From an email yesterday, “Sometimes you don't make me look forward to my future...” The sender is a good friend of mine, an adoptive mother of a large family and she knows a great deal about my family. If I spend ten minutes a day blogging, I’m only sharing a tiny percentage of our real time events.

Right now I’m terribly unhappy about a recent occurrence in the life of a grown child who won’t let me talk about what’s happening. He’s not in trouble, it’s not a disaster, it’s just something that’s totally out of our control at the moment and our entire family is collectively upset and dismayed.

Yesterday the same child, now a grown man, and I squabbled on the phone angrily, both of us struggling with these recent events and taking it out on each other. Not necessarily a smart response, but a safe one. He knows I can take it, he knows I love him, he knows I’ll always be there for him, and he knows I’m terribly torn up at the moment so I snarled back at him.

My friend has watched from afar, seen my children make huge progress and also commit boneheaded wrongdoings as well. She’s seen me with my grandchildren; she’s shared in the joy and heartbreaking aspects of having a large family. Her children are now barely hitting their twenties while I have several already into their thirties. Like mine, hers also were adopted as older children from the foster care system; traumatized children who seem to fight against us the entire way to adulthood.

However she’s seen us survive all the blows and draw closer together as a family. Heck, that’s what makes a family; the weddings, births, funerals, events, celebrations and a shared life with all the ups and downs. I don’t blog about some of our most upsetting events, sometimes it takes us years to work through stuff, often it is not until a problem has been resolved that I will only then share it, and even then only to show others in the same unfortunate, leaky boat, that it can be done.

Sometimes from friends I also hear, “I can’t wait until …”

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