Born in My Heart: A Bittersweet Adoption Blessing A Memoir of Adopting Through Foster Care
Prologue
Now, Let's Be Honest
Winter 2012:
For once, the air is void of screams.
I examine my children’s faces glowing in the flickering light: Eli, a tall, lanky boy with blue eyes, reads a book and snuggles between his sisters. Paige, a petite 3-year-old with blonde hair, drapes herself across his shoulder, a touch too close. Four-year-old Payton bites her nails as she examines the book, leaning back a bit too far.
I hold onto this peaceful moment, filing it away for the times to come, those times that are a nightmare from which I cannot wake.
Because things are rarely this peaceful. More often than not there is yelling, screaming, tears, and so much noise that earplugs don’t help.
When my husband, Andrew, and I began the process of adopting through foster care, we didn’t realize raising traumatized children would be so difficult. We thought all they needed was love.
We were wrong.
Andrew and I always applauded each other for doing a great job raising Eli. He was an easygoing child who understood boundaries and the consequences for crossing them. Therefore, it would stand to reason our experienced parenting would heal any damaged child we adopted, molding her into an extension of our family.
We were so humbly proud that we wanted to adopt an older child and were willing to tackle almost any problem, from any background. For practical reasons, we couldn’t have a child in a wheelchair, and I didn’t think a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder would be a good fit for our family.
“I’m too selfish to raise a child like that,” I told Andrew. It was probably the most honest I was with myself during that time.
Andrew and I always wanted to adopt through foster care, wanted to make a difference by taking in a child who needed a home.
We walked down the long road to adoption, taking fifteen hours of foster care training and humoring the foster-adopt agency as we sat through parenting classes. We wrote autobiographies, which included everything we’d done wrong and every horrible thing we experienced. Then we relived these times during multiple interviews. Eli was interviewed too, as much as a four-year-old could be. We underwent fingerprinting, physical examinations, and background checks. We were forced to be vulnerable, the social workers invading every intimate detail of our lives.
People would tell us how selfless we were to take in a foster child. They’d say, “It takes a special person to do what you’re doing; I could never adopt a foster child.”
They meant adopt a potentially screwed up child.
I’d shake my head and say, “No, no, I’m not that special, I’m just doing what God has called me to do.” But my ego absorbed the accolades and I shared our decision to adopt with anyone who would listen, just to stroke it more.
I went to hell and back over the next few years. My ego was dragged through the mud, tarred and stoned, ripped wide open until only tears of humility could sew it shut. I messed up, not because of what I did but because of my motives for doing it.
And I’ve paid for it. God, have I paid for it.
But the most difficult questions I’ve had to relive are these: When it’s all said and done, was this the right choice for Andrew?
Or Eli?
Or me?
Or was it even the right choice for my daughters?