My dear friend
Lisa, along with her family, is in
Lithuania.
They have adopted the
adorable Asher and Annalise, 4 year old twins.
Asher and Annalise join sibling Adeline and Alden.
These friends are precious to us.
We met them only a year ago through a mutual
friend but it was an instant love connection.
Our husbands get along; our kids want to marry one another.
And we all love Jesus and adoption and pizza
from Costco.
(You, know, the trinity of
important things…)
Anywhoozie, Lisa is about to come home and I’m just reupping
my blog and I thought I’d reflect on our first few weeks home in order to help
her. Most friends, though well meaning,
have zero idea what it is like to bring an older child into your family through
adoption. It is foreign and so those
well meaning friends often do harm when they mean to help, or worse yet, do
nothing at all. So here is my version of
how to love an adoptive family.
First of all, read Jen Hatmaker’s
How to Be the Village.
Jen does an excellent job of setting the stage of what adoptive family’s go
through after the big hoopla of the airport moment.
Many people will say “Oh, you went from 2 to 4! It’s like you brought home twins from the
hospital!” Um, yes, but a bajillion
times harder. It’s similar because your
expenses doubled and you are sleeping approximately 2 hours a night, but that
is really where the similarity ends.
Babies are pretty easy. You have
a baby and people expect you to be tired and bring you stuffed animals and
meals and the world’s cutest socks but really all you are doing is wiping poop,
producing milk, and watching Netflix whilst the smooshy balls of flesh sit
still where you put them. I mean, a baby
doesn’t crawl under the bed in defiance right before your in-laws show up to
meet their grandchild for the first time.
A baby can’t lob the remote at your head or stand on the kitchen table
or forget that you said to not eat the soap.
You bring home two preschool children and despite the fact that you are
getting no sleep and these kids don’t know what you are saying nor what it
means to be in a family, everyone asks you to meet them at a park and to touch
them like they’re the newest addition to the petting zoo… “Ooooh, their hair is
so soft, I never expected that!”
Ouch, Elizabeth, now it sounds like I will just screw it all
up, when I want to love my friends.
What
can I do????
Make meals. We were
blessed with meals three times a week for close to two months.
There were so very many days that I’d been up
for so long and spent so much time in “come to Jesus” meetings on the time in
couch that I couldn’t form sentences, much less a meal. (And did I mention that
while I was in those time-ins with one child, the other children were unfolding
the five loads of laundry I’d just folded while we watched Cars two times in a
row.) A couple of weeks ago, I was so proud because I’d planned this yummy
crock pot meal.
I’d set the table!
We were using real (not paper) plates!
I’d even managed to sweep up the cereal from
breakfast, so our kitchen was neat.
And
then it was around 5pm that my darling husband noticed I’d forgotten to
actually turn on the crock pot.
Y’all, I
would’ve cried, but by this point, I was so used to dropping all the ball all
the time that I realized from now on my role as Mom was to just roll the
ball.
I could no longer juggle. So we
went out for pizza.
So cook.
And make
something normal, please.
No lentil
salad or tofu lasagna.
It does the
family no good if you bring over some wackadoo meal and they still have to
order pizza to feed the family.
Because
chances are they’ve already had pizza three times already this week.
Do the grocery shopping.
If you live near the family, whenever you go to the grocery store, text your
friend. Sometimes you picking up a
gallon of milk or another 8 pack of yogurt will save the day, and really, how
hard is that? Things that would be a
blessing to a just home from the airport family:
-milk
-cereal
-frozen pizzas (are you recognizing a theme here?)
-eggs
-kid friendly yogurt
-oreos
-goldfish (and other “pack in lunch” items especially if
they have school aged kids too)
-bread
-rice
-deli meat
-spaghetti sauce
-bag of salad
-paper plates
-small plastic cups (not giant 16 oz solos, but ones for
kids)
-paper towels (seriously!!!!)
-kids’ band-aids
-fruit: bananas, apples, grapes, clementines, strawberries
(things that are healthy that can be offered to a child that has known
starvation at anytime without a parent having to feel guilty)
-ice cream
-beer
-wine (lots!)
Fold laundry. Come over
one night after the kids’ bedtime and offer to watch TV and fold laundry. Most
likely, your friend will first refuse this offer. Offer again.
Say, “How about I just fold the kids’ laundry and linens? You won’t even have to say words or think or even
help, you can just tell me how you like your shirts folded and stare off into
the mid-distance.” A friend did this for
me and I still cry when I think about it.
In fact, I hired a friend to come for a couple of hours every week just
to fold my laundry and vacuum. Adopted
kids often regress in the potty department so it is not abnormal for the addition
of adopted kids to multiply the laundry exponentially. Maybe your friend
thought they were potty trained but they aren’t. Or maybe they don’t know how to wipe and so
even though the kid is going in the potty, they still have to change clothes 47
times a day. Or perhaps the kid is so ecstatic
about having their own clothes that they don’t have to share with anyone and
drawers to call his own that the child changes clothes every 5 minutes. Your friend knows she should probably say
something but a)how can you blame a kid who has had so little for so long, and
b) that would probably require moving and/or dodging a shoe. Or *cough, cough* maybe a child who has been
in the home since birth with the addition of two new siblings has suddenly lost
the ability to go pee and poo in the potty but also refuses to wear pull ups
because she’s been in panties for over a year.
