What about my Bio Kids?

Once you become a parent every decision you make must be thought through in a different light. The choices you make no longer affect only you and your spouse. They affect your child as well. It’s a sobering reality. Mamas, do you remember the first time you realized that you carried another human being inside of your body? I do. I remember the sudden and instantaneous awareness that every single thing I ate, drank, or did might affect my unborn baby. In a moment’s time, I became a mother. Other women become mothers in different ways, some through foster care and adoption, some as stepmothers, some by different means. No matter how you become a mother you are instantly aware that everything you do now affects someone else. This is a question I get a lot, especially from people who have some insight into our daily life, “But what about your bio kids?” 

I have a few thoughts regarding this question. My first thought is that I typically do not differentiate in my mind between my bio and adopted children. As I said in my About Me page, our children are all equally ours and equally loved. And while this is true, I won’t lie and say that sometimes, on the really bad days, I haven’t considered that maybe we have done them a disservice in causing them to experience all the trauma, difficulty, and bad behaviors that have come with adoption. Sometimes, on the really hard days, I have allowed myself a brief moment to lay my head on my husband’s shoulder after the kids are in bed, cry for a few minutes, and ask him if we made the wrong decision. And the conclusion we come to every single time is, No. God doesn’t make mistakes, and these girls have clearly come to us by His hand. 

When we first felt called to foster care we had to decide if this was the right decision for our entire family. This included our daughter, who was six at the time. She desperately wanted a sibling and would often cry and ask me why Jesus wouldn’t put a baby in my belly. This question plagued me and often prompted my tears as well because I longed for another child. When we first presented the idea of foster care to her we told her that there were kids whose mommies and daddies were sick, and they needed families to take care of them. Sometimes their mommies and daddies got better and the kids would go home, but sometimes they wouldn’t get better and they would stay. Her immediate response without missing a beat was, why would we not help those kids mom? Even as I continued to explain that we could possibly have a child living in our home for a long time who might be reunited with their bio family, she insisted we should help. I believe that this was the Lord removing the very first and most important obstacle in our adoption journey. Even though she was only six, it felt important to us that our whole family was on board with this transition, with this decision that would affect us all.  

Secondly, when a child is born into a family with kids from different backgrounds, they know it as normal, so for our son, who was the last one to join our family and the second one to be born to us biologically, this is the only normal he knows. He doesn’t know a family life that’s calm and chaos free. This is his normal, and he has adapted well to it. Do I sometimes still wonder if it is causing him residual trauma? Of course! But we try very hard to take all our kids’ personalities and moods and dispositions into account daily. If any one of them is struggling at any given time I try to slow down and help them to regulate. With him I sometimes realize that he is extra whiny or angry that day and so I try to stop what I’m doing and hold him on my lap or play with him for a few minutes. I realize this sometimes with the girls too. If they are all cranky and snappy with each other I have to literally put whatever I am doing on hold and give them my attention. This is with all kids, but it is especially important with kids from hard places and for kids in a home with kids from hard places. This means that a lot of weeks I pay someone to clean my house or fold my laundry, and I definitely order dinner more than I’d like. I have had to let a lot of things go so that I can be more present with my kids, which is very hard for me because I really like a clean house, and a clean house helps to regulate MY nervous system. But people are more important than clean houses, and motherhood is my ministry. A friend once told me that one day my house will be really clean and really quiet, and I’ll miss the chaos. I’m still not certain that I’ll miss the chaos, but I know it’s true that I’ll miss my babies. So for now I will pour myself into them and try to let the other stuff come second. 

Finally, God is using all of these things to shape and grow all of us into people who look more like Him. Through the chaos and the crazy, He IS working. He is sanctifying all of us and molding us. He is instilling into my oldest daughter traits and qualities that I didn’t have until I was in my thirties. He is teaching my husband and I and our children what it looks like to love unconditionally, even when someone seems unlovable. He is showing all of us how to be less selfish. There are many days when something is planned and we all have to pivot because someone is dysregulated. It’s disappointing for everyone, but the Lord is giving us opportunities to talk about what it looks like to die to yourself, to give up what is easy and comfortable to love another person. Those conversations are pivotal to who my children will become. They are pivotal to who I am becoming. As difficult as it is some days I am quite often reminded how much I have changed since we began this journey. This is due to nothing I have done but to the work the Lord is doing in me. I have learned so much about trauma and the brain and how to help dysregulated children to calm down when they are spiraling out of control, but I have also learned so much about what it looks like to love when you get nothing in return, when your love is rejected. Those moments, the moments of rejection, are when we are forged through fire. Those moments are the ones that shape and mold you and make you dig deep and ask yourself if you really do love unconditionally. Those moments are the ones that make me more like Jesus, because they cause me to look to Him and to love another person not because of anything they did to earn it but solely for the purpose of loving, solely for the purpose of showing someone what unconditional love looks like. It’s what Jesus did for me, and it’s my chance to show my children, all of them, that they matter, that some people won’t abandon them, that their Dad and I will love them and fight for them no matter what. So in answer to the question, “what about your bio kids?” I guess I would say that while their lives would certainly be more ‘typical’ ‘predictable’ ‘normal’ and I suppose easier according to the world had we not adopted, they would not be better. They would not be learning all the things they are learning now about how to be a better human, about how to love and care for another person simply because it is what we are called to do. In my estimation, ALL of my children are a little bit ahead of the game in that area because every single day they have to make the choice to love and forgive and then to forgive again. It’s not easy, but it is good.