Surrounded by Pain

it just hit me tonight in the middle of posting kids and trying to whittle down my ever growing inbox (I worked steadily all day and could not get it below 70. A couple of times it got down to 69, but the next time I looked at it it was up to 75 again. I seemed to hover there around 70 most of the day. I’ve got it down to 50 now, but only because I’m working after supper when nobody else is at work trying hard to fill it back up.

Here’s what hit me: I am emotionally exhausted because I am surrounded by pain. Not only am I responsible for parenting 10 children who had traumatic pasts, filled with pain, but I am constantly reading case records and profiles of children who have experienced abuse and neglect. Most of the time I can step back and focus on the big picture, and process the information without letting it sink in.

It hit me though, a couple minutes ago, as I was zipping through another posting of a child that I was seeing the words “sexually abused” and having it mean nothing more to me than if I were to read the words “baking soda” on a recipe. I have gotten so conditioned to all the pain, that I don’t internalize it. The experiences and diagnosis of a child have almost become like ingredients in a recipe that make parents decide whether or not to parent a child.

FASD, Bi-Polar, RAD, sexual abuse are all big scarlet letters in the profile that make pre-adoptive parents say “thanks, but no thanks.” The diagnosis are secondary only to age (over 11, forget it) in making people decide they can’t parent a child.

And so, like tonight, every once and a while, something hits me like a ton of bricks. Either my emotional resistance is down, or I’m tired, or I have a minute to digest things, and then all of the sudden the child isn’t just the 32nd situation I have posted today, or Case #MB1409, but it’s a child. And then all of the horror, the injustice, the shame, the grief, and the pain come rushing in.

And so to all of the children out there who wait I want to say this:

I am sorry that your birth parents could not care for you;
I am sorry that you were beaten;
I am sorry you were sexually abused;
I am sorry that you were neglected;
I am sorry that you witnessed things that no child should ever witness when you were very young, that you were watching an NC-17 film while standing in your bedroom doorway;
I am sorry that your birthparents neighbors, friends, or fellow church goers did not step in and do something to help your birthparents before they were caught in a cycle from which they could not escape;
I am sorry that someone came and took you away from the only people you knew, even if it was in your best interest;
I am sorry that you had to go from home to home to home;
I am sorry that there are things wrong with your brain or your body and that the medicines you take aren’t quite working;
I am sorry that you have been placed into families before that couldn’t meet your needs;
I am sorry that the group homes and mental hospitals and residential treatment centers have not had programs that matched your disability, so they made things worse instead of better;
I am sorry that now nobody wants to adopt you.

But mostly, I am sorry that we as a society have failed you on so many levels.
I am sorry that we haven’t done better for you sooner.
I am sorry that we didn’t step forward long ago to do more before it came to this point.

And I’m sorry that the future for you is bleak, whether or not you are adopted, but ever more so if you are not.

And I’m sorry that in the midst of things you became simply a case, a number, a record, a file.

I wish I could do more for you, waiting children, but right now my house is full, my background checks may no longer be clean because of the battles we’ve fought for the children already here, and I can’t convince people to do something as hard as what parenting you might be.

But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop trying, and it doesn’t mean that you aren’t worth fighting for. And it certainly doesn’t mean that any of this is your fault.

And next time, when I see your picture, I will pray for you and I will remake my commitment to worker harder, smarter, faster, with all that I have in me to recruit, train and support a family who just might, some day, be willing to be there for you and love you, no matter what the future holds.