Jesse holding Gregory for the first time

You guys, I’m really struggling today.

I know that it has a lot to do with the one-year-anniversary of C coming to live with us. A year ago this Monday, we welcomed her in to our home with hearts overflowing with love and hope that we would soon be able to call her our daughter.

Those hopes are long gone now, and their memory aches like someone stabbing me, even now, 6 months after she’s been gone from our home. Every day, there’s a small part of me that wishes I could just forget and move on like she has, because it would be so much easier and it would hurt so much less. But even though all the attachment therapy didn’t work for her, it definitely worked for us. We attached. We loved her as though she was ours.

Having her taken away, by her own wishes no less, shatters deep-seated security I thought I had. When my babies were born, I knew that I would love them forever. I knew that they would always be my babies, even if they grew up and got married. I knew that the bond we were creating could never be broken, and not just because they are my flesh and blood, but because I made a decision to be their mother.

But now? There is a seed of doubt. A worry, in the back of my mind, that someday they will make a choice not to love me. That they will reject me just like C.

My head knows that’s silly. Even if they hate me for a few months of their teenage years (seriously, can’t even fathom it), they will know deep down that we will always be attached.

But my heart doesn’t believe.

A friend of mine is in the process of adopting her 3 year old great niece whose mother is a drug addict. While the process has been good for her two biological children (ages 4 and 2), it’s also been tough. The oldest one is asking questions that would make any mother’s heart hurt. The other day, she asked my friend “when SHE was going to get her new mommy.” My friend’s jaw hit the floor, and she asked her daughter why on earth she would ask that. The 4 year old replied that her cousin first had one mommy, and now she has a new mommy. She was wondering when this was going to happen to her.

My friend said it is so tough to realize that by bringing this other child in their midst, her kids are processing fears and doubts that they should never have to confront. No 4 year old should wonder when her parents will be taken away.

This is exactly how my heart feels right now. I am doubting and asking questions I never thought I would. I’m wondering if bonds I thought were unshakeable will suddenly be broken. I catch myself worrying about losing my own biological children. What if someone thought they were messy because we rushed out of the door in our jammies? They could assume I’m neglecting them and report me. What if I lose my temper in the grocery store? What if someone sees me spank their hand or raise my voice when they try to run into the street?

One could say that’s silly, but my own cousin just lost custody of her own infant for a stupid misunderstanding outside her workplace. It happens.

When you’re grieving like this, every little thing that reminds you shines like a bright light into your eyes in the middle of the night. You feel like you’re drifting around in a fog, not quite yourself but surviving, and then something will happen and the sharpness hurts and stuns, all at the same time. Every time I hug my babies, I ache, wishing I could hug her as well. Every time I see a young hispanic girl, tears involuntarily start to flow. Every time I hear certain songs on the radio, my pulse quickens and I race to change the station. Every time I tuck the boys in at night, I feel sick, remembering how I cherished tucking in C, processing her day and praying with her.

It doesn’t help that I have lots of friends who are adopting right now. The head of our homeschool group just finalized the adoption of her grandson this Wednesday (she had originally adopted the mother of the boy when she was a teen, but the girl ended up in a group home, then pregnant and living with her boyfriend by the time she was 17). Another friend just received her first foster-adopt child this week. Yet another friend is finishing the final paperwork for their foster-adopt.

I’ve never had a miscarriage, but I imagine that this is what it must feel like. Grieving over our loss, while watching everyone else receive their kids or finalize their adoptions. Wanting to rejoice in the two children I have, but instead acutely feeling the absence of the one I lost.

I’m left with so many unanswered questions. Why are so many other children, some who went through even more trauma than C, able to attach, but when it came right down to it, ours didn’t have what it takes? Why did it have to end like this?

I wish I was able to conclude with something heartfelt and lovely, but right now, there is just unfinished pain, like an unraveled hem. I want to call it out into the open without feeling the need or pressure to transform it.

Now for the realism: The Postpartum Stage has not been kind to me. In the interest of keeping it real around here, I am about to list my bizarre after-birth occurrences.

1. Hair Loss– I had some minor hair-shedding after Gregory, my first, but my second pregnancy was another story entirely. I lost CLUMPS. I look back at certain postpartum pics, and I can actually see bald spots in various places.

The shedding has slowed, thank God, but I still lose more hair on a daily basis than I used to. All of the bald spots have grown back in, producing the weirdest cowlicks and fly-aways. No fair.

2. Nickel Allergy– I can no longer wear any gold that contains nickel as an alloy. This includes my lovely wedding ring. I’ve been coating it with nail polish for the past couple months, but it gets gunky and I’m afraid of tarnishing the gold. I’ve talked to several jewelers about rhodium plating, but they all say that it will only last for a month or two. At $50/pop, that’s around $300/year of maintenance.

