How to love the crazy adoption people...

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!"