Clearly I know very little about raising traumatized children. I am flying by the seat of my pants with my 39 kids. It isn’t easy, there are no instruction manuals, and I need a lot of outside help.

I’m not afraid either to fail or to make mistakes. It takes an ability to do both. It takes my own willingness to discard my great ideas that didn’t work and to move on to those that do. Or to just continue trying to discover those that do.

I’ll meet tomorrow with a new psychiatrist that has joined the psychologists group that I’ve been using for ten years now. Two different psychologists come to our house, remarking it’s nearly like a psych lab what with all the issues, interactions and challenges that we face. Someone needs to write a book, be it they or me, someone should.

We have a superb speech pathologist at the elementary school, excellent special education teachers, Student Support Teams, guidance counselors and regular teachers. We have a wonderful husband-wife pediatric team, a top notch family dentist, a superlative church with brilliant, mentoring pastors, and I seek out only those friends that I trust and can learn from.

How can everything be this rosy? I’ve methodically searched, winnowed and interviewed for what we’ve needed. That’s my job as a mama. We’ve made changes over the years, found better resources, we moved into this particular house in this specific school district 15 years ago and we changed churches ten years ago. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do, my children expect me to take the lead, to show the way and to guide them.

I need guidance also. This genius that I’d watched on TV last night says he’s read over 4,000 leadership and inspirational books, that he’s never actually had a face-to-face mentor but that he’s learned everything through reading. I don’t have time to pick up the phone and call Nancy Spoolstra each night to pick her mind but I can read her thoughts here.

I am spectacularly blessed have an exceptionally accomplished, very experienced and baptized by fire, local adoption caseworker that is a confidant of mine. She can cut to the chase in a split second and discern what is really going on over here at my house when I’m up to my neck in acting-out behaviors. She doesn’t always have the answers but who does? Her honesty in that area has allowed me to be open about my own struggles. She told me, years ago, that it also allows my children to understand that making mistakes is acceptable as well, none of us have to strive to appear perfect, and we just have to keep trying to get better.

That is infinitely gratifying to me.