3. Gluten and Soy Allergy– I’m not positive that these are due to postpartum, but from the research I’ve done, it seems that auto-immune responses are like dominoes. After 27 years, I can only explain these sudden allergies by saying that they are probably piggy-backing off of the nickel allergy.

4. Foot Size– My feet have grown half a size, thanks to all the relaxin chemicals in pregnancy.

Bizarre, no?

Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with any of the more common side effects, such as weight gain or stretch marks. But I am still coming to grips with how different my life is, now that I’ve gone through pregnancy.

Our college friends, 10 years later!

I’ve written many times about how I am terrible at making friends. These last 2+ years in California have definitely taught me that.

But as I’ve continued to think about it, I’ve realized that it’s not an ability that I lack. It’s the desire! Somewhere deep down, I don’t want to make more friends.

My brain tells me that this is silly and I need to overcome it. Everyone needs friends, and when you decide to move halfway across the country, leaving your established community behind, it is only right to try and make friends.

But my heart says differently. I’ve come to realize that I am much more sensitive and fearful than I ever realized. Once you befriend someone, you let them into your life. This means that they can hurt you and that they can let you down. It means that if they were to leave, their presence would be sorely missed.

I didn’t used to be this afraid, honestly (although I’ve always been a bit of a loner!). But as a young kid I had death surrounding me at every turn. I remember the day that my nanny, Susan, sat me down at the age of 6 and told me that the reason my parents were on a trip was because my grandmother had just died. She had to explain what death was.  At the age of 8, my other grandmother died, and, although she and I were never close (she “loved” me but didn’t “like” me), my mom mourned for weeks, breaking out into random sobbing for nearly a year.

A year later, my mom had an ectopic pregnancy that almost killed her– I was the one to call 911– and everyone told me for weeks how lucky I was to still have my mom. I realized that at any moment, anyone I loved could be taken away, just like that.

And if all that wasn’t enough, just a few months later, my beloved violin teacher of 3 years died. Since I had never had a relationship with grandparents, this violin teacher had become my grandfather figure. We would sing songs together every lesson, and he would accompany on the guitar. I performed my little fiddling solos with his band. When he was diagnosed with cancer, we continued to have lessons but I saw him get sicker and sicker as each month went by. Within the year, he was gone. They asked me to play a song at his funeral, and I did, even though I’m not sure how I got through it.

I was so torn up about his death that I wrote a story as a way to process it. I sent the story, called “Ashokan Farewell” in to a magazine when I was 10, and it won! Everyone who read it would cry, and I remember thinking, “No, I’m not a great writer. That’s just how bad my heart hurts, okay?”

Throughout junior high and high school, I was able to leave some of my fears about death behind. I became close friends with Jesse, who is now my husband. When I left for college as a 17 year old, everyone assured me that home would always be here, always be the same.

And then, just 4 weeks into my freshman year (10 years ago today), I got a call telling me that one of my best friends had committed suicide. And the fear began all over again. He was the 4th person in my life to die and he was MY age. I was asked to play piano at his funeral, and I did, although I could barely keep it together. To this day, I cannot play that song any more.

Unsurprisingly, I also wrote a story about his death. When my creative writing instructor at Biola read it, HE cried. He stopped reading it halfway through and said, “Who taught you how to write like this? I didn’t!”. And, once again, I wanted to say, “I’m not a great writer. My heart just hurts.”

Since his death, I have made only a handful of friends. Without realizing it, I became very very careful about who I let into my heart. At every turn, I resisted becoming friends with Jesse’s group (sorry, Courtney, Chelsea and Christine!), trying instead to stick with the one or two friends I’d made during orientation. After 2 awful roommate situations, one in which I moved out in the middle of the night to avoid confrontation, I gave in to the inevitable and adopted Jesse’s group of friends as my own. And then these friends followed us to Texas, so I didn’t have to branch out much. I met my friend Jenny because she actually pursued me, coming to all of my piano recitals and inviting me to do things. She was the only one to spend my birthday with me, our first year in TX.  I was so grateful for her because I wasn’t strong enough to reach out and make friends on my own.

I am learning, and I am getting better. I have been together with Jesse for 10 years, and I’m just now learning how to trust him (I’m a slow learner!). I have a hard time trusting my long time friends, but I am working on it. God knows my heart, and He is constantly providing me situations for both growth and safety.

Until then, there is my writing. I can process the pain and fear I feel over death in a way that makes sense to me, whether it be on this blog or in a story. And it always helps.

