Is It Worth It?

Despite the boundless amounts of info, stories and expert advice out there, we did not really know how hard it would be to parent an older adoptee. We thought we knew. We tried to gather all the out there stuff and bring it in here before we made the decision. But it all stayed out there. Until it became our own experience. Until it was too late.

People have asked me some tough questions. Questions like, “Would you do it again?” “Do you still recommend adoption to other families?” “Would you have done it if you’d known how hard it would be?” “Will you ever get to a point where you can look back and say it was all worth it?”

Those are pretty ballsy questions. And I like that my friends are ballsy enough to ask them. I’d like to explore my answers with you today – just in case some of you have been dying to know but haven’t felt free to ask.

“Would you do it again?”

This question could be interpreted in two different ways. 1: If we could relive that time in our lives, would we make the same decision? 2: Would we consider adopting again now? My answers are yes and no, respectively.

Our biggest reason for adopting in the first place was because we felt very strongly that God wanted us to do it. My husband and I place a rather large emphasis on trying to live obediently to God, and that priority hasn’t changed since our adoption. We would obey again.

But would we do it again now? At this point in our lives, there is no part of me that feels like God is calling us to that, so I feel somewhat confident in saying that it’s not on our horizon. Our family situation is so different now. Six years ago, our desire was to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, offering what we had for God’s purposes. What we had was a healthy family with room for kids who needed a healthy family. Realistically, we don’t have that to offer right now. So my basic answer is no. But hey, with God all things are possible. If he wants to move us in that direction (and that would be moving a mountain!), we would obey.

“Do you still recommend adoption to other families?”

Yes. As long as there are children in the world who have been traumatized by death, abuse, abandonment, or extreme poverty, I wholeheartedly endorse embracing those children and providing them with safe and loving families. It is unfathomably hard. But it is necessary. It is our global and communal responsibility.

“Would you have done it if you’d known how hard it would be?”

I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I don’t know for sure. It’s just better that we didn’t know. But guess what. The same could be said of my biological children. It’s not an adoption question. It’s simply a parenting question. It’s all hard.

Some days I think it would be so much easier to forge through the difficulties with my adopted son if we were working from a foundation of mutual affection. But on the flip side, I sometimes think my bio-kids’ drama would be easier to bear if it didn’t stab right through my mother-heart of affection. These burdens look different, but their weight is the same. Parenting is hard. It’s just better all-around if we don’t fully understand that ahead of time.

“Will you ever get to a point where you can look back and say it was all worth it?”

Yes. It is already worth it – because I choose to measure worth not by my personal benefit (the “return on investment”, if you will), but by the simple fact that an investment has been made.

That is the opposite of how we typically think of worth and investments. Let me use the analogy of a floundering business. I might choose to give that business $1000 a day knowing full well that I’ll never get my money back – nevermind earning interest on it. Due to how that business manages my contributions (which is completely out of my control), that business could easily go bankrupt next month, a year from now, or ten years from now. Financially speaking, my money may be wasted. But relationally speaking, each day’s investment is worthwhile because it is what that business needs to survive that day.

That is all I can do as a parent. I cannot control how my investment is managed, but as long as I continue investing, I know it is worth it.

My children are worth it.

 

Circumcision, Criticism and Cynicism

Acts 15 is like a scene right out of “A Few Good Men”, complete with Tom Cruise demanding, “I want the truth” and Jack Nicholson shouting his famous response, “You can’t handle the truth!” Except that the Biblical account isn’t centred around the secret military disciplinary measure known as a Code Red. No, this debate is deeper, darker, and more volatile.

Circumcision.

Many leaders in the early church felt that Gentile believers should be circumcised in order to be acceptable to God. The people who opposed that view sent Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem to settle the debate. Some Pharisees got their nose out of joint over it, then Peter took the witness stand and gave them what for. Paul and Barnabas finally got a chance to get a word in, but they’d barely finished speaking when James piped up. I don’t imagine this was a calm, diplomatic, pass-the-conch-shell kind of discussion. This was hot. Both sides of the debate were 100% sure that they were 100% right.

Circumcision may not be such a hot topic today, but I think we have our own current issues that get us all hot under the clerical collar. Same sex marriage and abortion spring to mind as two such powder kegs. So what can we learn from the Acts 15 circumcision debate and how can we apply it to today’s issues?

