Conflicting Emotions

All in all yesterday was a good day. It was much better than Paula's or Mary's.

Bart and I had a good time. We had a couple of tasty meals, we almost finished all of our shopping, and we saw a powerful movie, that I’m not sure how to blog about.

However, it was not a good day inside my computer. I came back to several discouraging emails from families wanting to adopt hurting kids, but having all kinds of struggles.

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by it all. I am involved with 25 families who are waiting to bring home 54 children. I was also involved in matching 127 children in 54 families over the past 16 months. Many of these families email me when they are frustrated or when things are going wrong. Now, my guess is that if I am involved with only a total of 171 children and 79 families, that I am in a very small corner of this crazy adopting-from-foster-care world. I also was involved in watching 87 children who were matched NOT come home for one reason or another over the last year.

my question is this.

How much crap is really out there? Multiply what I deal with times what, a thousand, ten thousand, one hundred thousand, and we might know.

The most difficult piece of all of this is that every one of these journeys begins with something unthinkable: an innocent child being abused and neglected. It begins there and in the BEST CASE scenario, a kid ends up with lots of issues and adopted into a relatively healthy, and yet still imperfect, family that struggles to remain healthy until that child settles in, which sometimes takes them way beyond their 18th birthday.

The rest of the scenarios are less than ideal. The kids at John’s ranch, for example, who have no families don’t care this time of year. If their behavior is perfect or horrific they are still not going to get to go anywhere or have a family or get the nurture they need, so especially around the holidays they freak out. Their behavior stinks. Everyone tries to make up for it -- volunteers visit and buy them nice gifts. But regardless of everyone’s efforts, spending Christmas in a family that is not yours or in a group home is NOT a true Christmas, even if you get all of the material possessions you ask for.

So, while yesterday was a great day, and I am very grateful for it, I came home to be reminded of a less than perfect world, where babies are not nurtured, children are treated as punching bags, young preteen girls are raped by their mothers boyfriends, and teenage boys who have experienced all this stuff finally can’t handle the anger any more and get institutionalized. And in this less than perfect world, people are signing up to take on these kids and the system, as well as the unpredictability of these kids behaviors, causes them frustration and pain.

Hang in there with me. My mood will change....