Realization #1: I LOVE teaching Latin, almost as much as I love teaching English. I teach two separate Latin classes at different schools on Fridays, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I have a diabolical love for diagramming sentences, but now I know that I also love coming up with random analogies to explain complicated things to teens, like the 4 principal parts of a verb (2 arms and 2 legs on a body), different tense endings on the stem of a verb (putting a different hat on your head, depending on the weather), differences between conjugations being just like the differences between families (1st conjugation is that perfect white suburbia family with stepford wives), etc. LOVE it. Teaching Latin makes me want to go back and get another BA in classics.

My old Latin Book from Junior High– I created a treasure hunt for myself!

Realization #2: Most Thai food is gluten free!

Realization #3: I’m also allergic to soybean oil. I found this out when we made gluten free chocolate chip cookies after eating Thai food and I was sick to the point of throwing up for HOURS. I kept thinking it had to be the Thai food (maybe how they fried the tofu?), but Jesse pointed out that the timing wasn’t typical (3 hours after eating dinner), and that it had to be the cookies somehow. Then, a gluten-free friend told me she has the same reaction whenever she eats anything with soybean oil….there ya go. It makes sense of other things that have happened as well.

Realization #4: Soybean oil and hydrogenated soybeans are in EVERYTHING. The coffee creamer at church. Salad dressing. Chocolate. Most types of bread and crackers. How many Americans know that they are eating buckets of soy products every day? They say that just a bottle of baby soy-formula has more hormones than a month’s worth of birth control pills. C’mon, America, let’s get our food supply under control!!!

Realization #5: I am going to try an elimination diet soon, as it seems it’s the only way I can pinpoint the specific things that are making me sick. That should be….fun? I already feel like I don’t get to eat anything, so only eating 1 or 2 food groups for a month sounds devastating. But I hate the feeling that my food is poisoning me, especially when I am incapacitated by nausea. So, there’s that.

Realization #6: Jesse is going to have to make us some salsa soon. Our garden is producing tomatoes and spinach leaves like CRAZY. This is how many tomatoes we harvest on a DAILY basis!

Happening #1: I went on a women’s retreat with my mom’s church this weekend. I only went for Saturday, but it was so much fun! Just a whole day of sitting in a room, eating chicken salad, playing board games, drinking coffee and chatting….I am so glad I broke out of my introversion and went. I was worried how the boys would fare without me home, but I came home to the babies in bed and the kitchen clean. Success!!!

Janelle likes to point out that my face looks funny here. I was CHEWING. Ahem.

Happening #2: I bought some am-AHZ-ing boots at TJ Maxx yesterday with some more eBay money. I’ve made $250 in the last 10 days!

Happening #3: A busy week ahead of us! I have a full schedule for the first time, with both of my Latin classes and 15 piano students, half of whom are new!

Happy Monday everyone!

As this summer draws to a close, I wanted to talk about what it means to heal from something traumatic that’s happened in your life.

When I talk about the trauma of this past year, I am not just talking about our awful foster care experience, but also about our house-hunting ordeal turned nightmare. I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching about this past year, figuring out the ways in which those difficult months, the most difficult of my life thus far, have changed me. I always worry about how bad experiences are going to shape me, because I’ve come to find that I’m SO sensitive and SO shapeable. I am entirely unable to put on a front or be happy about things if I’m not doing well inside. Open Book. That’s me. An Open Book that anyone can write in.

But is hardening my heart a good option? Is that what this last year has taught me– harden your heart and be careful who you love? Be careful what you dream for?

No. No matter how much those 5 months of my life hurt and sucked big time, I REFUSE to let them negatively affect me, as easy as that would be. For instance, the first question people ask us is, “Has this made you afraid to ever foster kids again?”

The answer to that is complicated. Do I think we will ever be ready to foster a teenager again? Nope, I can safely say that that is not something I ever want to put our family through again. But do I wish we could foster other kids? Make a difference in this world, even if it means heartache? Yes. A hundred times yes. In many ways, this experience has opened our eyes to the huge hurting world out there, and once you see it you can never unsee. I’m grateful that our negative experience taught us something so positive about our calling and about ourselves. I sometimes ask Jesse, “Why do you think that God allowed things to get so bad?”, and he always responds, “Because, there’s comfort knowing that we did everything we possibly could. It helps us to know that the failure was not our fault.”

