I recently read this: “No one puts their children in a boat unless
is it safer than the land they are on.”
It moved my mind to push past the many times I wonder why refugees brave
the waters in overloaded boats to die horrible drowning deaths on a gamble to
make it to a new land…..that phrase gives me new understanding.
As we’ve struggled with our foster children we’ve adopted in
these teenager years, I ponder that phrase as I see it in their eyes and
lives. Recently our daughter ran off to
live with her birth mother. 6 weeks
later she returned angry at her birth mother and refusing to speak to her. During this time so much happened, but at one
point my husband and I were able to sit with her birth mother, talk and share
stories and see our shared daughter’s baby/early childhood pictures and realize
we ALL loved her the same. But she was
too alike to her birth mother to be able to live with her and hearing her birth
mother say “she needs you because you are stricter” was the same as she needs
structure….rules….our kind of love. What
a HUGE sacrifice this lady made….she recognized something many birth parents
aren’t able to grasp.
While I dream that one day she will accept her birth mother and
talk to her again, and be OK with TWO Mom’s….this journey has taken me outside
of my comfort zone as we continue to deal with her lack of self esteem and
ability to recognize true wholesome love from us and her birth mother. The journey isn’t over. The running isn’t done….I pray it will be….but
I can’t control it and have released her to God to watch her when life is too
hard and running is all she knows to do.
No matter how unsafe the boat is – she believes her land is less safe so
she gets in that boat and runs to a near drowning before coming back. It is so
horrifying to watch!
I hurt for her pain.
I hurt that she didn’t get the relief she wanted after 8 years of
yearning for her biological family that
the search arrived and she burned those bridges hard as she let loose of 8
years of anger that raged in her being against these people she has blood ties
to. She looked into the face of her
birth mother who was a mirror of herself with only fog around the edges to make
her look different and couldn’t deal with the reality of her own life. Acceptance. She still feels lost no matter
how many life jackets we throw her.
We journey on – sometimes when the stress is high and my
sight fogs over the purpose of this journey we chose, I pray that God will
bring us to the new land together and we journey on in that hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment