BIGNATESWIFE's blog

I am so relieved that Christmas is over. The boys had such a hard time coping with the past shooting right to the surface and overtaking their thoughts. They really gave us a run for our money for a while there. Now we are settling into our new routine. The boys are back in public school for the time being, allowing me a much needed break from wearing so many hats in their lives. It is such a relief to be able to be just their mom and not have to be their teacher and their friend and their therapist 24/7. They are enjoying their new schools and are adjusting fairly well. T tested at grade level in writing this week and I couldn't have been prouder. Last year at this time T could hardly write a complete sentence and what he did write, you couldn't read.

I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life. It is Christmas Day at 7:30 pm and I am done. Done. Done. Done. Christmas is so hard on these kids. There are so many Christmases past that bring about anything but fond memories of family and friends. My kids are stressed out and wound up. They are acting as though they've forgotten everything we've taught them. Z is new here and is so off course. Sometimes I get so frustrated at their choices and saddened by their lack of concern for others. I feel as though I've reached my limit and I'm so, so tired. The worst part is that most of this truly isn't their fault. Do you remember being able to process emotion and trauma at age 9 or 12? They have so many adult experiences and so little ability to process those experiences.

Within the next 45 days Z will be moving into our home and become a regular part of our lives. Yesterday we sat down, all four of us, and discussed our family purpose, otherwise known as a mission statement.

I'm sitting on my couch next to my sweet husband and we are watching our two beautiful boys eating their nighttime snack before bed sitting on the carpet in the living room. It has taken me a while to warm up to Z. Part of that has been trying to protect T. T is often very worried that Z is here to replace him. He needs constant reassurance that he isn't going anywhere and that we still love and want him. For much of T's life when another child arrives, it would be just a matter of time before T would be leaving. He is so scared that I will love Z more and that I will forget about him. On the other side of things, Z is worried that we won't like him and we'll decide not to take him in as part of our family.

Today is Blog Action Day, a day meant to bring about awareness of poverty throughout the world. So often I think that we focus on the poverty existing in underdeveloped countries across oceans and time lines. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word poverty is the deteriorating family structure in America. So many of the children who enter foster care and never leave are from homes that sit way below the poverty line. Poverty in America means drugs, crime and promiscuity, just as it means those things in other nations.Read more

Life is crazy. I know we all say that, and to a certain degree, most of us mean it.

I was just looking at a slide show of all of us in the court room on T's adoption day. Sometimes pictures can reveal what you couldn't see with your own eyes. We were all so happy, that was obvious, but the thing I hadn't noticed was how confident our young son was. On the day I first met him, he was shy and withdrawn. He was so skinny he was almost emaciated. He didn't say much and he seemed to be a bit afraid of us. All things you could probably say about a two year old meeting strangers for the first time. Except T wasn't two, he was eleven. Everything about his life up to that point had stripped him of his innocence, his dignity, his heart. He was a shell of a kid. Truth be known, we had very little to do with T's transformation.

I am 27 years old. My son is nearly 12. I was not a teen mom. In fact, I married at 24 and T, my sweet boy, was born to me at 26. Our adoption worker defined it as a chemical adoption. It is the term he uses for the phenomenon that happens when a woman sees a child and instantly becomes his mother. Really, when one thinks about it, that is how biological families work. That small baby is placed in his mother's arms and instantly, at first sight of him, she becomes his mother. No one thought it was possible for us to love a child who was not "our own", let alone a child who was 11 years old. Most people thought we were certifiable. But we knew from the beginning that God was calling us to children who had been left behind, the unwanted.