Let’s look at verses 8-9 and 11. “He [God] knows what is in everyone’s heart. And he showed that he had chosen the Gentiles, when he gave them the Holy Spirit, just as he had given his Spirit to us. God treated them in the same way that he treated us. They put their faith in him, and he made their hearts pure… But our Lord Jesus was kind to us, and we are saved by faith in him, just as the Gentiles are.” (CEV)

The message that Paul, Barnabas, Peter and James preached so fervently to the early church was this: We have no right to judge what is in someone else’s heart. God is the one who knows their heart and he is the one who gives the Holy Spirit and offers salvation. It is not up to us to demand that near believers, or even new believers, succumb to the burden of our rules and stipulations. We are saved by faith and they are saved by faith, so let’s get off our high horse.

When we are sharing our faith, the onus is on us to be the flexible ones. We do not have to be 100% right in every tradition we hold dear. God doesn’t need our dogma to speak to the hearts of people who are drawing near to him. Our job is to be gracious in how we relate to those people.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Flipping to the next chapter, we find Paul and Silas on a little mission trip where they meet up with a believer named Timothy. Tim’s mom was Jewish, but his dad was Greek, and according to Greek tradition, Tim was not circumcised. Yet.

I can well imagine Timothy’s reaction when he hears Paul’s stipulation for joining their missionary journey. “Hold on there, Paul. Just last week you were preaching against circumcision and now you come at me with a scalpel? That is uncool, dude.”

So, what gives? Why is Paul flip-flopping on such a major issue? Well, if we look a bit closer, we discover that his stance is unwavering. He is still firmly on the side of grace.

In this case, Timothy is already a believer and because of the audience that he is going to be reaching out to, he needs to give himself some more credibility and acceptability. Paul was asking him to give up something that he held dear (um, yes, it was his foreskin) in order to be more relatable to the people they were trying to share the Gospel with.

That same position is applicable to today’s hot issues. Does that mean that I should suddenly start being gay somehow so I can reach out to the LGBT community? Or have an abortion simply so I can speak more personally with pro-choice friends? No, of course not.

What it means is this: we have to be willing to bend our “100% right” stance. We have to be gracious in the way we approach our conversations and our relationships. We might still have black and white opinions on some things, but we have to enter into the grey areas with humility and honour for the dear ones who are coming from their own black and white opinions.

When Paul preached against circumcising the Gentiles, it was from a position of graciousness. When Paul had Timothy circumcised, it was from a position of graciousness. No matter the issue at hand, our role in it is to be the voice of grace. Not criticism. Not cynicism.

Sometimes that’s not easy. Sometimes it is brutally painful. Sometimes the sacrifice is permanent. But I believe that kind of grace transcends religious and political conflict better than anything else.

And I just can’t resist being an absolute dork about how I pose my final, challenging question to you.

What “foreskin” do you need to cut out of your doctrine in order to forge deeper relationships with the people around you?

 

Parents: We All Suck

Let’s be honest. Every parent has moments of superiority over all the other cowering parents around us. We’ve done something right with our kids and we have a primal impulse to hold our heads higher and bestow upon our pitiful peers the blessing of basking in the glow of our eminence.

From a perfectly planned and timed conception to a child’s acceptance of a Nobel Prize – and every possible accomplishment in between – we parents grasp at those fleeting moments of pride and grip them as tightly as we can. Whether we broadcast these victories to everyone near and far, or do our gloating silently, is up to the individual. But we all know we’ve felt that tingle of supremacy.

I have a child who is very gifted athletically. He is the star of his undefeated soccer team, having scored in every game they’ve played. He is tall and lean and strong and fast. Oh, and he’s also adopted. But still, I take full credit for his athletic prowess.

My youngest child’s kindergarten class has on two occasions watched an episode of “Arthur” to compliment something they’re learning in class. Because he is steered away from “Arthur” (and “Caillou” and “Sponge Bob Square Pants”) at home, my endearingly obedient son sweetly informed his teacher that he’s not allowed to watch that show and she allowed him to do some other activities until it was over. Honestly, I wouldn’t have cared if he’d watched a couple of episodes with his class, but he spoke up for what he assumed I’d expect of him, and that thrills this mama’s heart.

My daughter applied for a specialized program in high school. She worked hard to put together a resume and references, and her abilities and work ethic came across loud and clear on the recent report cards that she submitted with her application. Her effort paid off when the high school guidance counselor phoned to welcome her enthusiastically to the program. We were even told that most students receive their acceptance in the mail, but the counselor was eager to break the news specifically to my daughter. My daughter. You may applaud my parenting now.

Just this weekend, my other daughter spent most of a day working outside with her daddy and then came inside to help me with some other jobs. She heartily declared how much fun she’d had that day, doing all that work with us. We are just that fun to be around. Even doing manual labour.

