, to a town and a school even whiter and more rural than the one we came from.  The questions began before school even started.  This is the conversation I walked outside to in my backyard:

"A SHELTER????  You mean an orphanage?  Yes, I used to live in an orphanage in Africa, NOT in a shelter.  What do you think I am?  A cat?  MEOW!!!"  I stood back trying not to wet my pants.  I wanted to see where this was going to go next.  

The boy and Caroline both laughed.  Then he said "So your real mom just left you there?"  Caroline responded with an annoyed tone, clearly wanting to get back to the game they were just in the middle of, "Yeah, sure.  Let's play."

I swooped and and made some politically correct statement that their birth mother was too poor to take care of them so she made the loving choice to allow another family to take care of them.  Then I came inside.  I thought about what I needed to say as a follow up to this interaction.

Once she came inside for the night I told her how proud I was of her.  I liked how she made it silly so that he didn't feel dumb.  It is likely that she is the first adopted child he has ever met and he was using the vocabulary that he was familiar with when it comes to adoption, albeit pet adoption.  She has such great comedic timing that I knew the humorous approach would be her strength.  I then gave her suggestions about how to better answer his question about her "real mom".  "Is my mom imaginary?  I'm pretty sure she's real.  I think you mean by birth mom."  These were my suggestions on how to handle it in a humorous way while still educating him on the correct vocabulary.  

We then talked about how much of her story she wants to share.  I reminded her that her story is private and it is nobody's business how she came to be adopted.  She can share what she feels comfortable with, and we went through a few different levels of sharing information.  I want to empower my girls.  I don't want there to be any shame with their stories, and one day I'd love for them to be able to use their story to share God with others by telling them how He has worked in their lives.  Baby steps.

In the meantime we will continue to keep an open dialogue about how to handle the tough questions. And don't worry, if the stories are funny, you'll be sure to hear all about it!

Adoption-Our Plan A

I once had a fellow adoptive parent make an off hand comment to me that went something along these lines: "We all know that adoption wasn't our first choice."  Ouch.

I thank God quite frequently that Mike and I are in the minority of adoptive parents who have not experienced the loss of infertility.  In fact, I have yet to meet another family who was able to dodge this painful experience.  That's right folks, we never tried to get pregnant.  GASP!

This decision began before we even were married.  Ever since I was 12, when I found out that my 2 aunts (technically my 2nd cousins) were adopted back in the 60s, I remember thinking how interesting that was.  Of course at the age of 12, I was unable to understand the many layers of emotion involved with all parties of adoption, I just thought it was "cool".  So before we were married I told Mike that I had a strong interest in adopting at some point.  We figured that maybe we would have a biological child as well as adopt, however I NEVER felt the desire to ever be pregnant. Like never.  I don't know if it was because of all of my previous health issues, or because I knew the health risk to myself and a baby if I were to be pregnant, but God took any natural desire to procreate right out of me!  I felt like such a weirdo though because I knew in my heart that God's purpose for me on Earth was to be a mom and yet I had no desire to birth one!

In 2009, Mike's dad was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease.  We were told that Mike had a 50% chance of carrying the gene and therefore if we did have biological children, there would be a 50% chance of passing it on to them.  Along with this, Mike's mom and I both have Crohn's Disease.  Since that is on both sides there was also a 30% chance that we would pass that onto our child as well.  This was enough of a sign from God that He did not have biological kids in our plan and we were more than fine with that.  I was honestly relieved.  Now we could begin the journey of growing our family!

I have so many friends whose lives have taken different routes to get to their adoptions, there isn't one cookie cutter story.  Adoptive families all form so very differently.  Yes, some do deal with infertility, some have a mix of bio kids and adopted kids, some do a kinship adoption along with so many other examples.  Please keep this in mind and do me a favor:

DO NOT say to an adoptive mom "Oh, now you will probably get pregnant!".  I had so many well meaning people say this to me and my response was, "Ha!  I sure hope not!"  Yes, this happens to some couples, yes this may be the hopes of some womens' hearts, but do not assume that is the case!

DO NOT assume that adoption was a family's "second choice" or "Plan B".  For some couples this may be the case, but even if it is, that is none of your business.  Please just share in their joy and love on them.

