Plan B

Little One and I are playing with legos tonight.

While Sister is at youth group, he has Mama all to himself for one glorious evening and he takes full advantage.

I’ve been tasked with building a house and I am digging through the pile of pieces to find just the right shape and size. And then I run out.

It’s ok, Mama, Little One reassures.  Just try Plan B!

I’m not sure where he learned this phrase, but it makes me chuckle as he picks out a random mish-mash of pieces that ruffle my still-too-perfectionist-for-my-own-good tendencies.

Once upon a time, I was young and idealistic.  I was considering becoming a single mom by choice and I imagined a few folks in my circle bristling at the thought because “kids should grow up with a mom and a dad.”

I didn’t want to be Plan B.

But here’s the thing.  Adoption… as beautiful as it can be at times, is rooted in loss.  In a world without sin, parents who birthed children wouldn’t struggle with poverty, addiction or mental illness.  In a world without sin, there would be no such thing as trauma.  In a world without sin, social workers and public defenders and foster parents wouldn’t need to exist.

But friends, none of us are on God’s Plan A.  We are all a hot mess, desperately in need of rescue and redemption… no matter how our families were formed.

It’s true that Little One has known too much of Plan B… before his adoption and after it too.  Our life doesn’t look the way I imagined it.  I wish I could give more to this sweet boy who gobbles my undivided attention like candy.  So much more.  And right now I just cannot.

Look, Mama! he chirps, snapping the last piece into the fence he’s made to surround our imperfect lego house.  Plan B is awesome!

Indeed it is, sweet boy.  It may not be perfect, but Plan B leaves room for grace, for redemption songs.  It leaves room for receiving help and watching God provide.  It leaves room for telling the truth and making someone else feel less alone– and making you feel less alone in the process.  It may not be perfect, but some days, Plan B is pretty stinkin’ fantastic.

 

An omer of manna

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my pastor. We don’t talk often, but when we do, he has my back. Poo had hit the fan (again) and his question was blunt.

Are there financial needs that we can help you meet?

My answer was honest. There really weren’t. Thanks to great insurance and some other resources we are able to access, money was far, far down on my list of concerns.

A week later, I thought about calling my pastor back. At the suggestion of a friend of mine (who also happens to be a trauma-informed therapist and a fellow adoptive mom), we made an appointment with a holistic doctor. His approach to diagnosis and treatment is outside of the realm of “things covered by insurance.”

We spent a good chunk of change (and a good number of hours) at his office. And we came home with a ton more non-medicinal things to try. Whether they bring relief or not is still to be determined. But we came home with a box full of supplements and hope that we hadn’t yet exhausted all of our options.

Honestly, it’s money I can afford to spend and whether it buys us a little hope, a placebo effect or a miracle cure, I don’t regret it a bit. It’s just that the offer had been made literally days before.

I was reminded of a story that Richard Foster tells of letting God know that he needed a pair of gloves (even if he could easily afford them) and then pausing to see if God might provide them another way before buying them. And if not, buying them with gratitude to a God who provided the resources in the first place.

I didn’t make that call. I didn’t tell anybody how expensive that lengthy appointment was (though, to be fair, my big girl did… so it’s possible that word leaked that way). I just paused.

And, YOU GUYS, yesterday I got an envelope in the mail all ransom-letter looking. No handwriting. No return address. I was half-expecting it to be a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet (why do they send those with no return address anyway? What if I wanted to convert? Where would I go?). But no. It was a check. A ridiculously generous check that covered a whole bunch of that investment in holistic hope. Like almost all of it.

This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness.’ (Exodus 16:32)

Friends, we’ve been walking in the wilderness for half a year now. I keep thinking that we’ve turned the corner. Surely, we’ve turned the corner.

I don’t like the wilderness much. It makes me feel needy and dependent. Like all I’m doing is taking. And grumbling. And needing even more.