Above all things, however, I think that this experience has taught me how to NOT be a victim, and that the consequences of letting someone or some circumstance walk all over your family are dreadful. When someone is unfair or downright cruel to me, I am the “flight” part of the “fight or flight”. I only know how to retreat and lick my wounds in secret, even if the abuse is ongoing. Jesse is actually the opposite end of this equation, which is what makes us so good for each other. When I just want to retreat and give up, he takes charge and faces the situation head on. In fact, the one thing he wishes he’d done differently this last year was stop the situation from getting as bad as it did, pulling the plug sooner.

A few examples of abuse in my life: I had a horrible boyfriend who was really bad for me. He treated me horribly. He took other girls’ phone numbers WHILE WE WERE ON DATES, and then accused me of being untrusting. Jesse was actually the one who helped me break up with this guy, because I didn’t have the nerve to do it myself. Even though the relationship was toxic and abusive, it was better than nothing and I stuck with it.

There was also the time I worked at a classical school in Ft. Worth and a particular mom had it out for me because I failed several of her kids’ papers. Since she had home-schooled them up to that point, she was deeply hurt by my criticism. She made it her personal mission to GET ME FIRED. She would literally sit in the carpool line all afternoon, going car to car, trying to collect enough dirt on me to get me fired. Seriously! And instead of standing up for myself, I took it. I never confronted her, just came home to Jesse sobbing every single day. As a result, I was afraid to ever set foot in a classroom again.

All of these situations have shown me that I do not need to be a victim when something wrong occurs. Just because someone is offended does NOT make it my fault. I do not need to accept personal responsibility if I have done all that I can on my end of things. The buck stops with what I can control. The end.

But that’s easier said than done, as anyone knows. It’s easy to let your thoughts wander, wonder what so and so thinks, wonder if so and so is mad, wonder what they might do. I am learning, left and right, that the biggest thing I need on a day to day basis is to control my thoughts. There were so many times during those 5 months that my thoughts were like buzzing bees around my head. And it got to be too much.

Finally, I was able to lean on the Lord in a way that people talk about with many cliche’s such as, “Give all your thoughts to Him”.

That always sounded cheesy to me, and I’d never understood it.

Until these last 5 months. It took me being in such a desperate place of being unable to control my own thoughts and anxieties to fall on the Lord and say, sometimes out loud, “I cannot handle this anymore, not for another second. I NEED you to take these thoughts from me.”

There was one time that I’ll never forget when I did this. We had just finished with an AWFUL day, full of police officers and self-harm threats from our foster child. I was desperate for comfort, and I cried out to God. And I got an IMMEDIATE response. As soon as I was done praying, I felt a warm presence, starting at my head and going all the way down to my toes. And I heard God speak. I cannot explain it, but I heard words. Someone said, “I am pleased. You have pleased me. And I love you so much.” It makes me tear up just to write this, because I rarely want to talk about it, it’s so precious to me. I’d never heard God speak to me before, and that day I heard it.

Learning to open my heart and let God show me how valuable I am has been the most important way in which this traumatic last year has changed me. I know God is there. I know my family is there. I know my friends are there. If I can stay fully aware of how much these people love me, I don’t need to harden my heart in order to protect it.

Love protects. Not the absence of love. This, I have learned.

But there were a couple big sucky things.  I’ve wanted to write about them, but then another thing would happen and I wanted to wait and see how it played out first. And it always got a bit worse, so I’m glad I waited to write about it in one neat post, rather than let bad stuff string along into a saga.

First of all: I lost my teaching job at NCCS. At first, it was just “your 3 classes got dropped down to 2 and no one told you, sorry you had to find out like this”. Then it was “We’re not sure if we’re going to have the enrollment to keep the AP classes separate from the normal ones”. And then it was, officially,  ”We definitely do not have the enrollment to pay you. Wanna teach for free?”

Finding all this out, mid-August? Totally craptacular. Luckily, we have a savings account for the first time in our 7 years of marriage, so we weren’t panicking….but we were saying, “Holy Crap, that’s a third of our income, gone like that! With only 7 days notice!”

Luckily, Jesse’s job is secure (he’s now the only English teacher in the HS). And I still have 9 piano students. If I had known I wouldn’t be teaching, I would’ve had all summer to build up my clientele, but with only 2 weeks before school starting, I wasn’t sure I could pull in enough students to pay the bills.

Whaddya know, God is really really good. In just 2 weeks, I’ve pulled together 2 extracurricular Latin I courses, one with NCCS after school and one at a homeschool group. I also got a flood of emails from interested piano students, and I start teaching 7 new ones next week!

So, the long and short of it is: As of right now, we can pay our bills, AND put a tiny amount into savings every month. Granted, we won’t be flying around the US to vacation or see anyone for the time being, but we will be far from starving. God is SO good, I cannot say that enough. On the plus side of this arrangement, I only have to work from 3-6pm, 4 days a week! That’s actually less than I was working before. And it won’t put strain on Jesse’s prep time because my awesome mother and mother in law are stepping in to help babysit all 4 days so Jesse can stay at school and get stuff done!