Conventional wisdom tells us to check our parental pride at the door and leave it there forever because of all the failures that are destined to humble us sooner or later.

Failures? Oh yes, I’ve had my share of those.

I carefully clicked my newborn daughter’s infant carrier into the car seat base without waking her up, drove half an hour to get home, and then discovered that under her cozy blanket, she wasn’t buckled in at all.

I started to tuck my son into bed one evening and asked him why it smelled like pee. “Oh yeah. I wet my bed last night. I forgot to tell you.” It was late and I was tired (and perhaps emotionally unstable at the time) so I said, “Well, it’s dry now. Good night.”

I have never bought school pictures or signed up for school lunches. Not even the milk program. Those are gaps in my children’s lives that will never be filled. The arbitrary expense is only part of my reasoning. The other is that I don’t have a personal secretary to file all the necessary paperwork for me, so it just doesn’t get done. Sorry, kids. Work it out with your therapist.

That kid who isn’t allowed to watch “Arthur”? Yeah, he saw all of the “Lord of the Rings” movies before he was four.

And then there was The Sticky Chicken Incident.

Oh yes, I have indeed had my fair share of failures. These few examples don’t even scratch the surface.

That’s precisely why I propose an about-face on the admonition against clinging too tightly to our victories. I would like to suggest that we need our pride. Instead of reluctantly letting our failures keep us humble, we need to embrace our victories to keep us sane.

Those brief islands of pride in the sea of our suckage are the yoga to our stress and the green juice to our junk food. They may not be the norm, but they are just as much a reality as all the times we hang our heads in shame. If we don’t hold our heads up once in a while, those muscles will atrophy.

So go ahead. Let’s bask in today’s victories. We deserve it…for now.

 

An Unexpected Side-Effect of Healthier Eating

If you’ve followed me over to my other blog, Real.ForGood, you’ll know that I’m slowly eliminating processed, chemical, food-like products from our home and replacing them with real food. Part of that has meant a shift in my Food Pyramid Reality. You remember those little triangle charts from Canada’s Food Guide that dictated how many servings of protein, dairy, grains and produce we should eat every day? My family’s “pyramid” more closely resembles the Leaning Tower of Pizza. And yes, I do mean Pizza.

As I’ve analyzed what we eat regularly, I realized that wheat products have been the foundational component for most of our daily intake. I decided that it’s time to stop harping on my kids to squish a few extra vegetables onto their already-filled-with-wheat-and-meat plates. Time to stop reminding everyone that “actually, plant-based foods are supposed to make up at least half of our daily diet,” while I cooked up more pasta and baked more bread and counted the peppers on the pizza as a vegetable serving.

Over the past few weeks, I have been loading up the grocery cart – and then the fridge – with a wide variety of fresh produce. I had been afraid of this step because I didn’t want to blow my grocery budget to smithereens. But guess what! There hasn’t been much of a change in my weekly grocery costs. Now that I’m not spending half my cash on boxed, processed garbage, I have lots of room in the budget for more fresh stuff. Funny how that works!

Then something happened. I was grocery shopping today (you may recall that I don’t usually enjoy this chore) and I suddenly discovered that I was pleased as punch to be filling up my cart. I was grinning like a fool. Smiling at other people. Proud as all get-out of the beautiful bounty I was buying. It took me a few minutes to figure out why.

It was pretty!

My cart was full of bright, fresh colours and textures – not boxes. And it was so pretty. Beauty lifts your spirit, and I realized that my groceries were beautiful and my spirit was lifted. Ridiculous, right? I know it is. I can’t believe I’m writing this.

When I got home, I emptied all my grocery bags as I usually do and there was this incredible pile of beautiful, real food. I didn’t want to stash it out of sight. So I loaded all the apples into a big basket and set it on the counter. The other produce that doesn’t need to be refrigerated went onto a pretty tray on another counter.

And it made me happy.

When my kids got home from school, they all remarked about the pretty food. Even my 14-year-old son said, “Hey, that stuff looks more better out here than it does in the fridge.” (To which I simply replied, “I know, right?” Picking my battles, folks. Picking my battles.)

But then I wanted it to look really nice, so I thought I should tidy up all the other junk that seems to multiply overnight on our countertops. And that led to picking up other random clutter from the dining room and living room and front hall. And that led to some extra vacuuming. And that leads me to my unexpected side effect.

Healthier eating has made me a better housekeeper. Whodathunkit?

