Fostering: ‘In the moment’ loving

Daniel Donaldson posted this in Stories on Wednesday, August 13, 2008  

It’s been over 2 weeks now since the little girl came to our home in an ambulance. She has the biggest, darkest eyes you will ever see and is so given to smiling and cooing. Truly she is the most adorable three month old baby.

She is our first foster placement and while she is such a joy the experience is not without work. She came by ambulance because she had to stay in a horizontal position on a pillow. Both of her legs were broken. She had a fractured rib and a couple of other injuries. We kept hearing over and over again about how much force it must have taken to result in such injuries. Something about baby’s bones being like green tree branches… very bendable and hard to break. We still haven’t heard the story of how she was hurt. I’m not sure that I want to.

Her biological parents aren’t giving any information. A relative has come forward requesting to be considered to take care of this little girl. If they pass their homestudy, most likely she will leave our home and go to her relatives.

The question we have been asked so much, which I imagine a lot of foster parents must get, is, “How do you keep a balance of loving her and not holding her too close since she may not stay?” I think it is a natural question to ask; after all, how can anyone relate to that who hasn’t walked through it personally? It’s a good question… it’s a hard question.

What I have said is the balance is not like that of a scale, where the increase of one side (or awareness) diminishes the opposing side. Rather, I think it feels more like a yo-yo in the hands of a novice. I myself am such a novice so I speak from metaphorical experience. You see, when I hold this little girl, feed her, wipe her chin, make her smile and watch her eyes light up, it is wonderful and natural and smooth (like when the yo-yo is magically doing what it is supposed to). Then every once in a while I think, ‘she might not stay forever.’ This feels like a radio bulletin interrupting a song, and the result is a sort of jerking feeling around my chest, much like a yo-yo being clumsily jerked upward. At times I feel a little sick from it. And then I remember that there is nothing I can do to change the future, whatever it may be. I have been given today, and so I hold her tighter and give her another kiss and try to make her laugh more often.

It’s the same response I would have if I heard that my biological son was going to be taken away, perhaps from an illness or something. To say ‘I would feel sad’ would be such an understatement; but at the same time I would be keenly aware of every second I had left with him. While I certainly think the duty of a foster parent is, in part, to remember that the child is not fully ‘yours’ so long as they are under ‘foster’ status, I also don’t know how anyone could ‘guard their heart’ from loving a child. Loving a child as though they are your own does not require them to actually ‘be’ yours, though at times this may prove more difficult than others. And yet, at the end of the day this baby is in God’s hands and no one else’s. Just like my biological son. Just like everyone else in my life I hold dear. And honestly, shouldn’t that be a comfort to our hearts? That is, at least, what I keep reminding my own heart.

Practical tips we have tried to help our home to love ‘in the moment’:

What helpful tips have you used in your home to help you and/or your household with loving ‘in the moment’?

What It Means to “Truly Love”

Michael Monroe posted this in Stories on Sunday, July 6, 2008  

I have been thinking a lot about this question of late, especially as it relates to the four children I call “mine.” Pondering such a deep and unbounded question leads to thoughts about so many different aspects of their story and my relationship with and to them.

Because each of my children were adopted this question necessarily brings me ‘face to face’ with the reality of my children’s birthparents, in particular their birthmothers. It causes me to consider and reconsider the undeniable role each of these women played in giving my children life and their relationship with my children (and my children with them) – both past, present and future.

Honestly I don’t think most adoptive parents spend enough time really looking at adoption from the perspective of birthparents. I think this may be particularly true of adoptive dads. With the ever growing prevalence of open adoption there is little doubt that birthparents may be more and better understood now than ever before. However, I still think that more of us should spend time unpacking this view of the adoption kaleidoscope. I know that is certainly the case for me.

As I continue to sift through what it means to truly love my children the thought provoking article by Miroslav Volf below came to my mind. I came across the article by Volf several years ago, just after reading his amazing book Free of Charge. Volf, himself an adoptive father, tells of his own face to face experience with one of his children’s birthmothers, and how it reshaped his view of his children’s birthmothers and gave him new insight into what it means for him to “truly love” his children.

She Who Truly Loves
-Miroslav Volf

The first thing I saw was a tear–an unforgettable giant tear in the big brown eye of a ten-year-old girl. Then I saw tears in her mother’s eyes. In these tears, just enough joy was mixed with pain to underscore the pain’s severity: joy at seeing him, their three-month-old brother and son, and intense pain at having kissed him good-bye when he was just two days old; the ache that he, flesh of their flesh, was being brought to them for a brief visit by two strangers who are now his parents; the affliction of knowing that the joy of loving him as a mother and sister usually do will never be theirs.

