I thought about Nancy’s post all morning as she described her purpose in parenting.

“I am very driven and very goal oriented. I want to see what I consider to be measurements of success. While I can intellectually wrap my brain around the concept that success might simply be that I kept my child safe for 18 years that is not what I had in mind as my definition of parenting success.”

I can hardly echo more than a big, “Amen,” to that. I find it almost unbearably sad as well since I too once had such high hopes and big dreams, audacious enough to think that I’d work eight jobs if necessary in order to enable 39 kids to graduate from college.

What I failed to factor in, or to take into account, would be ability level, motivation, emotional issues and, worse yet, the mental diagnoses that I would later encounter as I adopted children from some fairly marginal circumstances. Several have birth mothers or fathers with significant mental disorders, all had birth parents who either drank or took drugs during pregnancy, and they all suffered instability, abuse and neglect for years before they joined our family.

Some days are considered good days if I just get everyone to accomplish minimal tasks, great days are when there have not been any fights, outbursts or uncontrollable rages. Yet all of my children have made progress, it’s just that there’s so very far yet to go.

Quite a few of my children have made it to college. They are both strong-willed and a witness to the theory of positive expectancy. Five have graduated, one with a Master’s Degree, but I also have one in a psychiatric hospital, one in jail, one in a juvenile justice therapeutic program, three in remedial summer school programs and some in the armed forces; the list goes on, both negative and positive.

So maybe I can up the ante, keep them safe and work on their feelings and understanding that they are loved by me. That alone can take years and years.

The obvious quote of, “whatever you do for the least of them…” always comes to my mind, strengthening me and pointing me in the right direction at all times.

Not all of my kids have even been able to successfully graduate from high school, but those that could not, or would not, have earned GEDs at least, all but one so far.

I still feel that my children are capable of doing more than they have done; their effort doesn’t equal their ability at times. I look over the results of criterion based testing and I see that they can do more than they do. They are improving as I continue to expect that of them, as I continue to encourage and cheer them on so far.

But if I limited my children by the “facts” that they came here with, I’d be doing them a disservice. There’s so much more that they are capable of, and keeping them safe for as many years as is possible, is necessary and sometimes all there is to be done. Often we don’t see their successes until after they flounder through their early twenties, or at least that’s been my experience.