A friend of ours just shared that when her dad went through intensive brain surgery for cancer last week, it brought all of her priorities into a laser focus. Crisis times can do that sometimes, while I personally find that when life is good and easy, I get so distracted by all the details and sometimes forget about the main thing. In the past six months of fostering a special medical needs toddler, I haven’t had time to worry about as many of the details, and what I have time left over tells a lot about my priorities. (Spoiler: Homemade bread and the gourmet, from-scratch meals that I love to prepare are a distant memory. Lately my better-than-a-sister friend Sarah has been doing the bulk of my grocery shopping for me over the weekend and delivers it to me, along with a healthy homemade meal, on Monday afternoons while our kids have a quick play date. We subsist on Costco prepared meals, frozen pizza, and leftovers the rest of the week, and my husband and I try to get something a little healthier on the table on the weekends or rare week days when we’re not juggling therapies or appointments and homeschooling the big kids. Glamorous my life is NOT.)
So as I scribbled notes at the Christian foster moms conference I attended recently, it occurred to me that maybe these foster moms–who pretty much have been living and mothering in nonstop crisis mode for years (or decades!)–might have some good advice for those of us crazy foster moms as well as for those of you who are “just” raising your bio kids. (Note my sarcastic “just”–there is no “just” in motherhood!) Here are some of my takeaways:
I will mess up a lot, and a lot of things are totally out of my control, but my kids will learn the Bible in my home. That is one thing that I can do right! As parents, we often have the illusion that child rearing is something that is under our control. I’m guilty of that–my husband and I had decided that we wanted to start our family in February of his last year of grad school. T arrived on his duedate, in February of Daddy’s last year of school. We were organized like that. Then between miscarriages, morningsickness, and the like, our subsequent children reminded us that we are not actually in control of all this. But I can control the words I speak over them (prayers and blessings before meals and bedtime, at the very least) and the books I read them (the Bible, of course, and quality children’s books) and the routines around which we orient our lives (we attend church every Sunday; we eat dinner as a family, even if it’s frozen pizza).
Plant yourself in truth before you engage with kids in crisis. The speaker who shared this has a 15 year old foster son, and she said her mantra before entering his room is “I am the adult! I am the adult!” She’s reminding herself to initiate interactions with the understanding that the state of California has put her in charge of his well-being, and she has the right to make the rules in her home. With her little girls, who have endured more trauma than any children ever should, and often have meltdowns from the most heart-wrenching little triggers, she takes them through a series of things they know are true: “What’s your name? What’s my name? Who loves you? (This takes a while!) Who loves you more than any of us?” (By this time, they are usually able to joyfully shout, “God does!”) I used a variation of this with my strong-willed child in her temper tantrum years: “I love you. I will always love you. There is nothing you can say or do that could ever make me stop loving you. I am your Mommy. I love you, no matter what. God loves you, no matter what.” Of course, before you can lead a child through something like this, you have to believe it yourself. I shared last post about how I struggled with postpartum depression, and I don’t want to imply that some easy spiritual mantra will fix everything. But for much of my parenting life, it’s helped to start the day (or after a particularly hard incident, go hide in my room for a minute), take a deep breath, and proclaim to myself, “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
Avoid the picture-perfect social media vision of your life and accept that life is messy. Our speaker reminded us that the gospel story starts with Jesus being placed in a manger. She asked us to think about mangers in a non-Christmas pageant way for a minute–they are dirty! The Incarnation is all about the perfect God coming down to our messy world. For those of us who have borne children in our bodies, pregnancy and childbirth are messy, sticky, uncomfortable experiences. Watching my youngest daughter, who is totally bonded to me now because she’s not even seen any other mom figure for months, cry in her bio mom’s arms and reach back for me, calling me Mommy, while the bio mom tries not to cry, is messy and uncomfortable and really, really hard. We live in a fallen world, and motherhood (biological, fostering, or adoptive) is hard work. That’s why we do the Real Housewives of E2S Project!
Challenge yourself to believe that God’s plan for your life is better than any maternal dream you could ever have. The mom who shared this was a woman who had struggled with infertility for decades and who has had dozens of foster placements and only four forever kids who got to stay. She was able to tell us this from a place of deep heartbreak and brokenness, not some sunny, perfect, easy life. I think we were all sobbing throughout her talk, but the line that struck me the most was, “In the midst of this, hopefully I look a little more like Jesus than Lisa.” Wow, that’s what I want, more than anything! But oh, it can be painful to get to that point. That pain in my life has only been bearable with the knowledge that God’s plan is perfect. And in this new season of foster-adoptive motherhood, I’m seeing how so many painful pieces of my past have prepared me so perfectly to mother this little girl. Horrific morningsickness? Gave me intense sympathy for the unacceptable trauma that A’s vomiting was causing her, pushing me to fight for solutions when her medical team seemed totally fine with her vomiting 5 times a day as long as she gained weight. All those moves across the country, having to make new friends in new places? Someone from every place we’ve lived has provided me with vital knowledge and support in A’s myriad medical issues. Our foster license taking two years to complete? We got recertified just as A was stable enough to move to a non-medically trained foster family. Now, we won’t understand all the reasons for why things didn’t go our way this side of heaven, and I still have lots of questions for God. But I do see enough glimmers now that I’m able to trust that God’s plan for my life truly is better than mine!
Well, it’s Monday morning, the kids are all up, and I’m about to go take on the day. Whether you’re parenting kids in crisis or “just” trying to get kids dressed and fed this morning, I’m rooting for you!