The joy and the pain of those tears led me to a repentance of sorts. My image of mothers who place their children for adoption was not as bad as my image of the fathers involved, but it was not entirely positive either. I could not shake the feeling that there was something deficient in the act. The taint of “abandonment” marred it, an abandonment that was understandable, possibly even inescapable and certainly tragic, but abandonment nonetheless. To give one’s child to another is to fail in the most proper duty of a parent: to love no matter what.

Somewhere in my mind, a famous verse from Isaiah colored the way I was reading birth mothers’ actions: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isa. 49:15). A good mother, I thought, ought to be like Israel’s God, absolutely unable to “give up” her child (cf. Hos. 11:8).

But a mother is not God, only a fragile human being living in a tragic world. So why think immediately of abandonment because she decides to place her child for adoption? The tears of our son’s birth mother and the actions which, like a beautiful plant, were watered by those tears, suggested that my view of at least some birth mothers may be not only mistaken but also morally flawed. I needed to repent and alter the image.

Later, as I was reflecting on those tears, I came across a passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “Witness the pleasure that mothers take in loving their children. Some mothers put their infants out to nurse, and though knowing and loving them do not ask to be loved by them in return, if it be impossible to have this as well, but are content if they see them prospering; they retain their own love for them even though the children, not knowing them, cannot render them any part of what is due to a mother.” The text comes from Aristotle’s discussion of friendship. He employs the example to make plausible that “in its essence friendship seems to consist more in giving than receiving affection.” For Aristotle, a “birth mother” manifests the kind of love characteristic of a true friend, a love exercised for that friend’s sake, not for benefits gained from the relationship.

“It is hard to know that you have a child in the world, far away from you,” wrote our son’s birth mother in her first letter to us. It is hard because love passionately desires the presence of the beloved. And yet it was that same love that took deliberate and carefully studied steps that would lead to his absence. In a letter she wrote for him to read when he grows up, she tells him that her decision to place him for adoption was made for his own good. “I did it for you,” she wrote repeatedly and added, “Some day you will understand.”

She loved him for his own sake, and therefore would rather suffer his absence if he flourished than enjoy his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover’s heart. My image of birth mothers had changed: “she who does not care quite enough” has become “she who truly loves.”

When we parted, a smile had replaced the tears on the face of our son’s birth mother. Now it was my turn to cry. Back at home, with him in one arm and an open album she made for him in the other, I shed tears over the tragedy of her love. Despite an intense affection for our son–no, because of such affection–I thought there was something profoundly wrong about his being with us and not with her. In a good world, in a world in which the best things are not sometimes so terribly painful, he and she would delight and thrive in each other’s love.

The encounter with our son’s birth mother left an indelible mark not so much on my memory as on my character. She helped me articulate what it means to be a good parent. A vision of parenting that was buried under many impressions and opinions emerged clearly on the horizon of my consciousness. I ought to love him the way she loved him, for his own sake, not for mine. I must not pervert my love into possession. I can hold onto him only if I let go of him.

But how can I let go of him whom I long so intensely to hold? The only way I know is by placing him in the arms of the same God from whom we received him. I remembered another deeply pained woman–a woman who suffered not so much because she had to give away her child but because, like my wife and me, she needed a miracle to receive a child. It was Hannah, the mother of Samuel. She was given the child she so desperately desired because she was willing to let go of him (1 Sam. 1:11).

Even those of us who will not set our children “before God as Nazirites,” as Hannah did, will love them best if we hold them–in God’s arms.

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School.

COPYRIGHT 1998.  Reproduced with permission from the August 26, 1998 issue of Christian Century (www.christiancentury.org).

Mahaney on Leadership and Family Vacations

Jason Kovacs posted this in Resources & Links on Friday, June 27, 2008  

With summer officially here it is the season of vacations for most families. C.J. Mahaney of Sovereign Grace Ministries provides some wisdom and a challenge for fathers in this short series on the Sovereign Grace Blog. Click here to read the whole post.

Cowboys’ Ware Fulfills a Challenge for Fatherhood

Matt Donovan posted this in Stories & Resources & Links on Monday, June 16, 2008  

Images of Grace Photography

Demarcus Ware and his wife, Taniqua, just adopted their daughter, Marely. Great story. Beautiful family.

(via nyt.com)