I really wasn’t looking to adopt again, not at this point in life. Our two little girls are 8 and 9, and we’ve got grandkids now just a few years behind them.
So at this point, I’ll be attending my kids’ graduation ceremonies using one of those walkers with the tennis balls on the legs!
And with this new little 7 year-old boy, it’s not like when we adopted our girls who we got basically at birth. After years of chaos in his life, it’s like letting a feral animal into your home. Basic things like good toilet habits are nonexistent. He is unappreciative of anything we buy him, nothing is ever enough. He throws a fit whenever he doesn’t get his way. At times, you feel like a warden in a home for the criminally insane.
But the reality is if we don’t adopt him, he’ll go back to a group home where he’ll live with kids much older and bigger than him. No matter how good the staff is, you can put money on him being abused at some point.
When you’re trying to decide whether or not to make the commitment to adopt, you do lots of soul searching. You ask yourself how it may negatively impact your kids, because it most certainly does. Before his morning medication has taken affect, it’s like having a drunken little man spreading havoc through the house. My girls just get quiet as I try to help him take his meds and get ready for school. They automatically get less attention. As I watch them out of the corner of my eye, I hope they understand that I would love to be helping them. But the tyranny of the urgent demands me o focus almost completely on him.
They other thing floating around your brain is that you know you don’t feel the same affection for him than you do the other two. If you’re not careful, that will start convincing you you’re not meant to be his dad. But that’s when God reminds you that real love was never a feeling, it’s a commitment.
So you repeatedly do the “actions of affection”, trusting that one day soon the feeling will come too.
That’s what I’m doing tonight as I pray with him before bed. He had never known what prayer was before he came to live with us. When my girls mentioned Jesus, he asked who they were talking about. But now, he asks me every night to pray with him. If he doesn’t fall asleep soon, he’ll even ask me to pray again.
Tonight is different, though. That afternoon, I found a mess he had left in our garage and I lost my temper. Nothing physical since corporal punishment is against the rules for foster kids. But boy, the smell of human waste hit my nose and I started yelling for him. Instead of me cleaning it up (this time), I called him out and supervised him to do it. One old beach towel and a half a roll of paper towels later, he has gone to shower while I bleach the area in our garage down.
Last time this happened, I wondered if this was beyond what we could deal with. I told him if he did it again, we would probably need to send him back to the group home. But now he and the garage is clean again, and he’s snuggled in bed with Sonic the Hedgehog waiting on me. Before I pray with him tonight, I mention that afternoon and how disappointed I was in his actions. I pointed out how angry I got, and didn’t apologize for that anger. He deserved it.
But tonight I mentioned something to him that I just realized myself. I asked him, “What was the one thing I didn’t say to you when I was mad at you this afternoon?” He thought and couldn’t remember.
The one thing I didn’t do was threaten to send him back. I had made my choice, the choice to love him despite wishing I didn’t have to deal with his drama. So I wrapped my arms around him and told him he was our little boy now, no matter what. I whispered in his ear how no little boy on earth was loved anymore than he was.
No matter what he does, we are going to love him. When everyone else falls for the lie that love is a set of urges to be gratified at any cost, we have to remember love is not a feeling, it is a choice. And we are all in now. I doubt God felt great affection for me when He was dealing with my filth. He did it because love is who He is, and I needed Him so desperately.
Still probably need to stock up on bleach and paper towels, just to be safe…
