Good and Perfect: Grief and Restoration

Grief is a weird thing. It’s not always easy to identify and it can come at us when we least expect it. I’m coming to grips with the fact that this weird thing is something I have been experiencing for quite some time.

Every adoption story begins from a place of brokenness.

The infertile mother.

The child who was abandoned to an orphanage.

The teenage girl who is not able to care for a child.

The foster child who was removed from his home in the middle of the night.

I hope to always be clear that when I share the brokenness of our story, it is not because of her. She is who God says she is. She is precious, she is adored, and she is known. That is just the same today as it was before she entered the foster care system. But, our story is hard, and I hope that transparency will allow others to see the whole picture. Because in reality, I think the story is much more beautiful when you know the whole of it.

I have this friend, Kathi, she is a God-send to me. While she was a few hundred miles north of me adopting two older children, we were praying about taking in our second foster child. Kathi brought her children home one month before L came to us, and through a funny series of events, we got to know each other a few months later. Her children weren’t in the foster care system and L was a little bit younger than her two. Our stories aren’t the same but we connected because we were each other’s “yes, I DO understand!” She has been such a great voice of truth in the area of adopting older children and has been so honest and vulnerable with the difficult that she wasn’t prepared for. A couple of months ago she did a great piece on grief that you really need to read. She and I have a bond because we understand each other, and we can say the things that might sound bad to other people.

I feel very rich in relationships, and I have a big tribe. There are a host of women that I can call on when I need prayer or when I’m down. I have my person, who I love and trust and who allows me to be me. I have coffee chats with church friends and girls weekends with mom friends and adult-only weekends with college friends and regular conversations with many people. But even still, I have felt lonelier in the last year than at any other time in my life.

I have compared it to when I had a miscarriage between my first and second children. I was completely unprepared for the grief that would come from that loss. I vividly remember crying as I answered the phone 5 or 6 days after my d&c, and my friend on the other end said, “Oh no, what’s wrong!?” She knew I had miscarried but was taken aback by my tears almost a week later. I had no control over my emotions, and I cried all the time. I felt like such a weirdo for a long time, because I put an unrealistic expectation on myself about what grief is like. I consoled myself with things like “well at least you weren’t that far along,” and “you have one healthy child, and some people don’t have that.” Those things were true, but they did nothing to help me overcome the loss I had experienced.

We have this thing where we like to make sense of grief. We compare our trial to someone else’s and beat ourselves up for feeling sad since their hard seems worse than our hard. We give ourselves a timeline to be sad and then decide when it’s time to get back to “normal.”

But grief isn’t linear, and it doesn’t usually work according to our schedules.

So the thing that I am coming to terms with in my life right now is that this story we are living, it is beautiful. But it is also traumatic, and it is painful. And those words, those experiences, they bring grief.

Adoption should absolutely be celebrated. It is a powerful and redemptive thing. But I think my people, I think your people, I think those friends in your circle whose family looks like mine, they deserve to know the other side too. They need to know why I busted out crying when someone told me congratulations.

Vulnerability continues to be a theme for me and so I want to be vulnerable in this post, to show you the emotions that go beyond the smiling face and the growing family.

I have seen L’s parents. I have heard their voices. I have walked past her mother as she was sitting on a curb waiting for a ride after we finished a meeting at the DSS office. I grieve for this mother who has lost her children.

I have heard L’s stories, and I know her fears. I grieve for this child who was not protected.

I know why she is in foster care. I know why she will never live with her biological family again. I watch my two boys who are her same age and I grieve that the beginning of her life was so difficult when theirs was so innocent and playful.

I have a child in my care that has significant needs and many times those needs have meant that I’ve lost time or a special event with one of my other children. I grieve the loss of what I knew as my family’s normal.

My son asked me one day if he and L were twins, since every other family he knows that has kids the same age call them twins. I love his innocence. My twins don’t have the same skin color.
I grieve the day when that innocence will be lost and they will be questioned about why they look different.

Sometimes L tells stories and my youngest asks questions. He has heard just enough to know a level of brokenness in this world that I would rather him not know.
I grieve the fact that by helping one child, we have lifted a veil of innocence from another.

L presents as a very happy child, but she has anger, and it is mostly directed at all the maternal influences in her life who failed her. I grieve that this child I love may not ever fully trust my love.

Being a licensed foster parent, I am infinitely more aware than I ever was before about the realities of foster care.
I grieve for those children who are passed from house to house and will never have stability.

I have been on the wrong end of many awkward conversations where someone asked a simple question and they got a tear-filled reply.
I grieve for the conversations ahead when I will still be the one that turns the mood to sadness.

L has one biological family member that she asks about pretty regularly. She was crying recently about not seeing her and I cried with her and told her that I wish I could change things. Then she looked at me and said, “but you don’t have the power to do that, do you?”
Oh, how my heart grieves that I don’t have that power.

We are told often how cute she looks, how happy she seems, or how lucky we are. Those things are true. But the story is deeper, more complex than that. There are emotional scars and an array of emotions that may hit without any notice.

Being adopted from foster care is certainly better than being a foster child until you age out. But adoption – especially adoption by a non-relative where siblings are separated – is not the priority in our state. That means none of the other options were possible. And that’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. So while we are excited, we also grieve.

If you are that mama like me, who is in the trenches, keep fighting sister! You are a survivor and you can do this. Take a deep breath. Find your people who will let you be you, no matter how many times your “you” is the fun-sucker. Soak in the truth of who God says you are and who he says your child is. Cry when you have to and find ways to laugh a lot. Eat that elephant one bite at a time.

If you are a friend of that mama… she needs you! She needs you to be there in her joy and also in her sadness. She needs you to know that grief is not linear and that it might come up again when you aren’t expecting it. She wants to be heard and supported and prayed for and to have no expectations of what this process will look like.

The greatest joy that I have experienced in all of this is the nearness of God. When I’m joyful, I know he is pleased that we are walking in obedience. When I’m sad or feeling lonely, I know that I’m never alone. When I am tired of talking about it because I don’t feel understood, I know that he knows me more intimately than I even know myself. When I feel overwhelmed, I know exactly where I can find my refuge. He restores all things.