Check in.
Send texts.
Most likely your friend is lonely and starved for adult
conversation.
And possibly homicidal because
of all the pee and poo everywhere.
That said,
don’t assume that because things are hard they regret their decision.
Or maybe they
momentarily regret it.
With a lower case “r”.
Which then makes them feel guilty and
horrible.
So don’t say things like, “What?
Is it harder than you thought it would be?”
Because more than likely your friend has
spent hours researching and training, but when the time comes, no one really
knows what to do when your child screams and thrashes and throws whatever loose
object they can find at your head for 45 minutes because you dared to strap
them into the car seat. And don’t say things like, “Well at least you are now
together!”
Because that completely
negates your friend’s feelings.
It’s
like telling a woman with severe morning sickness she should be thankful for
the puke on her shirt.
Your friend has done things she never thought she’d do in
these trying times—let the TV stay on 24 hours (hey—it’s teaching them
English!), gone to the pharmacy in pajamas, yelled at the kids so loudly her
throat was raw, seriously pondered nudism as a means to reduce the laundry, driven
around aimlessly for two hours because all of the kids fell asleep in their
carseats, cussed out her spouse, given the kids bubble wands then locked them
outside, and locked herself in the bathroom with her phone (that candy isn’t going
to crush itself).
Whatever you do, DO NOT GIVE PARENTING ADVICE unless you
yourself have parented an adopted child.
It’s so very different.
And it’ll
make your friend want to punch you in the face.
You know how it’ll take ten minutes to get out the door with your kids,
so you just say, “Fine then! We are leaving without you.
Goodbye.”
You can’t say that to a kid who has actually been abandoned.
To a kid who has been abandoned or orphaned
through death, you can’t send them to their room when they misbehave.
They’ve already been sent an ocean away from
everything they know.
Every parenting
decision, every consequence given,
must
be done through the lens of trust-building, relationship affirming.
So when you see your friend offer a do- over
to a kid who just hit her because he’s mad, don’t say, “Oh, in my house that
would get a whoopin’.”
Because more than
likely, your friend’s adopted kid has already had more than his fair share of
whoopins’ and your friend is trying to both earn her kids’ trust and also teach
him the appropriate way to deal with his anger and disappointment.
Kids who come from hard places have this
intense internal struggle.
How do I grab
on to this new family while grieving the loss of my first family?
How do I suddenly accept help from a parent
when I’ve done it all on my own for so long?
How do I accept that these people are telling me I’m precious and adored
when the circumstances of my life tell me differently?
These are very difficult and adult and complex emotions being sorted out by teensy tiny immature people. It's no wonder there is crap everywhere. (Gosh, why won't she stop talking about poop?)
Send your friend money, gift cards, jewelry. No really.
Money because adoption is expensive and more than likely, your friend
has at least 10k in debt. And the need to pay it off isn’t helping your
friend relax in the 2 hours a day she gets alone. Gift cards because your friend needs a million
things from Target and WalMart. She needs pants
because their newly home child has gained 7 pounds in two months. Baby wipes because one of the children put
two bins of wipes down the toilet. A
plunger (see previous sentence). More
Doritos, because, well, just because. And getting to go shopping without having to
price out every little thing is such a joy and Target has baskets that three
kids can be strapped in so it’s the closest to normal your friend has seen in
awhile. And jewelry, because, y’all, she
needs it. A dear new friend gave me the
cutest Stella and Dot studs yesterday at church. Just because she loved me and wanted me to
feel special and loved. Oh my
goodness. I may not have bathed today but
on my ears are the loveliest pair of sparkling earrings reminding me that Jesus
sees me and is for me and so is my buddy Nicole. Even if I can smell myself, especially when I can smell myself.
We’ve been home almost 4 months. And this crap is still happening. (Though, honestly, a lot less. Or at least the kids have gotten used to the
car seats and now all sleep in their own beds. Most of the time…)
Ok, so now you are thinking, holy heck!
What did my friend sign on for?
Why on earth would anyone adopt?
Go into debt and get shoes thrown at me? No, thank you. Because while it is the most difficult thing
I’ve ever done/am doing in my life, it is also the most joyful.
There are days it feels like death.
But even those days bring me closer to my
Jesus than ever.
I know what my
adoption cost him.
It was bloody and
precious.
And well, this holy calling of adoption puts our family
in this raw place of genuine living that it’s almost a high.
A joyful intensity that can only be accurately
described as bordering lunacy.
Unbeknownst to him, I think adoptive families are the ones Keroac wrote
about:
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous
yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle
you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"
