Our Adoption Journey

Last year, my wife and I were certified as Foster Parents. Soon, we will adopt the very first child that was placed with us. This post is about our journey to this point.

It’s a little weird to have someone hand you kid and say, “Congratulations! Now you’re a mom and dad!” Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple or nonchalant.

In July, we welcomed an energetic little boy into our home as a foster child. When training to become foster parents, you are cautioned to maintain a “guard” around your heart, understanding that placement is a temporary situation. Foster Parents are cautioned to keep in mind that the goal is for the child to return to his or her biological family. It’s is a good, clinical warning designed to prevent heartache.

The problem is, though, that humans are not machines capable of turning emotions and attachments on or off like a switch.

And so to us came a child full of energy, opinions, and a short but overwhelming lifetime of mistrust, pain, trauma, confusion, and abandonment. We were his fourth placement in three months. Threats of violence and outright violence led him to be moved from previous homes. It was too much. He was too much. His heart was full of darkness. Hatred. Anger. Rage. Confusion. His mind was consumed with thoughts of destruction and gore and God only knows what else.

It was all he knew.

All of that – the hatred, destruction, anger – was put on his small shoulders by those who should have been there to protect him. His shelter from the storm was no safe harbor. It was the storm.

His was a life of inconsistency, and his way of coping with it led to even more inconsistency and turmoil. The lack of boundaries left him more like an animal than a child. He was stuck in survival mode, all the time.

The first few months were easy, in retrospect. He joined us on vacation and was quickly embraced by our families. There were tough times, naturally. Visits with his biological family wreaked more havoc on his already tormented mind.

The havoc was compounded when visitation abruptly stopped. How do you explain to an already overwhelmed child’s mind that he is no longer allowed to see the people that he has known from birth?

How do you say, in a way that he can understand, that it’s better this way?

I still don’t know.

And then came the “Trifecta of Trauma” – Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. These are normally the most-fun times in a child’s life. But these holidays became for him reminders of what was, what has been lost, and what may never be again.

He decorated his room for Halloween with abandon. More pumpkins! Spiders! Skeletons! And he promptly had innumerable nightmares. We quickly took it all down the next day.

For Thanksgiving, we spent the week in Tennessee. He assumed we would live in the hotel forever, and was devastated when he learned that we would not be. “We have a home in West Virginia,” I said. The idea of a permanent home was lost on him. And the havoc grew in his mind.

Christmas brought its own tribulations. His anxiety went into overdrive. Violence became the order of the day. An overwrought brain resorts to what it is most familiar with, what it’s experienced the most. And this one was most familiar with punching, kicking, biting, spitting, cursing, and lashing out in any way possible.

Tears upon tears. Shouts upon shouts. We were all adrift in a sea of rage. Breaking points were reached and obliterated. Meltdowns. Exhaustion. Wailing. Groans. I found new meaning to the phrase “utterances too deep to understand.” When you’re beyond all you know to say and do, you hold this ball of rage in your arms, with no words left to say, with your spirit screaming out to God for peace. For you. For him. For us.

We should have seen all of this the first few months. Instead it came (literally, sometimes) like a slap in the face at the happiest time of the year. Those were dark days. But even in the darkest of days, we were not alone. Family, friends, therapists, caseworkers – help was only a phone call away.

And through it all, God still spoke. Hold on. Keep going. Don’t give up.

We were given insights, strategies, ideas to better understand this little boy. Otherwise we would have been another port in his stormy life turning him away.

So here we are. A little more than a month away from our adoption date. We are already a family. We are now Mom and Dad – not Lisa and Brandon. Adoption is still a bit of a mystery in our world. I know it is for me, at least. Let me sum it up like this…

Imagine you’re given a gift, and you open the box to find it absolutely shattered. For months you slowly piece the thing back together, despite the outside world throwing rocks at it, and your mind wondering what the point is. It’s broken, right? Just let it be. But within you there is a drive to see it reassembled that is louder than the world and your own doubts. Adoption is saying, “I didn’t make this, and I didn’t break it, but I will forever commit myself to putting it back together.”

Born not from our flesh, but born in our hearts. You were longed for, and wanted, and loved from the start.

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