The wilderness sucks, friends. But the manna is still sweet. And still enough. And still there every. Single. Day.

And so, I want to gather up this omer of manna, this story of just right provision, just like Moses and Aaron. To bottle it up and save it and share it and use it as a reminder. To you– but mostly to me– that even here in the wilderness there is enough. Always enough. Because He is enough.

Together

For some reason, my writing inspiration seems to dry up when everything is going well.

It’s only when my mind is unsettled and disquiet, when my soul is churning that the words come fast and hard.

This last month has wreaked havoc on our little family. We are good fakers, of course, so out in public it is only the heart-listeners, the edge-sweepers who notice that we are anything other than fine.

We are not fine.

Trauma sucks.

It is not a wound neatly stitched shut with love and Jesus and therapy.

It’s more like a funky scab, seeming to be ok for a minute, then getting bumped or scratched in just the wrong way and pouring out more blood and mess than you’ve ever seen before.

More love. More Jesus. More therapy.

More pulling close when everything inside says you should be pushing away.

More googling all the things that might make you feel like you have a little bit of power in a situation where you feel straight powerless.

More stop-gap measures to relieve the pressure before it explodes. Again.

It is an exhausting way to live.

I’ve read all the things about adoption. About trauma.

And so many times, I’ve read of the isolation. Of folks who had initially supported an adoption backing away when the poo hit the fan. Even saying really helpful things like

You knew what you were getting yourself into.

No.

Not here.

Not in this story.

This past month, we’ve called in all the reinforcements.

And, friends, they have showed the heck up.

With food (of course).

And fasting.

And rides.

And the moral support of literally just sitting (and sleeping) in places that help us feel safer.

This past month, we’ve spoken together these things that I used to think could not co-exist.

God is good and life is almost unbearably hard.

We are hopeful. And also terrified.

We believe in healing and are sitting right in the middle of the mess of brokenness.

Love wins. And trauma sucks.

It helps to tell the truth. To speak it out loud where the darker parts lose the power of silence.

We are not fine.

And we are in good company here.

Where we speak things that we used to believe could not co-exist.

Together.

 

The Exhale

We finalized Little One’s adoption this week.

It was, pretty much, the perfect day.

Except for the part when he was grumpy and yelled at everyone.

But whatever.

It was the day that changed nothing.

And everything.

The actual details of our life look pretty much the same as they did before.

Tomorrow, I will stroke his curls and change his diaper and strap him into his carseat and drop him off at daycare and feel sad that I will spend all day with other people’s children instead of my own.

And grateful for a daycare provider who loves him like her own.

And then we will come home and laugh over dinner and read “Brown Bear” one hundred times and get baths and sing songs and hope for the best in his big boy bed (with his crib as a back-up option because we are not ready to die on the hill of the big boy bed just yet).

It will look pretty much like most of the days we’ve lived together over the past two years.

Except I will be able to breathe.

I will not have to ask for permission to cut his hair or to post his pictures or to let him sleep somewhere other than his own room.

I will not have to have all of his medical and daycare paperwork signed by a social worker.

I will not miss work or lose sleep over court hearings and other official meetings that may or may not happen at the time and place I am told.

I will not record every single thing (no, really, every single thing) for fear that some or another professional assigned to his case (most well-intentioned, many overworked, some completely burnt out) will not and I will need that exact date and time and phone number somewhere down the line to prove that I followed all of the rules and parented him well.

I will not cancel stuff I want to do because of required visits with some or another person who needs to lay eyes on him by some arbitrary date (which, by the way, is tomorrow).

I will not fret about what would happen to him if, God forbid, something happens to me.  Because today, I get to make those decisions instead of the state.

I will not wake in a panic, sweating up until the last possible second that something could still go wrong, that he could disappear.

This week was the exhale.

The release of breath that I’d been holding for the last two and a half years.

My life looks the same

But I feel one thousand pounds lighter,

Like I am walking on air.

This, too, is adoption.