Saying Goodbye to Rose

This weekend Rose will be moving to Ohio to live with her Great Aunt.  We have been told that the Aunt is interested in maintaining contact with us.  We shall see what the future brings.

When I thought about what to write about saying goodbye, I thought about the realities of that day last month.  We drove to her foster home and got to spend a bit less than an hour playing with her, taking a ton of pictures in group and individual settings with each child.  We prayed over her.  We avoided talking about the reality that we may never see her again.  We purposely packed the day with activities such as walking through a race car museum, buying shoes for every child (uff da!), doing our monthly shopping at Wal Mart and Sam's Club (it ended up being 2 months of shopping and, again, UFF DA!).  We also splurged and took the kids to a sit down restaurant for the first time.  Faith was quite curious about the difference between a "fast food" restaurant and that this was a "slow food" restaurant;)  She also was excited that we had glass glasses to drink from lol!  Thankfully there were tv's with football games playing to keep the kids occupied while we waited.  We also laughed about how the waiter looked like Anikin Skywalker.

But sharing about the day we said goodbye does not really encompass the truth of what it has been like to say goodbye to Rose.  It has, by far, been the most painful experience of my adult life.  My parent's divorce when I was 4 and losing my close friend to a drunk driver when I was 16 happened before I knew how to really grieve and think through situations and thus were devastating, but were different.  I was not a Christian then nor was I mature enough to really consider implications of anything more than the grief I felt at the time. I thought I would do better this time, but I grieved just as poorly as I did then.

In two weeks Rose turns 1.  We received the phone call telling us she was 1 day old and asking if we would like the placement and likely adoption.  This journey has been almost a year in the making.  I thought I would share about the heart realities of saying goodbye to Rose: biological sibling to our Superman and Faith and 5th in the sibling strip born to the mother.  Talking about this places me in a very vulnerable position, and I really, really dislike doing that.  But I am hopeful that it may help someone else who is grieving as so many other people have posted vulnerably about themselves and it has helped my healing process.

The time we had Rose in a nutshell: she was born 12/4/2012.  We got the call from HHS the next day.  She had to remain in the NICU for 10 days due to choices her birth mom made that affected Rose negatively.  We had given up our foster care license 7 months before and got moving on the process immediately to reinstate it.  We contacted a friend who had a friend who agreed to be Rose's placement until we could get licensed.  Our finger prints were sent off to the FBI but no one had news on them for months.  I finally called them and discovered that they had been sitting on someone's desk with HHS for 7 weeks and no one had moved them on.  Because we were not licensed when Rose went to court, her placement went elsewhere despite the fact that it was HHS's fault that we were not licensed.

During that time frame of mid-Dec to mid- Feb we were able to do respite with Rose and had her for a total of 7 weeks.  It was an emotional time where we wanted to believe she was staying, but the license was not approved.  Then a father was named and the HHS worker decided that she did not agree with something I said during a visit and caused a variety of hoops to be created for us to prove that we were capable being a good family for our children's biological sibling.  

In mid-February we were told she needed to be moved to another foster home and await the DNA testing with the alleged dad.  This took a couple of months.  Then he began visitation and the process began for his mother to obtain custody.  That did not move forward so the great aunt was identified, and a month ago she was approved.  We did monthly visitation during that time and advocated strongly with HHS and her Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) for us to be the placement.  The foster home she was in was excellent and they (and many, many others) have been praying fervently for God's Best for Rose.  They, too, are grieving deeply during this time.

When I look back on the past 10 months it was, essentially, a very dark time.  After losing her in February I really lost myself.  I had many nightmares about what could happen to her and therefore could not sleep.  Having worked in prisons for 9 years my mind is a fertile ground for imagining the worse in less than optimal homes.  However, knowing the reality of what has happened to our children, Rose's siblings, made it all the more real and graphic in my mind.  I cried a lot initially.  I considered all of the injustices of this world due to sin and utter depravity.  I thought about the endless tortures that can happen to a defenseless child physically, spiritually, and emotionally.  I thought a lot about the realities of adoption - people want to believe it is such a beautiful experience but it is usually one interspersed with loss, grief, trauma, and pain.  I grieved for Superman and Faith who were daily praying fervently that we would get to adopt her.  She is their only biological family that they know other than the two siblings who were adopted to another family also during this past year who have moved to a far away state.  Superman remembers what his life was like before he came to our home.  He remembers and has deep fear for his sister experiencing the same.  I discovered their mother's facebook page.  Her posts make me shudder and nauseated.  She is 25 I believe.  How many more children will she do this to?  I pondered all of my children's biological siblings that I know about and don't know about and wondered about their lives.