DO NOT get the impression that any adoptive parent is adopting in order to "rescue" or "save" a child.  None of us are trying to save anyone.  We simply want children and this happens to be the path God has chosen for us.  We aren't any better than anyone else, nor do we ever feel like we are.  We are just barely hanging on, just like every other parent!

Don't make assumptions, it's a good general rule of thumb in life really!  It is always safe to say to ANY family, "Wow, God has really blessed you!".  Period.

Holland vs. Italy: the tale of parenting a special needs child

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by
Emily Perl Kingsley

"I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.
It's like this......When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
 After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland."

Mike and I went to the first night of a six week seminar for parents who have children with emotional, behavioral and/or mental illness issues.  It is put on by NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).  This story was the first thing that was shared.  It struck me in a way I didn't expect.

While listening to this, I heard it from the perspective of the first adoptive parents of children who have gone through a disruption.  They had an idea of what international adoption would look like, feel like and be like.  As it turned out, the true story is that it isn't all a "dream come true".  It's hard.  Parenting a child from a hard place is very hard.  It's exhausting with little to no pay off on your end as the parent.  I'm lucky that my children all have very minor attachment issues and are able to form a loving relationship with me, but a lot of adoptive parents are not so lucky.

The two disruption situations we have been through were vastly different.  The one commonality is that both families also had biological children in the home.  This is not something that I can relate to, since we chose not to have any bio kids in our family, but I have often wondered if adoptive parents who already have bio kids when they adopt expect the feelings they have for their bio kids to be exactly the same for their adopted child.  Maybe that's their Italy.  I'm not saying that that scenario isn't possible, but it has to be different.

A bio kid comes out of the womb knowing no one but you.  They need you, they learn unconditional love from you.  They are protected by you.  When you adopt a child, especially when it's not a newborn, you receive that child along with all of their trauma.  You have to do the work to bond to that child.  It is not automatic.  It's not easy.  You have to learn to love one another.  Our children spend a lot of intentional time on our laps, we fed them at the dinner table when they were 4 & 5 years old.  We look for any kind of interaction we can in order to mimic the kind of bonding that a newborn and a mother would share.

It takes a very long time, it doesn't always work and it can be heartbreaking.  If you have bio kids as well I can understand how this would put so much stress on your relationships with each of them as well as stress on the family as a whole.  This is why I can empathize with families who choose to disrupt.  Even though I do not understand it in most instances, I always try not to judge them.  That has to be one of the hardest decisions of someone's life.  I have to assume that they would only go forward with the disruption if they believed in their heart that it was in the best interest of the child.  This is where my faith in God comes in.  God has plans for all of our lives, and sometimes those plans are messy, but if we trust Him and listen to Him the end result will be a blessing that we could have ever imagined.

Maybe most people like Italy.  It's pretty there, the food is decadent, it's gorgeous and the weather is great.  I happen to love Holland.  I have always lived a bit off of the beaten path and had to be the one swimming upstream, against the current.  Most people can have Italy.  I'll hang out in Holland, where it may be messy, but it's a beautiful mess.

There Must be a Miscommunication...

I have seen a lot of posts on Facebook lately about that fateful expression “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”  I hate that phrase.  I hate it with all that’s in my soul.  

I believed it for years.  I was diagnosed with a chronic, painful medical condition at age 19.  I spent years convincing myself that God must really have some serious faith in how much I could handle and I used that phrase to empower myself.  

Then, I got married…young.  “Marriage is hard!” people tried to tell me.  I remember thinking to myself “Well YOUR husband must just be a jerk.  My husband is perfect!”  Guess what?!!  MARRIAGE IS HARD!  We were both going through graduate school, living paycheck to paycheck trying to work and go to school full time.  This is when I began to suspect that, if God really does only give you what you can handle, then there must be a miscommunication somewhere.  He must have me confused with someone else.

The next phase of my life is when I became convinced that not only WILL God give you more than  you can handle, and he will give you sooooo much more that it forces you to rely on Him, (or start drinking heavily!).   We started out on the journey of adoption.  At first it was all rainbows and butterflies.  Sure, the paperwork was endless, people didn’t quite understand why we were taking this path, we didn’t quite receive the overwhelming joyful reaction we had hoped for from those closest to us and there were tears.  All in all though, it was good. Stressful, but good.

