Good and Perfect: Breaking the silence and finding my voice: Embracing the story that God has given me

I texted with a friend in ministry this week about my writing because she needed my help with something and I told her honestly, “I’m bone dry. I’ve got nothing.”

It’s kind of funny that my last post was about vulnerability and then I was silent for two and a half months after I posted it. For me, the struggle with vulnerability is being too vulnerable with too many people. In addition to that, everything in my gut wants to share freely and openly about our fostering story, about the real-life situations that happen in our house. But sharing all the details aren’t always wise or respectful, or legal. There is an element of confidentiality that has to stay in place so I’ve thought a lot about how to be authentic while being guarded. I want to bring every reader along on all the steps of this journey but I can’t always do that in the way that I would like to.

So my resolution for the year was quite simple: Be intentional.

My tendency is to be careless, to say a little more than I should or maybe be more vulnerable than is necessary in certain situations. And as it relates to my public voice, I kind of lost the desire to say anything. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing so I stopped talking. I was frustrated that I couldn’t say it all so I decided to say nothing. (Being mature and acting like an adult is going to be my next goal because clearly I don’t always do that well.)

I am passionate about orphan care and our responsibility as a Church and a society to care for the unprotected child. When I’ve been really honest with a handful of people about things we’ve considered in the future, those people look at me like I have four heads. “Woman, you’re not quite handling the load on your plate so well right now… have you completely lost your mind?”

Most days it feels like I have. I am a walking contradiction in that I often feel frustrated that God has called us to this hard thing, and yet my heart bleeds and feels a great deal of passion and responsibility about raising awareness and support in the area of foster care. I want people to understand the need, but more than that, I want people to understand that they, too, can do it. As my contradictions become more obvious, I become more silent. The lie in my head is that being real will make people scared to enter into it themselves.

But this has been a big week and my heart has been stirred to talk again. So I’m breaking my silence and intentionally being honest about what the path ahead of us looks like.

Conventional logic and wisdom would say that twice disrupting the birth order of our children to foster older kids (meaning, not babies) is not a good thing to do. In fact, we’ve been questioned on more than one occasion about whether or not we were being responsible parents to our own kids by allowing highly traumatized kids to come live among them. Being very honest always leads to a “wow, I could never do that” (sometimes that comment is respectful and other times it feels a bit judgmental). And on the contrary, not being honest paints a picture of cute little kids with smiling faces and us being this sweet family who is doing this great thing, but there is nothing realistic about that view.

This has been the hardest thing I have ever done. We love the little girl in our home so much, but our life is very different now. We can’t predict when something will trigger a fear that will change the course of the evening from lazy-TV-watching to sobbing and comforting the terrified child. I don’t always know what will stir up anxiety and I don’t know when her fear will come out as complete defiance. I can’t predict the days when the deference of all the built up anger towards her biological mom will be dropped on me and leave me in tears of frustration. I’m rarely ever prepared for the way my emotions blindside me when I sit with her in a therapy session and hear her say “I feel happy because my mommy and daddy keep me safe” or when I get notes from her when I'm sick that begin like this:

Over the last year I have felt like there is way more that I don’t know than what I do know. But one thing I’ve always been able to rest in is this: in spite of the questions and the hard and the days I want to run far away, I know that this little girl has been placed in our care for a reason. Even when it made me sad, angry, or fearful, I never had doubt.

This summer she was leveled up to therapeutic foster care. A lot of outsiders thought “What? Why? That makes no sense!” But as is true with most of us, the people within the walls of our home see much more of us than those on the outside do. So it goes with her too, and we understood that a higher level of care was what she needed. We also understood that we needed to get licensed to be able to give that so that she wouldn’t have to move to a new place.

If being resource foster parents when your own kids are 4, 6, and 8 is questionable, then being therapeutic foster parents with kids those ages is like off the charts ridiculously unwise. That’s what some people would say. And yet, sometimes God just tells you to do something that doesn’t make any sense. So we did it. We did all the extra classes, spent lots of money on babysitters to get all those new hours just one year after we had gotten our regular license, and kept walking this road so that she would receive this higher level of care within the walls of the same safe place that she has grown to know as her home.

And let me be clear: this is not because of our huge hearts or our great faith or some goodness we possess. Those are huge misnomers about foster parents and they are not good definitions for us at all. We moved forward because we knew we were supposed to. We were all she had. We are all she has. It’s always been an obedience thing. If I ever felt like I had an out, I would’ve taken it, but I’ve heard whispers and I’ve heard shouts: “stay the course!”

We have wrestled with the idea for a really long time, and this fall it became abundantly clear.

She is ours. This isn’t a temporary thing. This story isn’t about fostering. It’s about adoption. It’s about redemption. It’s about forever.

We knew in our heads a long time ago and fully accepted in our hearts more recently, but we’ve remained silent for the most part because of legal things and appeals. A couple of months ago we were really burdened with the fact that she deserved to know her plan, so we told her. We told the kids. We let them all know that we would be praying that things would move so that it could be official and she could have a new name.

This has been a scary week. Josh and I had our annual weekend away with our heart people and us being away made her feel scared. When she feels scared she becomes unpredictable and once in awhile those unpredictable moments are very overwhelming and hard to deal with and they bring great worry about the future. I cried a lot. She cried a lot. I broke down a couple of times on people who weren’t quite ready for my emotions. But God kept whispering “stay the course!”

Nobody longs for a story that might be hard forever. We are aware that we might make a big sacrifice and she might not ever have the capacity to be grateful for that. We know that there will be good days and there will be hard days and that the trauma of her past could show up many many years down the road. But sometimes, even still, you just know.

Today we got word that she is legally free. This case is over and done with forever and amen and she is now adoptable in the state of South Carolina and one step closer to being a Patterson. We told the kids and they all did a happy dance. It is a very exciting day. And it's also a very tragic day, because there is a mother who will never see her children again. There are siblings who have no chance of living together as a family. We are excited, and yet we grieve. The contradictions continue.

This story we’ve been given, it’s hard. It’s harder for her than it is for us. But it’s redemptive and beautiful even in the mess, and today I was flooded with peace that it is certain.