Monthly Archives: April 2019

Exchanging

25 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Grandfostering, Parenting

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So a little more than two years ago, my daughter accepted her second newborn foster baby, just one month after the first moved to a new home with her older brother.  I’ve already shared some of the similarities and differences in my experience with each baby, but this second placement came with a brand new addition to the routine.

Visits with mom.

While my daughter had Baby A, the birth mom never arranged for any visitation time, so I didn’t need to learn the ropes of taking a child to children’s services.  In fact, other than going downtown for my background check, I had avoided driving in town for years.  It wasn’t that I never had, or that I didn’t know where anything was, I just don’t care for busy city traffic.  With Baby A I think there was one time I was needed to pick her up from daycare downtown, and the day my daughter had to turn her over, but both times I was a passenger.

Baby B’s birth mom was different.  She wanted visitation very soon, and it was scheduled twice a week in the middle of the day under supervision at the agency.  While the downtown daycare was operating it made it convenient for my daughter to transport her, but she had the occasional  meeting or training scheduled, and I was available to ferry the baby around.  Bringing her there involved a parking garage and carrying her in a car seat or stroller, getting her signed in and transferred to mom.  If I was also picking her up after the visit, there was a coffee shop nearby to hang out, and then return to sign her out and pack her up to go back to daycare or home with me on occasion.  And validating multiple parking tickets.

After her daycare location changed and the drive was farther from my daughter’s work, there were more times it helped to get her into town and let my daughter pick her up when the visit was over, so my presence at the visits became more frequent.

The biggest difference was that I got to know Baby B’s birth mom.

I didn’t need to know background details about her.  And likewise I feel I shouldn’t say much of what I did learn, at least nothing identifying.  But I’m a mom.  I’ve felt five babies moving within me for the last six months or so of every pregnancy.  I found myself knowing these little people I carried more deeply than I ever thought possible, before they were ever born. I couldn’t assume that she felt any less of a connection with the child that she had given birth to, who had to be removed from her arms and given to another person to love and care for.

I remember not wanting to offend or intimidate her in any way.  If she didn’t make eye contact, I wouldn’t force it.  If she didn’t talk, I was polite but didn’t ask a lot of questions.  But I did feel for her.  Because I knew how it felt to lose a baby.

I always smiled at her, tried to place Baby B from my arms into hers, or transfer the stroller right to her hands, and give her some reassuring thing to notice about the baby.

My daughter had shared her desire to see moms reunited with their child in her fostering adventure, and I was looking for the same outcome.  So as a mom, I tried to encourage any good thing I saw her do or heard her say.  There were a lot of long stays at the coffee shop, praying for mom, and returning to hear her tell Baby B that she loved her as I took her back.

There was hope for their reunion.  For a long time.

I won’t go into detail, but in my understanding, when a baby is taken away from the birth mom, there are serious reasons that could be any number of things.  And in order to regain custody, each mom would have her own set of requirements to meet, goals to be working toward and achieving, before the system would consider reuniting mother and baby.

The passage of time would be the only way to know if  Baby B’s mom was able or willing to successfully meet her requirements.  Time, and official meetings and hearings and I’m not sure all the hoops to be jumped through.  But this was a process, and it had to be lived out, before a day would eventually come when either the birth mom could try to regain custody, or the door would be shut on Baby B ever being with her birth mom.

So until that day came, I had those occasional chances to make an impression on a young woman I grew to love and care for, who is still in my prayers, whose face I looked into as much as I could, seeing what Baby B might be like as she grows.

And I wanted her to see the love of God in me.  I wanted her to see joy and peace and contentment, with the world, with the situation she was in, with her baby passed back and forth between us.  I wanted her to know some of the love her baby was getting.  I wanted her to feel it.

It took a long time, but she started looking me in the eye.

I can’t tell you what she saw, why she was finally willing to look.  But what I wanted her to see was hope.  Hope for herself, that I would be happy for her if she were able to do all she needed to do and someday take her baby home.  Hope that even if she didn’t, she would know I still cared about her.  And mostly that Baby B’s birth mom could always count on her baby being loved by people who also took time to see and love her.

 

 

 

 

 

Redeemed

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Recovery journey, Redemption

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It is very hard for me to admit when I’ve done something wrong.  There’s always an excuse I can give to justify my actions, or at least throw others off the trail until they figure out I really am guilty of whatever I did.

