Day 131: Impossibly, horribly true

Tonight, I am not sure what happened. My TV seemed to choose a channel all by itself. After watching some DVRed sit coms, I was watching Oprah. I don't usually watch Oprah because she is sometimes overly congratulatory of how great she is. She has done a lot of wonderful things, but I think she has allowed her head to get a bit swollen and I have a hard time watching her salute to "I'm awesome!" If she were really as awesome as she seems to believe, she would do her good deeds in quiet, where God instructs our generosity to be so as to be of pure motivation. It is a tough call to answer, but just saying.

Anyways, enough of my anti-Oprah tirade. For all her pride, she has done some pretty powerful shows. The show that happened to be airing tonight, seemed to be from earlier today. I was immediately moved to tears by the story of a young man, Clayton Grad, who had been horribly abused by his father and step-mother when he was six. The details of the abuse were sickening. He was kept in a closet, dog fencing surrounding his body so he could not sit or move, much less escape the tiny 2x2 closet. He was not fed nor allowed to use the restroom. He was punished with urine and feces when he could no longer control his bodily functions. He was kept in the closet for most of his life during a long enough time period that he cannot recall when it started. Luckily he was rescued by a police officer who God made sure listened to his "gut" and was later raised by a loving aunt who did much to give him the life any child deserves.

The audio recordings of the timorous six year old recounting the horrible abuse turned my stomach and made my heart ache. I just can't understand how these people can have children, but I can't. I can't understand how they could look at this sweet little boy and torture him. Pausing the TV, I held my daughter so tightly and chased her around the living room, tickling her and kissing her. I must have told her "Mommy loves you" a hundred times tonight.

Being Friday night, I didn't rush to get her to bed early, but she's had a rough week with teething: fever, crabbiness, loss of appetite, sleepiness, temper tantrums. She started acting "done" around 9:30. She had crossed a threshold and nothing made her happy. I took her in to change into her jammies, but she was hurting and tired and just started crying. It broke my heart. I just held her and rocked her. I gave her toys and got her to laughing, but instead of putting her down to bed alone, I couldn't bring myself to let her go.

I wanted to be a mom from the time I was 16. I had a dream that I was pregnant and it was so powerful. I wasn't in any rush, but I wanted to be a youngish mom. I wanted to have several children, maybe adopt and foster. Then life got in the way and I was not able to conceive or not in a relationship in which I wanted to. By the time I met the man with whom I wanted to have children, I was no longer able to even hope for a biological child. We started looking into adoption. When we realized how costly it was, I began to realize that I might never be a mom. I was devastated, but trying desperately to accept that as my lot. If God meant for me not to be a mom, maybe He had a reason I shouldn't be a parent.

When things started falling into place, and we finally knew that we would be parents, I was over the moon. But it didn't seem real until I held her tiny finger in my hand. My friends said they could see my joy in the picture of me by her cribside in the NICU. I still can't believe how lucky I am to get to be her mom. Until you have a child, you can't imagine the type of love you have for this itty bitty person. It is gut wrenching. Loving her is so intense sometimes it almost hurts.

After she fell asleep, I held her in my arms. I wanted to squeeze her so tightly as if I could hug my love into her so she would always be able to carry it around in her heart. I watched the rest of the show I had paused and cradled my sleeping angel, trying not to wake her with soft kisses as I tried to understand how anyone could take the precious gift they'd been given and do such things. I talked to her as I carried her to bed. "I love you so much," I said. "You deserve a perfect mommy, but all you got is me. I am gonna do my best to love you enough to make up for my mistakes." I know she couldn't hear me, but I needed to tell her one more time how much she was wanted. I was meant to be her mom. God planned it from the start even if I didn't know it and she was always wanted by me. But I did wonder what life she might have had if her birth mother chose not to give her up. It would have been filled with poverty, transcience, drugs, cigarettes, jail and dysfunction, maybe neglect and potentially abuse. I am brought almost to tears imagining that life for my precious Lil Bit. It shouldn't happen to any child.

But it happens everyday. 5-6 children died today from abuse. Every ten seconds a case of abuse is reported. That number is more staggering when you think about the fact that most abuse is never reported. Much of what we would consider abusive behavior isn't even recognized at the time by the child as wrong and if reported, would not result in the child being removed from the home due to an overworked, underfunded system.

