Not Enough

I woke up to my bedroom door being quietly opened and closed. I picked up my phone to check the time, still groggy from sleep. 4am. I slid out of bed to check on my children. As my eyes adjusted to the light in my daughters’ bedroom and my brain adjusted to the absurdity of what was happening, I was flooded with frustration and disbelief. Are they seriously up at 4am with food that they snuck from the kitchen and their older sister’s stolen computer? All of my adopted kiddos have pretty severe food allergies; three can’t have sugar or food dye, and one can’t have gluten. They aren’t allergic like they are gonna go into anaphylactic shock or anything, but oh man when they eat it you know. It’s almost like an out of body experience. So you can imagine that walking into juice boxes, ice cream, and muffins in the bed like it’s a carnival food truck at 4am gave me a jolt and a pit in my stomach. Why? Do you mamas with adopted kiddos ever ask WHY? Like so many of the things they do don’t make sense. The level of hypervigilance required to care for them is exhausting. Sometimes it all seems so unfair. I just want to be their mom, not their prison warden. But what do we do as moms? We wake up the next morning, and we start over. We give them a hug and a kiss and send them off to school with a full belly and a full lunch box. We contact their teachers to let them know they might be extra tired that day. And then they leave, and we cry. Or we vent to someone we trust. Or maybe we scream into a pillow. Or maybe it’s such a normal part of our lives at this point that we tuck it away with all the other feelings that we’ve stuffed down deep to deal with later. That’s what I did for a long time. I stuffed my feelings because I thought no one would ever understand this life I’m living. No one would ever understand if I told them how hard it is, how sometimes I question every decision I ever made but in the same thought can’t breathe because of how much I love them. No one would understand the anxiety I feel thinking about their futures. Will everything I’ve done be enough? Can I keep them from all the mistakes their bio parents made? Can I make them feel loved enough? Can I show them what unconditional love looks like? Cause sometimes they make it really hard. And you know what that got me, stuffing my feelings down deep? It got me high blood pressure, anxiety meds, and 60 extra pounds. Stuffing your feelings only gets you so far. And then your body rebels. I took care of my children, my five babies, four of them under four at the beginning, for seven years without taking care of myself at all. I neglected my body and stuffed my feelings as far down as they would go because I didn’t think anyone would understand. And because no one told me that raising adopted children is different than raising biological children. It’s not the same. They have different needs, have to be handled differently, disciplined differently; everything is different, and it’s even different between my three girls. Everything can’t be “fair” as some would see it, and sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of judgement that comes from that. For my biological children the very foundation of their existence is love, acceptance, nurture, from the moment they were conceived, whereas for my adopted children it’s rejection, separation, anxiety, and fear. The things I say or do with my biological children, especially where correction is concerned, just lands differently than with my adopted ones. Figuring all that out took years. I’m still figuring it out. In the past two years some things have changed, not my kids’ behavior, certainly, but the way I approach it. Don’t get me wrong, it is still exasperating when I wake up at 4am to a picnic in the bed and realize the lengths that they went to hide it and deceive me. Of course I am furious. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, I just want to SLEEP! So then what has changed? Well first of all, I have a therapist. Therapy is not something I ever saw value in until recently. I just couldn’t handle all the stress and anxiety anymore. I knew it wasn’t healthy, and my health was suffering. I had no idea the number of symptoms I was struggling with that were attributed to stress and anxiety. I would literally sit on the couch every night and feel like my throat was closing up and could feel my heartbeat all over my body. I had every cardiac and stress test, blood work, sleep studies, you name it. And still I had no idea what was wrong with me until my doctor told me it was anxiety. I have also read a lot about trauma and adoption, books that I now recommend to other mamas considering foster care and adoption BEFORE they begin their journey. Why? Because man oh man do I wish I had better prepared myself for the journey I was about to embark on nine years ago. Man oh man do I wish I had known how different it was going to be from the picture I had made up in my head. Back then I was sure I could love them into normal well-adjusted children, and that is simply not true. And I know that because I have loved them with every ounce of my heart since the moment I laid eyes on them. Thirdly, we have a LOT of help now that we didn’t have before. I’ll write more about that in another post, but my girls have therapists and behavioral assistants and psychiatrists, and teams of people at their schools who all help us. A year ago, all of those things seemed really really scary to me, but now they are a part of our normal everyday lives, and I am so grateful for all of them. It is such a blessing not to carry the weight of all their troubles on my shoulders alone. Finally, and most importantly, God has been changing me, shaping me and molding me into the person He wants me to be. He has used every single trial, argument, conversation, bad behavior, word of encouragement, and tear to change me. I am simply not the same person I was nine years ago when we began. And to be clear, I attribute absolutely none of that to myself. It is all a work of God in and through me. Let me just say if you are doing this without Jesus I am amazed, because I could not do it. I would have given up a hundred times without knowing that he is a sovereign God orchestrating all these things for my good. I can look back and see His hand all over my story and theirs, and it is a reminder to me that I made the right choice, that I followed His leading and that He will be faithful to complete the work he begun. So going back to all the questions I asked earlier, the answer is that I will never be enough for them. I will never be able to love them the way they need to be loved or keep them from making mistakes or secure their futures. Apart from Christ I am nothing. I will make the wrong decision every time. I will fail them. But something that I heard at a conference in February stopped me in my tracks, and now I’m gonna share it with you. “My not enoughness will drive my children to Jesus” because He is the only One who will ever be enough for them. So as long as I keep pushing them to Him, I have done all that I can and all that He has called me to do. And it’s the same for you, mama. Keep pointing them to Jesus. It’s all you can do.

Philippians 1:6 “And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.”

As always please contact me with questions. I’d LOVE to chat. Check out my resource page, and don’t forget to click SUBSCRIBE so you get an email when I publish new posts. Thanks for reading!