If I talk to you long enough you may not recognize the ugly truth anymore with all the layers of stories piled on top of it.  But it’s still there, hiding its eyes so you can’t see it.

I’m a sinner.

Most people don’t use that word anymore.  But for four years now, since I started going to Celebrate Recovery, I am aware every day of the state of my heart and soul.

There’s an old-fashioned word that I think captures the essence of sin, and that’s trespass.  As in “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  A couple meanings of trespass are: ‘to make unfair claims on or take advantage of’, and ‘to commit an offense against’.

And one from the Greek meaning of sin, ‘to miss the mark’, like in archery.

Four years ago I found myself at CR every week reciting either the twelve steps or the eight principles of recovery.  They included some things  I was uncomfortable saying, but I figured I’d get used to it soon.

Realize I’m not God; I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable. (Principle 1)

See what I mean?  Well obviously I’m not God, but powerless?  Unmanageable?  That was, and still is sometimes, the hardest thing for me to admit.

I’m not going to give details, but when I was a very little girl, I was taken advantage of by a teenage boy in my church family.  It went on for a while, and I never told anyone about it.  Finally someone saw something questionable happening, and it ended.

But not for me.  Because I had gotten used to the wrong behaviors, and I felt a very misguided affection for him.  Others would later abuse my innocence and trusting nature, and again I never told.  For almost fifty years.

No one knew my struggles to know right from wrong, so I made my own definitions, and justified any bad feelings I had about my actions.

In my mind I always blamed the adults, my parents included, who let a teenage boy take me away from everyone else, out into the dark night, week after week.  I decided that I would never be unnoticed again.  So I got loud, I forced my natural shyness down deep and learned to act brave and sassy.  And at six years old people thought it was cute.

But at least they knew when I was no longer in a room.

I was managing just fine on my own.

Almost fifty years later I went to my first CR meeting, then started doing a Step Study where I had to dig deep into those secrets and bring the truth to light.  I was really bad at it.  I struggled to face my past, and even more to start naming some of the unfair claims made on me, ways I’d been taken advantage of, offenses committed against me.

When I first started facing the facts, and the feelings that came with them, I experienced rage like I had never known.  I was furious that anyone could do to a child things I’d held secret inside me most of my life.  It was a relief to finally speak the truth out loud in a safe setting, and it was torture to admit that I had been abused by people I cared about and who I thought cared about me.

And right there I saw how powerless I was, how impossible it had been to manage my experiences and feelings and behaviors, because none of them were based on truth.

And I had not even begun to look at my own wrongs.  But I did have to start facing the sin in me, the ways I had taken advantage, the offenses I had committed.  And it was not possible to do it in my own power.

I needed a power greater than myself.  Thank you, God!

We humans share a fatal flaw.  Sin.  And the bad things we do to each other are not the worst.  It’s how we treat God.

I have claimed a relationship with God for many years, but I have taken advantage of him, as if he owed me peace and joy and every other good thing just because he created me.  In many ways I have put myself in the place God should be, in what I thought was control of my life.   I have downplayed my offensive words and actions, I’ve ignored the Spirit when he prompts me, or purposefully turned away from where I felt him leading me.

I miss the mark.  Big time.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Jesus.  I am powerless, but he is all powerful.  I cannot keep my little life moving in the right direction, and he set the earth on its axis and sustains it by his will.  And when I mess up, there is nothing I can do to ever make it right again.  I cannot undo the effects of even one wrong thing.  Because my actions affect others, and I am powerless to control how they experience those consequences.  And once I’ve done something, or something has been done to me, I am bound to it, unable to remove the memories,the feelings, the guilt.

There’s another word, one I love to define.  Redeem: ‘to buy the freedom of’.

How much would it cost to pay for all the damage I’ve done?  To release me from bondage to my fickle passions?

If you sit in a service on Good Friday, let the reality of what Jesus experienced in the beatings, the mocking, the thorns, the weight of the cross, the nails, the face of God turned away, all rest on your shoulders.  Maybe like me you will know the impossibility that I have any power to fight my  sinfulness alone.

And to  grasp the price that was paid?  I cannot.  How could he think me worthy?

But is there any other explanation?