I tried to keep my thoughts positive.  I tried to tell myself all of the truths of God's character.  I repeated to myself over and over that He is sovereign, He is powerful, He loves her more than we do, He created her, He knows every day of her life and we cannot do anything to change that, His ways are better than our ways, another home may be better than our home for her to grow up in, if she is to be saved it is up to God and not to us, etc.  But my thoughts also were increasingly dark.  I know that God is all of these things, but I also know that every single one of us deserve Hell.  We are all sinners and do not deserve to be safe from harm, it is only by His mercy that anyone is.  I considered the millions of children across the world who grow up in deplorable conditions ranging from orphaned to starving to neglected to the may ways they are abused and killed.  God loves every one of of those children too, what makes Rose different?  I reminded myself that the HHS system is very broken and what is best for the child may look one way on paper, but it may not be best in reality, the workers are over worked and jaded, and laws as well as human error result in a lot of less than optimum outcomes...yet God is sovereign over those entities and we must submit to His choices.  It was a horrible, horrible time in my mind.  I knew that I must, I MUST, bow the knee and submit to His will and His plan.  I could not let myself fall into bitterness and resentment.  Yet, I always skirted that line.  I told myself that I had to have faith.  I had to persevere.  I had to endure.  I had to accept God's will even though it could be horrible for Rose.  There were many other thoughts on both sides but you get the idea.  I would chastise myself for being in that dark place when I "should" know better.  With what I do for a living and being a Christian, I "should not" be...whatever I was struggling with at the time.  Probably the worse was the apathy.  I existed for a long time in a place of "what is the point?"  Why clean when it will just get dirty?  Why bother?  I kept life up as it "needed" to be, but did not go further than that.

I found that I could only cope via escape.  I could not win the battle in my mind so I sought to not be in my mind.  I could not bear to sleep and have nightmares and thus went to bed very late (not too hard with a toddler who would not go to bed until 12 or 1 a.m., but I was often up much later than that) and got out of bed early.  Once I woke up I could not fall back to sleep.  In the past my escape has always been in doing.  I would clean primarily.  I would have projects and activity.  The problem with doing those things is that they took energy (that I did not have) and they still allowed for me to be trapped in my brain with my thoughts.  So, I reverted to my old standby.  You know that question "if you were on a deserted island and could only have one thing what would it be?" Well, my answer would be...a book.  Even as a kid I read all of the time as escape and people around me did not appreciate it.  I have loved home schooling our children as it gives me the excuse to read aloud to them lots and lots.  I had not let myself read fiction in over 10 years because I knew that with my addictive personality (I do the same with computer games, so I can't holler too loudly at Buddy and his xbox since he is just like me in this regard) I would not stop.  Anyone else out there play Spider Solitaire and tell themselves, "just one more, I'll quit after this one!" ?  Well, I started reading.  I venture to guess that I have probably read over 200 mindless and purposeless fiction books since this began. I am embarrassed about it.  But there it is.  I am a "readaholic" :) .  I am not sure that anyone outside of the family realized how far into the black hole that I fell.  I did what I needed to do.  But pretty much what I remember for the past 10 months is darkness.

God had revealed to me around August I think that Rose would not be returning to us and had released me from some of the emotional attachment that was so hard.  I felt in my heart that she was my child even though on no paperwork was that ever stated - not even officially as a foster mother.  I was 100% attached to her despite only having her for 7 short weeks.  I felt that I had lost my child through all of this ordeal.  Then I would feel guilty about that since she was never my child.  God helped me to process some of that.  Then, during a lunch with dear friends of ours who say it like it is, there was, for the first time, confession and processing.  I marvel at God's timing of it since the next day we got the news that Rose for sure would be going to her Great Aunt.  That day I refused to allow myself to read.  I hated the dark nebulous place in which I had existed and fought kicking and clawing to not fall back in there.  So I did the next best thing...I cleaned:)  I put on worship music and cleaned.  God brought me to another place that day.  A place of realizing that up until then I had been kneeling as a servant before the throne but by the grit of my teeth forcing myself to "do" the right thing.  But instead I was moved to a place of sitting on His lap and simply...being with Him...trusting Him.  I know that those words seem incredibly simple and perhaps even trite.  But the shift in my heart was the difference between bondage and freedom, pitch black darkness and living light.  Between me forcing myself to do what I was supposed to do...and just...letting go and trusting Him.  This is not the first time I have struggled between "doing" and "being," between living "for" Him and living "with" Him.  It is an ever present struggle and I seem to have a hard time remembering the lesson.

That was the day I got better.  The day before our friends had used the word "trust" in their conversation with me.  It had stuck in my mind and I could not let it go.  The day after this in church every song that was sung had the word "trust" in it over and over.  I was pretty emotional about it to my further embarrassment.  By the way, I have carefully watched every single song in church since that day and have not once seen the word "trust" come up again yet.  The next Friday was when we went to say our final goodbye to Rose.  And it was...well:)

During the past month I have felt that I am in the light again.  I feel creative to do things, and want to create not just exist.  I feel energy to do things.  I feel peace.  I feel joy again.  I am even crying again (which I normally avoid at all costs).  That was a weird one for me.  Initially it was quite annoying but then I realized that I was actually feeling again so have chosen to rejoice in it but, seriously, how many times is it appropriate to cry during the Lord of the Rings lol! There was a period of 2 weeks where I felt incredible guilt for what I have lost out on with my family and friends for the past 10 months while I have been "absent."   But, He has taken that too.  It is what it is.  Like every trial in my life, looking back on it I am seeking to find the silver lining.  This trial has helped me understand the hearts of our birthparents/grandparents better, it has helped me to understand functional depression better, it has helped me to understand the power of escaping to cope and hard it is to get out of it, it has helped me understand that the "right words" mean nothing until the Holy Spirit sows it into one's heart, it has helped me see so very many of my shortcomings and given me direction on how to proceed, it has helped me to relax a bit and not take things so serious (after all the house still stands after my lack of intentional living for the past months), it precipitated the pen pal friendship with a favorite author I discovered, it has allowed us to get to know Superman and Faith's other two biological sibings and their adopted family.  Mostly...I have moved to a new level of...trusting Him:)