Sometimes we run out of things in our house. For instance: bread, ice cream, good snack food, patience, and any ingredient that I actually want to cook with…all things we might not have. Other things we are never out of: milk, some random vegetable in the crisper, chocolate something, Diet Coke, and someone with a bad attitude. Today I’m talking about a bad attitude. Mine.
My daughter has an attachment problem. I know this is true (except when I torture myself into believing everything is my fault and I’m a fraud and a terrible human being) and it doesn’t matter if someone else can see it or not see it or what we call it, or what caused it. It’s there and it has to be dealt with by me and in a constructive manner.
Except I’m not doing that. I cannot seem to summon up therapeutic parenting. Sometimes I cannot seem to summon up not being a jerk. “Basic parenting” is not enough, it’s not going to heal her heart, it’s not going to give us the mother-daughter relationship that I weep for. She needs more than I’m giving her and I know it and I’m still not doing it and it’s selfish.
I just can’t seem to move past it. No matter how many times I swear I’m going to do better, be better, love better. I’m not getting it done. I cry, I pray, I read the books, I talk to people doing it, I just can’t seem to do it myself.
Recently, I was wondering to myself “Why can’t you just do what you need to do?!” And very instantly in my heart, I knew it was because
I don’t want to go back there again.
I went into this adoption naïve, stupid, and misled, but with my heart big, unguarded, and soft. And then it was crushed.
I remember what it felt like in those first hours and days and months and I don’t want to go back to that. I remember what it was like to offer my heart freely and have it rejected in a way that you cannot understand unless you’ve been rejected by a hurt child like Boohoo*.
It took me a long time to build my heart back up to a place where I was a functional wife and parent again. Since that time, I realized that I’ve been guarding my heart closely where Boohoo is concerned. I know it’s weak, but I don’t want to be hurt like that again. I honestly don’t know if I can trust deep enough to give us a chance to redo that crappy beginning in a healing way. I don’t even know where to start so no encouraging platitudes in this post.
As I was realizing all this, I had the image of my heart that started as a little mud-pie, but then it was scorched by the sun and was dried out and brittle. The kind of mud-pie that even the slightest stick poke will have it disintegrating and crumbling. That’s me, a dried out mud-pie and I want to work things out, but I’m vulnerable and that’s terrifying. One stick poke and I just might crumble and I’ve been crumbled before and I don’t like it. The next image I had was of my heart as beef jerky: still edible, but dried out and chewy. You can see why I went with the first image.
This song by Casting Crowns, “Spirit Wind” speaks to what I need… “Holy Spirit, breath on me, breath your life in me” a new breath of life into dead bones. I think this is probably where God is going with this whole thing. I’m going to be asked to make this trust fall of faith into re-opening my heart and reclaiming the heart I had before, but better, more. In order to have the life I want with my family, my daughter, my God I will have to choose if I’m going to risk it all** to gain it all. I have to trust that what He’s asking me to do is more than I can do, but not more than He can do.
This is where the good Christian tells you that actually they did all this yesterday and it worked out perfectly and it was really easy they never had any doubts. What I’m going to say is, again, I don’t know if I’ll do it. I don’t know if I have that kind of faith. I’ve felt this pull before, never this strongly, but still. I know I have to choose it and that it can be ignored and I can just let my walls of self-defense fully encapsulate a shriveled up heart. I don’t know if I can risk it.
* Yes, I see the parallels between the way she was hurt and the way she hurt me in return. Yes, I know it’s not her fault. Yes, I know it’s a million times worse for her. Yes, I realize this post is entirely being told from my perspective about me, but if I don’t get my crap together, I’m not going to be able to help her get hers together. Yes, I need therapy. It’s on the to-do list. Seriously.
**It sounds melodramatic, I know. Ridiculous that an adult, a woman, a mother could be that afraid to fully love and embrace her daughter. I don’t know what to say about that except that even typing this post out is making me cry and feel like throwing up. Self-preservation is a strong instinct and what if I give mine up and try to reclaim that family I thought we would have and she isn’t ready to lay hers aside? That rejection and pain is horrifying. What if it asks more of me than I have to give? Then I just fail. What if I don’t do this? What if this is my last chance before my heart is hard or her heart is? How many times can we hurt each other before there’s just no more chances?
