Getting Real

As I've read over my blogs the last few days I feel it is necessary to write this post. Larry and I have been blessed with people who have been real with us. They prepared us well for what this process can look like...the good and the bad. Thanks to them none of what I am about to tell you comes as a surprise to us, and thanks to them I fear that my blog looks too much like a fairy tale adoption. It is not. Before I go farther I will tell you that much of what we have experienced is the same or better than we had hoped and that is the majority of what you are seeing as we share this journey with you. But I think it is important, for many reasons, that you know a bit more of the other side.

Really, everything was going great those first few days. There was a lot of excitement with the SDA appointment, sightseeing, the referral, even our first meeting went far better that we could have hoped or imagined. Then came our first "official" visit. When looking at our blog, pictures, and video you may think that there was an instant and amazing connection between all of us. Yes, we do get along well. She has never rejected us in any way and that in itself is an answer to prayer. At the same time the reality is that she doesn't feel like our child. It feels like we spend 2 hours a day babysitting someone else's kid. We are severely restricted in what we can do with her because of her surgery, because we don't know her at all, and mostly because we are under the watchful eye of the staff and have very little freedom to do much with her. Let me tell you....that makes for a LOOONNNGGG 2 hours. Oksana calls us "Mama" and "Papa" but that doesn't mean anything to her. We are just nice people who come play with her. If we never came again she'd probably be fine, and when our time is up she's perfectly content to leave us. This is perfectly normal for this phase of our meeting, but again, I fear that we are putting an image out there that there is some instant family bonding happening that isn't.

The other reality is facing her disability. Not much about her has been a surprise but, reading it on paper and seeing it in person are two different things. I've worked with children with special needs my whole life. Still, being a teacher/caregiver that sends them home every day, and knowing they are yours forever, are also two very different things. When we met Oksana we had to face, in reality, all of who she is. There is much she can do but the delays we are looking at are significant. It would not be unrealistic to say that she is developmentally at the level of a 2 year old. She's 5 years old...she doesn't know how to hold a crayon to color or a spoon to eat, I'm not positive she'd been on a swing before yesterday, we've tried twice to see if she has any knowledge of colors or color matching and have seen no evidence of that, she doesn't know how to blow out of her lips to make bubbles, etc. I KNOW she will grow and learn by leaps and bounds but that doesn't change that we have to face who Oksana is now. The Oksana I see now will need life long care. Even if that never changed we'd still adopt her but we have to go through the process of dealing with all of this emotionally, and that can also make the visits difficult.

On the way home from our last visit I told Larry that this whole thing goes against our human nature. When I had my boys there was an instant connection. Biologically we aren't designed to love other children like our own. Yet, adoption is God's heart. And doesn't that often seem to be the case....that things that seem so unnatural to our human nature are perfectly natural to God? So no matter what we FEEL we push forward in FAITH that God told us to do this, TRUSTING Him to create the love and push out the fear in us that will allow us to be the family He created us to be.