 

Stupid Things People Don’t Say

I have been wanting to write about all the stupid things people don’t say for quite some time now. And over the past couple of weeks, that post has been coming together in my mind – how I started reading books and blogs before our adoption ever became a reality, and one of the most discussed themes was the ignorant comments frequently directed at adoptive parents.

“What happened to his real mom?”

“How much did your baby cost?”

“Your child is so lucky.”

I was prepared to respond – and, truth be told, was actually looking forward to it!

But alas and alack, I guess my friends and family just aren’t that stupid. They already know that I, as the mom, am actually real. Beyond that mind-blowing factoid, they have been very protective of our privacy when asking about my sons’ biological moms. Sigh.

Regarding adoption-related expenses, our story is different from most people’s. Because we were living in Ethiopia at the time and we were legally excused from using an international adoption agency, the whole process to adopt both our boys ended up costing us less than $1000. That’s not private information. It’s more about our cultural experience than it is about our children. And it’s a cool story, so I’m happy to discuss it. But nobody ever asks. Sigh.

It seems like it would be a lot of fun to set some people straight on the whole luck aspect. If you think it through logically for a nano-second, you would have to conclude that any child in the position of needing to be adopted has been through trauma of some kind. It is downright evil to label them lucky for that. I believe that God brings good out of awful circumstances, and adoption is a beautiful example of that. But again, luck diminishes the profound blessing that adoption is – for the adoptee and the adopter. Sigh.

I was very excited to be on the receiving end of The World’s Stupidest Question just a couple weeks after our adoption was finalized. I was holding our two-month-old son and someone asked me, “Does he speak English?”

Wow. I did not see that one coming. “Uhh…not yet,” I answered, wide-eyed.

But that was it. All those books and blogs…all my prepared answers…and nothing.

Over five years have gone by and I have waited and waited. In a final act of putting my hopes to rest, I started to compose this blog post.

And then – today. Today it happened.

I was grocery shopping with my now five-year-old Ethiopian son. An older woman approached me in the baking aisle and opened with this awesome line: “I have mixed-race grandchildren.”

Okay then!

She followed me all around the store. My son even asked me why she kept following us (quietly, thank the Lord! It’s the first time he’s ever said anything quietly. There’s the silver lining to his being home sick today and not having much of a voice.)

She asked me, “Is he yours – ?“ (which I interrupted by answering, “Yes”) “- or is he adopted?” (which I also answered, “Yes.”)

Then she got in my son’s face and asked him, “Where are you from?”

Bless his sweet little soul, he told her, “Canada.” And then when I asked him if he could say where he was born, we told her Ethiopia.

She told me about a bookstore in Toronto that has lots of great books about mixed-race children and they even have people of different races on their staff!

Merciful heavens.

At the check-out (yes, she happened to arrive in the same line as me), she wished me well in my parenting journey and cautioned me that it is hard sometimes. I thanked her and assured her that I was well aware of the difficulties. Teensy-weensy bit of an understatement, that!

I am pleased to report that I did not launch into a sarcastic tirade at any point. Grace won out, as it should. Although I sincerely wish I had responded to her introductory comment (“I have mixed-race grandchildren”) with “Congratulations. I hope I will, too, someday.”

 

All Is Not Lost

Being in church since the time I was an embryo means that there are some Christianese words and phrases that have lost their vibrancy for me. I’ve known what they mean for so long that I don’t stop to internalize their truth, their potency, their vitality.

One such word has been resonating with me this week: Redeemer.

(This is completely off-point, but how sad it is that our children’s generation will grow up having never looked up a word in a dictionary! They can just google “define redeem” and this image appears for them. The notion that we used to use a physical book that contained and defined every word in our language must seem preposterous.)

A friend and I were discussing the mistakes we make with our kids. Specifically, our conversation was about how to answer our kids’ questions about intimacy and purity and babies. That is one huge minefield of a topic for parents to tiptoe through! We can get ourselves completely paranoid about how much therapy our babies will eventually need because we gave them too much information or not enough information or the right amount of information at the wrong time or with the wrong tone of voice.

My sweet friend summed it up quite well when she said, “It’s at times like these that we teach the truth as we understand it and trust that God will redeem our errors.”

God will redeem…God will redeem…

We went to my in-laws’ house for Easter dinner last week. Snow still covered most of Ontario – except my mother-in-law’s garden. The lingering winter daresn’t impede upon the glorious splendour that is Rosemary’s garden. It’s bewildering to behold.

Especially for me.

