Wracking my over-stressed brain for some positive posts to write about in the adoption of older children, I am feeling as if my negativity lately isn’t helping anyone to cope with their own family issues.

Or is it?

It isn’t easy being the parent of a child who spent many years in the foster care system. Why would I want to misrepresent that peculiar reality?

Foster care was usually much safer for my children than the birth families they were once removed from due to abuse, neglect and substance abuse.

What is slowly dawning on me is that all of my children were removed from homes that had rampant criminal activity going on at all times.

In foster care they were taught many of the normal life skills that they’d not yet learned, small stuff like using a fork or sitting at a table to eat.

Eventually being freed for adoption, they’d find themselves living with me – a schoolteacher, church-going, long-time mama – the complete opposite of what they may have experienced the first ten years of their lives.

Guess who’s in for the shock? That’d be me.

The children move in with me, all their self-defenses firmly entrenched and their reasoning abilities skewed by years of inconsistency and instability. They trust no one.

Silly me.

I welcome them with open arms, clean sheets on their beds, freshly painted walls in their rooms, and three square meals a day, a superb school system, a warm and welcoming church, a supportive community and excellent therapy available for them.

They rage in response.

On every level all that I have offered them scares them. They don’t believe that they deserve good things and they want to make me pay for offering this up to them.

What if they allow themselves to trust me and then I dump them like everyone else has done? By now it has happened so many times to them that there’s no way on God’s green earth they’d believe that this lady means what she says when she talks about love and security.

But I do mean it.

Years and years and years go by; I cry, sweat, work, suffer, endure and eventually find love and pride. That’s why I have to use and demonstrate the negativity because if I told other parents it was easy, I’d be doing them a disservice.

It is not easy, but I’m still standing... alongside some wonderful children.

Photo Credit Cindy Bodie