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Text of the page (random words):
ver so infinitesimally god is refining me through and in the midst of the hard it is i who am being rescued rescued from myself so no i m no savior no rescuer i m an average middle class white american whose life circumstances led me to a place where i could choose to open my eyes and see that there is so much more to the world than what my eyes would have me to believe i am the one being rescued from a life of normal and nice and given a life of dependency and boy is that scary but that s where our faith grows my friends posted by amanda at 11 18 am 1 comment friday may 11 2018 a new normal today marks nine weeks home i don t really know what to say about these weeks they have been incredibly hard hard in ways i was prepared for and i m thankful for that so so thankful but still so so hard my greatest regret from my first adoption of garrison three years ago was my lack of preparation no one talked to us about attachment or lack there of no one said anything about caring for a premie no one spoke a word about any of the things i was facing everyone spoke as if unicorns and rainbows had taken up residence in my home and heart oh god how i wanted that to bet true but the truth is that those first 6ish weeks with garrison were indescribably hard add on to that the layers of guilt and self doubt from my years of infertility and i was spiraling down a dark hole fast i didn t know how to explain it to anyone and all everyone could see was that i finally had my baby and everyone myself included assumed i d be blissfully happy without a complaint in the world when we decided to adopt again and internationally this time i knew i needed preparation i had an agency in mind that several close friends had used but i decided to dig deeper and hunt for the best fit i asked lots of people and called lots of agencies we eventually landed with lifeline in part because i was desperate for education and post adoption support i also believe in their ministry they have a good reputation in the adoption community and i love how willing the china program director is to answer all of my calls i assumed at the very least that this adoption would be very different but likely harder and i wanted to be ready we did buckets and buckets and hours and hours of training read books on adoption attachment trust based relational intervention and china we took courses on communication attachment styles and a four part tbri workshop lifeline requires a two day training for all families adopting internationally called crossings which we attended in november if it was offered i signed up if it was recommended i read it i so deeply wanted to be ready both for our son and my family but also for myself ready i don t know if you re ever truly ready maybe the mamas who are true veterans there and back again half a dozen times for me this was all still so very new i arrived home desperately thankful to be in the usa and to feel the comforts of home many people long to explore the world i am not one of those people i wish i was i wish i had a pinky toe worth of adventure in me but vacation sounds like the beach in florida or the mountains of colorado an adventure sounds like hawaii or europe china was next level for me and my heart hungered for home but suddenly home didn t really feel like home there was an extra person and despite spending the last two weeks with him in country i think we all suddenly became very aware just how much we were still strangers to one another his cry was foreign to me my voice was not soothing to him we all arrived home to obvious jet lag 13 hour time difference flying east to west is a b in ways i can t explain but also illness sam had a double ear infection joel had a cold and infections in both eyes i had caught the cold that sam had for a week in china the day before we left the first four days home were unreal i still can t believe we survived i assume the details will eventually fade and we will have some form of amnesia about the whole event otherwise no one would ever return to china a second third fourth time we saw glimpses of grief from joel in china lack of appetite tantrums arriving home opened the flood gates our solid sleeper suddenly couldn t sleep longer than 90 minutes without waking and transferring him out of our arms was akin to placing live bombs in a crib he grieved so deeply at night and it manifested in fits of crying so loud i thought he d wake the neighbors he was simultaneously desperate for us to hold him and furious that we were touching him nights were long and yet never ever long enough he seemed ravenous for food but refused to eat all of the things he had eaten in china he attacked crackers like it was the last food on earth shoving them in his mouth while crying yet completely without the ability to chew them if i tried to slow him down he interpreted it as me denying him food which sent him even further over the edge we ve been cocooning since we came home cocooning is a term used in the adoption community to describe a season of intensive care in which the parents meet all of their new child s needs interactions with people outside of the immediate family and the environments to which the child is exposed are very limited when a family cocoons they keep their new son or daughter s world small simple and predictable for us that has looked like staying home 99 of the time joel has gone with me each day to drop garrison off at daycare but then the two of us return home we ve slowly started to open up his environment just a bit by eating out at some quick restaurants visiting the park at low attendance times and running errands to the grocery store in the beginning i wore him in an ergo anytime we ventured out now he can ride in a cart or sit in a high chair but he occasionally still needs a hug or kiss to settle down other times he just wants me to hold him while it s easy to look at him and think he s almost two he should be better capable to handle these situations research says that it is far better to allow him to revert as far back to infancy as he wants if he wants me to hold him in target rather than ride in the cart then that s what we do slowly the tantrums have dwindled the nights have held more sleeping than screaming he s trusting sometimes that there will be more food next time he and garrison are starting to play a bit more than they fight when i think rationally about how much has changed in these nine weeks i m amazed i couldn t change the same amount about myself in nine weeks just ask my therapist but most of the time my rational brain is foggy and i m tired of the hard while i know that the lord calls us into the hard and that the hard things in life are the ones that refine us when i m in the fire i m quick to think i have been refined enough i return to work after one more week and i d be lying if i said i wasn t grateful add that to the column of things i feel guilty about i am simply not good at being a stay at home mom you know the phrase absence makes the heart grow fonder well that absence is critical for me for my mental health for my ability to parent the way i want to feeling guilty about it doesn t change it these nine weeks have been a marathon battle of keeping my head in the game and my mind free from the tangled web of thoughts that can spin out of control i m praying that joel can and will transition to daycare smoothly and that the changes won t set us back in