 

 

Taking Time to Heal

11 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Recovery journey

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After last week’s post, I made one more trip to urgent care to get more meds.  The first antibiotics had helped, but I still had a ways to go before I could breath easily and clearly, and they decided to try a different drug to finish clearing out my lungs.  And the amazing thing is, I haven’t needed my asthma inhalers at all since then.

Now to get back to feeling healthy.  The thing is, when you’ve been walking around for months not being able to breathe well normally, much less while being active, you get used to not overdoing things.  And now that I’m starting to feel better, it would be nice to instantly be back to having energy and interest in being more active.  Right now I’m tired, napping a little every day, but actually sleeping at night and waking up much more refreshed.

When I started into recovery, I had a similiar experience.

I came to my first Celebrate Recovery meeting and was intrigued with what I heard about people finding freedom from their hurts, habits and hang-ups.  I couldn’t have named what mine were, but I knew I had plenty of things weighing me down, keeping me from being able to see, much less deal with, all my issues.

A few days later I showed up for my first Step Study session, and as I listened to the raw honesty of the other women in my group, I was struck with how shallow and defensive my own answers were.  I immediately felt like a fraud.  I was so agitated.  I couldn’t even look at their faces for the first few weeks because I was afraid they would see all I was trying to hide from them about myself.

But it was me I was really hiding from.

I had lived in denial of how deeply I had been affected by inappropriate relationships in my childhood and beyond, and it was like being in an emergency room and gawking at other people’s wounds around me while I sat with broken bones and oozing sores that had been festering for fifty years.

I kept coming back.  Both to CR meetings, and my Step Study, and very soon I was able to expose my real feelings.  There were hurts from my past that have shaped so much of my personality, and habits I developed to deal with those hurts, so that I could never be hurt again.  And along the way, plenty of hang-ups about what I would and wouldn’t allow to happen to me, as if I could control everyone and everything in my life.  I had created my own little world where I felt safe.

So at the start of my recovery journey, I became aware that I had many things to face and deal with.  And I was overwhelmed.  Having the control issues I’ve always had, I did not see how I could possibly deal with all the things that I was finally letting myself face about my past, much less function in the present.

I needed time to heal.

But I wanted an instant cure.

Twelve steps and eight principles involve a lot of things to work on, and it was unrealistic of me to think I could lick this in a few weeks or months.  As I found out from the beginning, it is an ongoing process, where I had to really search deep inside myself every step of the way.

No matter how many times we repeat the steps and principles at CR meetings, I had to let each of them come to life in my heart before I could embrace what I had to do to comply with them.  And that didn’t come easy.  It wasn’t something I could force myself to do.  And it wasn’t a process I could control.

You may have heard the phrase “let go and let God”, and that’s what I first had to learn to do.  With every single hurt, every memory, every feeling, every wrong thing I’ve done.

I’m nowhere near finished, even after four years of working steadily.

But an amazing thing started to happen, as I pried open my fists and tentatively laid down first one thing then another in front of God.

He took them away from me.

Maybe more accurately, he showed me what I needed to lay down first, because those were the things he knew I most needed to get rid of.  And then he picked them up and carried them for me.

The memories are still there, but suddenly they have no hold over me.

The secrets had been spoken out loud in the safety of this circle of sisters, and an amazing thing happened.

I was not rejected, abandoned, condemned.

That doesn’t mean my wrongs were smoothed over and declared to be right.  Or that the wrongs done to me were any less hurtful.  Sin is still sin, and there are always consequences.  But being able to face them, name them, and give them over to God, with the support of these women I grew to love so deeply, was like a healing salve to my soul.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my recovery journey, probably because this month marks four full years of CR.  But also because just like the body needs time to heal from sickness or wounds, so does the spirit.

I came to understand why a Step Study takes about nine months to complete.  You can’t expect to get a handle on a lifetime of soul sickness instantly.  There is a miracle cure, but it isn’t a quick one.  Jesus really does work all things for my good when I put them into his hands and let him lead me through all those things I never wanted to face.

As I worked through the steps and principles I found that God had brought forward just the amount of things I was ready to handle at that time, and I found myself able to truly forgive.  Also able to admit some of the wrong things I had done to others and ask for forgiveness, make amends.

Once the Step Study ended, my recovery didn’t.  I continue to work through the steps as God brings up different issues that it’s time to face.

And this healing just keeps on happening, one day at a time, restoring me to who God meant for me to be all along.

