My mother’s life is a mystery to me yet she is with me always never more so then on Christmas morning. Thank you mother for everything!
We are family…
Thanksgiving comes around and the holidays seem to be a magical time. We carol into Christmas and somehow loads seem to be lifted for a short time only to return us to where ever we were headed anyway. Perhaps the let down is attached to the magical thinking and wishing for Santa to bring us what we want and need. Maybe the real purpose of the holiday is to give respite from the challenges we all face. What ever belief system you choose to embrace know that all the best things…
When is a person not endowed by their creator with those allegedly inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
When they’re adopted that’s when. Seemingly for adopted people the world colludes in your statutory disenfranchisement.
Surely the ability to lay claim to one’s lineage or at the very less have access to the legitimate original documents after a time is in the spirit of a free and open society. Yet so many are denied this most personal of all information by…
Take 15 5-9 year olds put them on a double decker commuter bus for seven to eight hours with three teenagers providing supervision and what do you get?
A school bus without a matron, a brake, or destination in other words at least one of the outer rings of hell. Just when you think the image of preteens swinging from tv monitors and seat backs, running the aisles inside a giant torpedo flying down route 80 at sixty five miles per hour was too surreal to be believed the traffic comes to a…
As I interpret what was in my mother’s heart the truth that matters most to me is when the words wouldn’t come her eyes smiled and I was nurtured.
My mother’s heart had no voice yet I heard every word. My mother’s heart beat silent and I learned to leave no love untold.
Just in case you were wondering what it’s going to take to parent a traumatized child let me be the first to warn you. It will at times be the hardest job you’ll ever undertake. It will make demands on every aspect of your life and give you reason to question every decision and thought. It will leave you changed forever and that’s a fact.
The media either glamorizes or satirizes parenthood only occasionally do we take an honest look at the complex chain of circumstances and influences that…
At the heart of every adoption:
A family has been torn apart.
A child has lost his bearings in the world; often its childhood identity and innocence as well.
Parent(s) devastated by the loss of their child and/or their role in it carrying scars forward for future generations.
A new family dynamic is forged under duress, always seeking acceptance based many times on a foundation of spoken and unspoken denial, lies, self-deception and misinformation.
Adoption is not having a baby. We…
When it hurts to breathe. When the pain becomes a constant state that doesn’t seem to subside. You are probably depressed. It’s important that many of these issues are addressed before we reach this level of function. Aside from the misery a depressed individual is emotionally crippled. Often they are incapable of mustering enough energy to be proactive in their placement.
Many foster/adoptive children come to us in this state and we often misinterpret chronic depression for ambivalence and…
Although parenting is not an intellectual exercise it is crucial that initially your drive to provide foster care be thoroughly thought out. Due to the emotionally charged nature of foster parenting it is imperative that you consider your intentions and expectations from both an intellectual and an emotional level.
Stage 1 We must make an intellectual commitment to fostering a child.
Stage 2 We must then make an emotional commitment to parenting a child.
Stage 3 We must then…
I remember the day you appeared to me:
beaming smile and twinkling eyes.
loving spirit
warming the room filling it with charm.
I was dark and vacant
in the days before you:
bitter, confused and afraid.
Smoldering embers of a benevolent
soul kept alive and nurtured by your example.
Loving me so at a time when at my core
I believed that I was unlovable; lighting the way
that I might discover the joy of living.
Standing in the tides of triumphant self-realization
I have finally begun to see.
To see with new eyes the
eternal truth that is my birth.
You have been my salvation:
my direction and my obsession.
I am no longer walking alone along the shaded path
that love draws from nothing and everything that
we are.