The day I met my daughter was the happiest day of my life. I am far from perfect and have my days when I could be more patient or more energetic or know what to do. Being a mom is an impossible job. I am going to screw it up, I am going to leave her with memories of me being angry or impatient. It is literally impossible to parent perfectly or even close, but no one should have a childhood like Clayton. And yet, it is impossibly, unbelievably, disgustingly true for one out of every 110 (or so) children.

I see what happens to some of those children when they get to me in high school. While they believe they are adults, I can see the little broken children inside. It hurts me. I have reported a few cases of abuse. One family moved away immediately after the investigation started. Another was found unsubstantiated. One girl I sent home with bags of food and got her in touch with counselors, but she is still in the home full of neglect. I am not allowed to take them home. Heck, I can't even give them a ride home legally. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to.

I know God is the master and has a plan, but I can't find in myself an answer as to how such suffering of children is allowed to happen. Especially when there are literally hundreds of thousands of couples just like us waiting for a child whom they will love and nurture. I just can't grasp how these parents are allowed to exist by God or man, but they do . . . and there are no words for the grief I feel for them tonight.

Day 340: Prettiest Girl in the world

Today I woke up ready to take care of business. There are stacks of papers everywhere. I have stuff to shred, stuff that needs filing and just stuff. Plus in the mix are things I have just been meaning to do. One of those things was to email pictures to the attorney who helped up finalize our adoption early. I can't tell you how much it meant to me and Chad to have the adoption finalized before he left. While according to the attorney, only one of us had to be there and the baby didn't even have to come, we were so disappointed to have missed her physical birth due to the fact that she was so impatient to be here, neither of us wanted to miss her second "birthday."It was a special day for us to welcome the prettiest girl in the world into our family.

While I was thinking about how special this little bundle of joy is to my heart, how words fail to describe how laughter bubbles up inside of me when her face lights up in a smile, I thought about writing a letter to the adoption agency to thank them for helping us add Lil Bit to our family. I went to their website and thought I would just take a peek at the waiting families. I knew we were extremely blessed to get chosen this quickly, but it made me understand exactly how blessed when I saw that over half of the families who were waiting when we joined the agency were still waiting.

For those of you who are not familiar with the process of adoption these days, you are not really on a list like they used to have. You used to wait on a list and when your "turn" came up, you received the next available child. Today's adoption agencies are more focused on the birth mother's choosing the right family for her baby. She comes into the agency and looks at books prepared by the agency's waiting families. She chooses a family for her child, then the family can decide if they like the match based on the mother's background and prenatal information. We were accepted by the agency on March 1. We got a phone call March 25 that a birth mother had chosen us. While she needed a little more financial support than we had planned for, we were so excited that we chose accept the placement. We had been crossing our fingers for a little girl to add to her two brothers. This birth mother was far enough along that we knew the baby was a girl and healthy 26 weeks  already! It felt like a dream.

We had been praying that it would either happen almost immediately or take a year or so to get chosen. With Chad leaving I wanted him to be able to be here and bond with the baby before he left for Iraq or not to get selected for a baby until he was almost home. With the current army climate, it is so hard to plan a life. He has been on the luckier side of the army. He has been home 15-18 months between deployments, but has been deploying every other year or so since 2003. That is a topic for another blog - but it made planning an adoption and the process really scary for us. We knew he would be going back at some point, but this time he knew he would have orders again pretty much before he came home the last time.

God's hand was in this process and we were given the most beautiful little girl. I keep asking her for her secret, how she gets prettier every day, but she isn't talking. I knew I would love her and she would change my life. I didn't know how I would just hold her and be moved to tears by that love. I didn't know she would change how I see the world and my life.

While 9 families still wait to be chosen from the list, I held my daughter for hours today while she snuggled, giggled, slept. How blessed we were to become a forever family this summer. God was watching over us. As a new mother, I now realize the responsibility that comes with loving her. I just pray that God continues to protect her daddy and keep our family safe for a long time even if we can't always be together. Lil Bit deserves all the best. She was a game changer for me. No matter how tired I am from taking care of her, house, dog, school and sometimes even myself, I wouldn't trade a second with my beautiful girl. There are no words to describe how it feels to love this hard and I am just getting started - all you Momma's out there know what I mean. What a godsend to survive missing her daddy!!!