I just don’t get it. The whole gardening thing. I can’t remember where I’ve planted stuff. I can’t distinguish weeds from flowers. I prune too much or not enough and always at the wrong time. The watering, the weeding, the fertilizing, the dead-heading, the transplanting…gah! I just want to sit in the shade with a mojito and hire someone named Harrison to do the gardening for me. (Specifically, Harrison Ford. 30 years younger, while we’re at it.)

But then I noticed on Thursday (the first day that it didn’t snow) that there were things poking up out of the dirt in my garden. Green things. Living things. I have messed up that stupid garden so many times and still, there are flowers growing there. Not to my credit at all.

God will redeem…God will redeem…I’m sensing a theme…

And as you well know, I kind of suck at parenting, too. We had a rough day this week. Peace was shattered, patience was lost, tempers flew right out the window. Angry words were said, tears were shed. Everyone was wounded.

These days we are screwing up our kids in ways that are monumentally worse than when we told them too much about sex. When I fail at turning the other cheek, being slow to anger, or loving my enemy, I am failing my kids. I can’t get those moments back and fix them. I can’t unsay my angry words. I can’t infuse peace in turmoil-filled hours that are already past.

But God will redeem.

That is not to say that we can stop trying and just let God’s redemptive work take over. No, I believe we still have a responsibility to do our best and to keep working on the crap that needs work. Like Jacob, who has to stand before the Lord Almighty and explain why he lied to his father and cheated his brother, I will still need to answer for my own sin. Like David, who had to live out the rest of his life with the pain and trauma that his adultery caused him and his family, I have to deal with the fallout for my own horrible choices.

But neither Jacob nor David nor any other flawed hero derailed God’s plans. God redeems. He takes the mess and works good out of it. He takes failures and trades them in for victories.

My garden is a pretty simple analogy for what He can – and does – do in my life, in my children’s lives. I don’t know what I am doing and I have screwed things up countless times, but there is still life. There is still growth. There is beauty for which I can’t take any credit.

God will redeem.

 

Not a Fan

Sports fans are great. They totally buy into their team – the jerseys, hats, face paint, horns and huge foam fingers. They are at every match, sometimes even traveling to see their team in away games. They are loud and boisterous and supportive. Their contagious enthusiasm incites fervour in other spectators. And the athletes feed off the crowd’s energy.

But heaven forbid that the beloved team should botch a game. Then those previously adoring fans mutate into rabid, psychotic monsters. They launch shouted insults at the players. They spew venom at the coaches. They call down curses upon the officials.  Once their expectations are dashed, their affection quickly erodes.

Passover week 2000 years ago must have been a similarly emotional about-face. It started with a parade. A hero rode through the streets of Jerusalem with his posse. Fans turned out in droves to cover the parade route with palm fronds. They screamed and cheered as their champion passed by, hoping for a glimpse, a wave, or an electric moment of eye contact.

The entire Jewish nation had been waiting to hear from God for hundreds of years, and here he was in the flesh: a hometown hero, a compassionate friend, a miracle-worker, an impassioned orator, a self-restrained rebel, and a soon-to-be political conqueror.

And then Friday happened.

Instead of rallying his supporters, instigating a military revolt, and challenging the authority of the hated Roman occupation, the Jewish champion quit. Just gave up. No fight, no flight, no sly manoeuvres in the night. Just resignation. Surrender. Defeat.

And in the blink of an eye, his adoring fans turned on him. The voices that had so recently chanted his praises now shrieked in hatred, demanding his death.

I can’t say that I would’ve acted any differently. The realization that my intense fervour was so dramatically misplaced would sting too much. Nobody likes feeling duped. And nobody likes a hero who appears to have wussed out. I don’t know that I would be bloodthirsty enough to actually cry out for his assassination, but I can’t honestly claim that I would have stood in his defense.

My expectations of how he would demonstrate his power would have distorted my understanding of how he said he would demonstrate his power. And I would’ve walked away, fully believing that all was lost.

Today, we all have days, weeks, months that feel like that Friday. Instead of the dramatic victory that we were so sure was imminent, we find ourselves bewildered by the apparent shift in power. We feel abandoned. Crushed. Bewildered by what on earth just happened.

The difference between the fans of then and the fans of now is that we have the benefit of knowing how that weekend played out 2000 years ago. We know that death wasn’t the end of the story, and that the hero’s eventual demonstration of power was more magnificent and more triumphant than anything we could have imagined.

I don’t want to be a fickle-affection fan. I am all in – investing everything I have and everything I am for the cause of my Champion’s victory. No matter what Friday holds, I already know what Sunday will bring.