Once we got the call about the twins though, the bottom dropped out.  We took over the disrupted adoption of twin 4 year olds who didn’t speak any English, were in diapers, had only been in the country for 6 weeks and didn’t know us from Adam.  They were terrified, traumatized, and behaved like wild animals…no exaggeration.  

The first night, once they finally went to sleep, I remember turning to Mike and asking him “Can we really do this?  What have we gotten ourselves into?”  I am sure a lot of first time parents can relate to that feeling, especially those of multiples.  

That first year consisted of hardly leaving the house.  There were tantrums and rages that lasted hours.  We became very familiar with the art of physical restraint, in fact that became our method of bonding because it was happening every day.  The worst part about it was that we couldn’t really get to the core of why they were so angry, because of the language barrier.

If you know our adoption story, then you understand how we knew that God had these children planned for us.  The confusing part was HOW IN THE WORLD DID HE THINK WE COULD DO THIS??  Yes, I have my degrees in early childhood education and developmental psychology, but no class can prepare you for this.  This was beyond.  Every book we read (and we read a lot of them) said we were doing everything right.  You may think this would be comforting for us, but instead it was infuriating.  If we were doing everything right, then why were they acting like this?

The independent, control freak in me waived the white flag.  I had to surrender.  I had to admit I couldn’t do this alone.  If God gave me these girls, then He was going to have to help me through this, but that meant me letting Him.  That meant me leaning on Him, praying, reading His word and living it through my life.  I had to stop caring or listening to what everyone else was telling me to do and listen to Him.  

Guess what?  It worked! :)  Slowly, my anxiety waned, the girls began trusting us, and our marriage was actually strengthened through this very tough time.  I began to see God working in our lives in incredible ways.  I learned to trust Him and His timing in my life.  It took time, and it’s still a work in progress.

If you are in a place in your life where you don’t understand why, why would God do this to you?  Know this: He will use this to draw you closer to Him, you just have to let Him.  Throw up your hands, throw in the white flag and surrender.  You can’t do it alone.

A Secondary Blessing...Josh

So by now you are all familiar with the insane blessing we have received in the last 2 weeks in our new daughter Celia.  What you may not have heard about is the secondary blessing that has come from our family listening to God, and his name is Josh.

This journey all began when Mike and I saw Josh's picture on a Facebook page of an adoption agency that specialized in resolving adoption disruptions.  I found their page about a year ago and have been following all of their posts since then of children who were looking for a new placement.  Josh's picture came across my computer on Sept. 10th, 2013.  He was 5 years old, Ethiopian, and his family was choosing to disrupt his adoption.  I looked at Mike and said "Well, we say that this is what we are looking for.  It's literally in our laps, so what are we going to do about it?".  I emailed his social worker that night to get more information.  We emailed back and forth a few times and I got more information with each message.  We were ready to begin our homestudy and move forward with pursuing him...until I suddenly got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that he wasn't our son.

I felt so guilty about feeling this way.  If we didn't move forward with him, then who would?  He had some issues that we had dealt with before, we could handle this, but it would scare off most (sane) people.

 I decided to share his story on our regional FB page for families with Ethiopian children in the hopes that I could maybe help find him a family (I knew this was a LONG SHOT).  Within hours of me posting this I got a call from my friend Jamie.  "Tell me about disruptions." she said.  She had experience in international adoption and parenting kids from hard places, but not in disruption.  We talked for a very long time.  As it turned out, Jamie and her husband had already began the process for adopting a child internationally through the VERY SAME AGENCY that was handling Josh's case!!  GOD IS GOOD!!  This meant they had already paid their agency fees and already had a homestudy completed with them!

They moved forward with his adoption and put their plans of adopting internationally on hold for the time being.  They brought Josh home the same week we brought Celia home!  We even had out first social worker visit through the courts on the same night!

Josh is the one with his tongue sticking out ;)

Our family prayed hard for this little guy, every night.  I know now why I had that feeling in my gut.  He wasn't my son...he was Jamie's.  My favorite part of this story (selfishly) is that our family will now be able to get to know this boy, we will be at the same Christmas parties, the same summer picnic year after year.

I am honored at how God used allowed our family to play a small role in their family's story.