Broken promises

Some day, I'll show you the drafts as well as the published parts of this blog.  Some day you'll see my naive optimism, theatrical forays into dreams of what this thing called parenthood will actually look like for me.  Some day it will hurt less to show my pain than to hide it.

Today is not that day, and I can't see that day on the horizon.

As I walked up to the edge of this page of the story called Licensed and peeked onto the page called Placement, I fairly drowned in the voice of the village I had poked and prodded and pleaded into hearing.

Some told me to stay cautious and guarded, others jumped up and down with me, many said I was brave, a few said they couldn't imagine what I was going through.  I told myself, and the village, that right or wrong leading with my heart is just who I am.  I had to believe what I'd been told by my licensing agency and that getting placed with two wonderful sisters who had been dealt some hefty blows was not a question of if...only when.

And then the bottom fell out, and I feel dumb.  My agent seemed reasonably bummed but glib.  I wonder if someday I'll be able to shrug off not receiving a placement like it's a missed opportunity at work.  For him, that's what it is.  He has a passion for children in need, I absolutely believe that.  But he's able to see it from a different place than I can, recognizing that there are more children in need than parents and there's no way that I won't be there for a child he's been charged to help.  So why would it devastate him?  He doesn't have to walk past the empty bedrooms tonight like I do.  I went into one of the girls' rooms tonight, picked up her princess nightlight, and cried.

I don't tell you that to make you feel sorry for me.  I don't feel like I deserve these feelings.  I feel shamed by my own selfishness and narcissism in the process.  I don't get to position myself in this process like a "normal" parent.  I did not look at my partner and decide we were ready to try for a child, discover the miracle of pregnancy, celebrate in showers, nest for months, take my daily vitamins and go for my monthly checkups, and then find out I've lost this miracle of life.  I did not pay thousands to work with an agency to become artificially inseminated or placed with a child through adoption, only to find that the contract fell through in the eleventh hour.

I want to see the similarities there, and I'm sure I could tell myself there are more similarities than differences.  But that princess nightlight is a garish example of me trying to make foster care something it isn't.  Foster care can lead to the miracle of adoption, and I believe God intends for me to be someones forever mommy.

But what happened this week, that isn't what this is.

This is a ministry.  A call to action.  God has put this burning need to have a permanent nuclear family inside me for a reason, but this week has taught me to listen to Him more and myself less.  He has called me to serve children in need, just as intentionally as he's called my agent at the Children's Bureau.  This home will provide love and safety to children in need.  Period.

Period.

Maybe one day that child in need that's living at my house and trying to find true north will be the child God created to take my last name.  I know I wouldn't have connected the two callings if this placement hadn't been positioned as it had -- I just thought that was His plan.  But I was wrong, and though it hurts, there is a purpose I need to accept more than I need to understand.

I am not brave.  I don't lead with my heart.  I am more narcissistic than altruistic.  It's a hard lesson to learn, but as I sit in the room that was almost my daughter's, I know that's the message that God has to help me hear before I can really be there for anyone else in a way that matters.

Lydia Joyner

http://youtu.be/UyYnw1rrvoM

I hope and pray that I can change someone's experience in the foster care system so that they may know what it means to be safe and loved.  

It breaks something in me to hear Lydia - whose name is the same as my little niece and I cannot imagine her going through anything similar - say that she was never loved like it's no big thing.  

35 homes in 18 years. 

4 first and last total name changes. 

"That trash bag you carry with you from home to home becomes your parents, your friend, your identity."