I can feel it in my bones

04 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Recovery journey

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I’m sick.  For a week and counting.  Actually, I’ve known there was something not right for about five months now.  I just have a hard time getting the health care providers I talk to to believe me.

You know the feeling, when something is off.  You’re just not yourself.  Not life-threatening, but after five months I’m ready to feel better.   At my annual checkup I had shared how I wheezed all the time and my lungs felt tight, but since I had no fever and she couldn’t hear much going on, my health care provider chalked it up to my asthma.

I’m not a person who likes going to doctors.  I know my body, I know when something feels wrong, in fact I’m the only one who does, yet they will still look at me and state that since THEY can’t hear / see / detect what they think they should, I must be mistaken.  I am tired of being ignored.

So I was almost ecstatic last week when – YES! – I developed a low-grade fever. The next day  I was at the local urgent care, finally ready to get some help.  And the doc couldn’t hear a thing in my lungs! She saw enough to suspect a sinus infection, so I left armed with prescriptions and handouts.

Relief is coming but  I’m not better yet.

Now that the meds are loosening up all the junk I knew had been hanging around in my lungs, I’ve given up sleeping at night for coughing.  Lying down with racking jolts jarring my lungs is not pleasant, but it’s doing the hard work of clearing out what’s been keeping me breathless and tired and aching.  As my ribs take the worst of it, I can feel it in my bones, the consequences of this going on so long.

I ask myself, if I hadn’t gotten the fever, how long would I have waited to plead for help? How sick did I need to get, how inconvenienced, how unable to fully enjoy every day, before I would have marched in to my caregiver and demanded that she listen to me, that she help me feel better?

Because no one can know how you feel except yourself.

I Corinthians 2:11 says:  For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

With the body many times physical ailments are visible to others.  But what about our spirits, our true selves?  How much can we brush over and decide is just life, so what can you do about it?  And even if a time comes when you’re tired of denying the things that have hurt you or that you regret or that you wish you could change, where would you go for help?

If my doctor won’t listen to my physical problems, who would listen to my spiritual and emotional ones?

For almost four years now I have been working on my recovery from hurts, hang-ups and habits that have affected me practically my whole life.  Not five months, but more than 50 years of things I had never spoken of or dealt with until just the past few years.  From looking at my life, others may not think I’ve had any major problems.  They would be wrong.  I may seem confident, in control, outgoing, capable.  I am not.  Most people would be surprised to know that I have spent my life acting the way I felt I needed to act to protect myself and my family.

Even though I have projected a persona that everyone believes, I know myself better than that.  And I have finally stopped running from the confused little girl who never told anyone the things that happened to her.  You can ignore a problem, but it doesn’t go away.  You can deny things that happened to you, but it doesn’t undo them.  And you can fool most of the people most of the time.  But when you are finally ready to be honest with yourself, you can face the truths that you know deep inside and the hurts that need to be healed.

How uncomfortable did I need to get before I was ready to face the yuckiness in my own spirit I had denied for so long?

In this case as well, there is help.  There is a physician that has amazing healing powers, whose words are able to separate soul from spirit, joint from marrow.  That phrase from Hebrews 4:12 has always fascinated me.  I picture a surgeon with precise tools able to see into the deepest part of me and say, “Here’s something you don’t need to keep holding onto anymore.  Let me get rid of it.  You’ll feel much better without it.”

When I try to explain Celebrate Recovery to people, this is the bottom line.  We each know we are broken, sick, hurt, guilty, and all kinds of other things.  And no other person can fix us.  They can’t feel what we feel.  They don’t know the panic or fear or sorrow that lives inside us.  We don’t come to CR to get fixed.  We come to CR to get real.  With ourselves, with each other, with God.  And the more able we are to face the sin sickness we carry around, the more willing we become to finally let Jesus cut it away, clean us up, make us healthy.

So after more than 50 years of carrying around soul hurts of many kinds, I have found a place where I can expose them all to Jesus, where he uses sisters and brothers to show his love to me, where I can be honest about my struggles, where brokenness is the first step to healing.

Here’s a link to a song my daughter and her friends sang at church Sunday, while I was finally  sleeping through the weekend.  It was hitting me this past week as they practiced it, how we need to get bone-tired of our mess before we ask Jesus for help.  If you are ready for some relief of your own, what can you surrender to Jesus?