I was totally one of those people before I had kids.
Like, if I was out at a restaurant and your kid was acting a fool, I was silently judging you and your lack of control.
Because you know, my (then fictional) kids would NEVER act like that.
Hah! All the laughs, as I pretend to not see my kids climbing the shelves in the grocery store, or sitting on their sibling in the middle of the dance class lobby.
Having children opened my eyes to my naïveté and judgement.
Grace.
The older I get, the more there seems to be a lot of areas that I just don’t know about. I may think I do, but until I’ve been there, in the midst of it; I’m clueless as to the thoughts, feelings, and requirements that walking through that specific journey entails.
At the end of this month we will remember my mother in law. It will be four years since she’s been gone, which just seems craziness. It really seems like yesterday we were sitting in an ICU lobby. I can remember her tight hugs, and the way she smelled. The sound of her voice still echoes through my head at times. And yet it’s been four years without her. Four years that my children haven’t had her in their lives. Four years that ours haven’t been covered by her constant prayers and love for us.
I didn’t know what grief was really like until she was gone. I had just gotten a taste of it the year before loosing my grandmother, and grandfather…while that was still too soon, they had lived. My mother in laws life felt cut short. She had two new grand babies she was supposed to love and smother, and four others that adored her.
I didn’t know what cancer looked like on someone until I saw it consume her.
I didn’t know that the grief never really went away, but became less consuming.
I didn’t understand until we walked through it.
And once I did, and started to awake from my own world of grief, I also awoke to the realization of what others I had known experienced.
In high school one of my best friends lost her mom to cancer. I was so clueless and consumed with myself I just didn’t grasp the impact and devastation. I didn’t know how to help or support. So I acted like nothing had changed, when everything had.
When we experienced my mother in laws death I was grieved and repentant over that and other situations where my naïveté and lack of compassion robbed me of the opportunity to love others well.
I think I’m in a similar season now.
This adoption/foster care world is a world of it’s own. One that is hard and messy and requires support and community…much like grief.
There’s so much I didn’t know.
I didn’t know about Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) and it’s effects on children, and how they act as a result.
I didn’t know much about Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) and the lifelong difficulties it brings, and the adoptive and foster parents brave enough to be willing to love through it.
I didn’t know about the nonstop challenges and heartache, both in the pursuit of getting them and then the lifelong attempt to parent and love them well.
And I sure as heck didn’t know about the constant heartache involved in having one of your children live somewhere where you can’t protect them and can’t keep them safe.
I’m grieved by my lack of sensitivity to other parents. That kid that I used to think was just acting a fool, or completely disengaged…I’m now realizing could be fighting an alphabet of diagnoses, or a background of pain and hurt. Instead of judging or making assumptions I could have entered into the fray.
There are parents we know that have bravely entered the foster care system, and I haven’t been much of a support to; checking in to see how I could help, or offering to be a certified by the state babysitter so they can breathe for a moment.
I just didn’t know.
I’m grateful for the grace that God gives us to have our eyes open. Our experiences and pain don’t have to be the end, but can be a catalyst to comfort, encourage, support and love others. Some experiences are really crappy…miscarriages, loosing loved ones, loving hard to love people, parenting struggles…but there is beauty in the ashes.
I’m asking God to open my eyes in other areas. I don’t want to have to always experience something for the Lord to move my heart to compassion over it. I want to just be more compassionate to others. I don’t want to have to intimately know what you’re walking through to be more apt to love you through it.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s suffering, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you in unshaken, for we know that as you share in our suffering, you will also share in our comfort.”
2 Corinthians 1:3-7 ESV, emphasis mine