terms of attachment i have to remind myself a half dozen times a day that our old normal is gone but that the present is not our new normal this is a transition period a hard one but not a forever one six months from now life will look and feel so very very different and while i long for our lives to feel normal again i m trying to remind myself just how quickly things change someday these photos and videos of joel in these early days will be precious memories as time will have softened the details and we will have forgotten so much the days are long but the years are short garrison is closer to kindergarten than he is to his birth so while i may hunger for a bit for the comfort of normal i know that these days are golden in their own way posted by amanda at 1 21 pm 6 comments labels adoption family thursday march 15 2018 fight like hell then stand in the gap i remember years ago praying that a birth mom would terminate her parental rights it seemed normal then it was what was best and so obviously within god s will what a weird complicated prayer and so difficult to unpack years later after so much time spent within the adoption world in some ways it feels like you can either be for adoption or for orphan prevention but not both if you re for adoption then you must want kids to be available to be adopted right and if you re for orphan prevention then you must not like adoption right i ll admit that there can be some murky gray areas in all of this but ultimately no nothing is further from the truth adoption and orphan prevention are two different sides of the same coin we must fight like hell to hell to preserve first families and when that is no longer an option we must be ready to stand in the gap orphan prevention is a huge complex topic because there are so many different reasons children become orphans war famine disease natural disasters like the devastating earthquake in haiti in 2010 there are certainly other issues things like poverty high medical costs social stigmas national laws and then there s the really really gross underbelly that no one wants to talk about financial gain those are just a few of the reasons there are dozens of others and every story is unique and different so how on earth do you prevent children from becoming orphans the truth of the matter is that we never will this world is broken there will always be war like the one we see playing out in syria creating new orphans each and every day as parents and grandparents and sisters and brothers are killed simply because of geographical location there will always be natural disasters earthquakes tsunamis tornados and hurricanes that will rip families apart and leave children without a family and there will always be evil in this world that seeks to destroy families but and that s a big but we must still fight with everything we ve got to preserve first families when we can while we will never end the creation of more orphans for that one child it will make all the difference the first battle in orphan prevention is one that must take place in our hearts it s the lie that we ve been telling ourselves for hundreds maybe even thousands of years it s the one that says whiter richer more educated etc is better i know you re probably thinking what on earth does that have to do with orphan prevention i can t tell you how many times i ve been told how lucky my boys are to have sam and i do you want to know where that thought pattern begins it begins by thinking that garrison is better off with us because we can provide more for him than his first family could that we can give him a better future that he will have more more toys more clothes more vacations more opportunities because he lives with us it begins by thinking that joel is better off in america than in china that he will have more wealth education etc because he lives here those things may be true the boys likely will have more because of the home they live in but that is a high price to pay for the loss of their first family and for joel the loss of his first culture and country we must lay down the idea that the children of uganda are better off in america because we can give them more we must set to flame any thought that says the children of costa rica need americans to save them is a forever family better than an orphanage or a life in the foster care system yes but when we have the opportunity to have children safely adopted in their own country we should celebrate that even if that means they will be raised by people who are poorer less educated and certainly less white that the options available in the us what these vulnerable children need is forever homes that can provide for their needs and the hope is that the forever is with their first family supporting orphan prevention looks different in every country culture and region it looks like systems in place to help families provide the medical care their children need because the truth is that every day families are faced with the choice to abandon their child in hopes that they will be found and given the medical care they so desperately need or to bring them home and watch their child die it looks like opportunities for jobs and childcare for women because statistically we know that women will use far more of each dollar they earn on their family than men it looks like rehabilitation options because around the world but certainly in our own back yard alcohol and drug addiction is a very real reason that children are abandoned each and every day the needs are so great there is no one band aid for this problem and we know it s a fight we will lose orphans will always exist in this world so what do we do we open up our hearts and our wallets to look around and see who is on the front lines providing care in the areas needed in the ways that first families need it who is providing food medical care education jobs rehabilitation options to the families in need in order to help keep families together it s using our standing within our communities our state and our country to draw attention to the needs of vulnerable children in our own back yards and across the world it shining a light on the plight of the orphan and saying that we will no longer slap a band aid on this problem we will no longer pretend that adoption is the answer to the orphan crisis when we ve done everything we can to preserve the first family we stand in the gap arms wide open to support adoption i truly believe more people are capable of adopting than do but i also totally understand that not everyone desires to adopt or feels called to do so and that s okay yes we need more adoptive families we absolutely do current numbers indicate that 153 million children worldwide have lost either one parent single orphan or both parents double orphan but one of the greatest weaknesses in these global orphan estimates is that they include only orphans that are currently living in homes they do not count the estimated 2 to 8 million children living in institutions nor do current estimates include the vast number of children who are living on the streets exploited for labor victims of trafficking or participating in armed groups thus global orphan statistics significantly underestimate the number of orphans worldwide and fail to account for many children that are among the most vulnerable and most in need of a family cafo org with numbers like that it s unarguable the we need adoptive parents but we also need more people to financially support adoption we also...