Second of all: Right on the heels of this, I found out that the reason for all my headaches and tummy aches is gluten. I’ve been trying to eliminate various foods all summer to figure out why I’ve been feeling so crappy, and I saved gluten for last because I really REALLY didn’t want it to be that. I love pasta! Bread! Donuts! Unfortunately, (or, fortunately, actually), after 4 days off of gluten, I feel better than I have in months. It’s undeniable, at this point.

I really wasn’t ready for another project to take on at this point. I’m starting up 3 different avenues of business right now to pay the bills, and it takes a lot of coordination and behind the scenes work. The boys and Jesse are not about to stop eating gluten any time soon, so I’ll be alone. Also, we are on a vegan fast every Wednesday and Friday (due to Orthodoxy), and being gluten free is really hard when you can’t eat meat or dairy.

So, it’s good news in the sense that I finally feel better. It’s bad news because I really really wanted it to be something other than gluten.

Lastly: After months of going back and forth, being hot then cold, our foster daughter C finally decided that she does not want to do the work that’s required to live with a family. She has chosen to stay at her school up north and eventually transition out of her group home to an in-between foster situation before aging out of the system.

While this is a relief because we no longer have to wonder about when she’ll be coming back, we are very sad, mostly for her. To not have any family is a very sad and scary place to be, so it’s crazy to think that attaching to a family is even SCARIER than that. She has never learned how to go back and fix relationships, and has a 5 month expiration date on every single relationship in her life, save the one she has with her old foster mother of 7 years. Her “survival instinct” makes her blow up every situation and relationship and restart, like a video game. She doesn’t realize that this is not normal– in fact, she does it on a QUEST to be normal, sadly. She has layer upon layer of self-deception going on (borderline multiple-personality disorder), down to the point where she re-tells the narrative of whatever happened at a particular home, just to deceive new families, social workers, police officers, etc. into believing that it was someone else’s fault. Whenever anybody figures out what’s really going on, she blows it up and moves on to someone new that she can manipulate.

And her attachment issues run so deep, that I am very afraid for when she decides to have kids or any sort of romantic relationship, especially since her mom and grandma had the same attachment issues which lead her to where she is today. If the issues cannot be fixed, they just repeat themselves.  The odds of a fatherless teen having a baby before 20 are high, and the odds of an orphan are astronomical. It makes me mad to think that a child who was abandoned at birth will just continue abandoning everything else in her life. I’ve talked to many other people who’ve fostered teens who were abandoned, and it’s the same thing. It makes me feel so helpless to change things. You can’t help someone who won’t let you near them.

We are still grieving on a day to day basis. One minute, I’ll think I’m okay, and then the next minute something new will crop up and I’ll realize I haven’t healed yet. That’s how grief works. I want to let myself go through this process of grieving, as painful as it is, because the alternative (shutting off my heart), is an even worse solution. I want this to grow me and make me stronger, not harden me. Part of this growing and grieving is to know that it’s OKAY to remember that we loved and love her, even if she only pretended to love us to get what she wanted. I don’t have to cut her out of my heart and life– what I had for her was very real, even if it didn’t turn out like I wanted.

So, there you have it– my crappy August. Here’s to September being better!

For frame of reference, here we are in 1991, 5 years old, playing at Big Sur!

She was also there AT AJ’s birth, filming the whole thing

She even stayed and helped through the crazy postpartum days!

Naturally, I was super excited that she was coming to visit. I only got to hang out with her a little bit, but it was still fun!

We had wine and dinner at my sister in law’s house.

We had a BBQ with her parents at their rental in Cayucos Beach.

Naturally, the only pictures I got were of my boys. They were THAT cute.

We went to Music in the Park in Paso Robles.

Smile!

Yesterday morning, we finished off her visit with a yummy coffee date at Amsterdam.

I’m gonna miss that girl! Until next time!

I’ve heard great things about the BOB stroller line, but I’ve always hated the price tag. Lately though, I’ve been finding myself wanting to go on walks. We live just a 5 minute walk from our main grocery center in Atascadero, and it’d be fun not to use the car every once and a while. We have no sidewalks, however, being out in the country and all, and our roads are quite steep and often mostly gravel.

We also have a day trip to the Midstate Fair planned for tomorrow, along with Big Sur next week. I convinced Jesse that if there were ever a time to get a double stroller, now would be it.

In turn, he reminded me of our commitment to staying on a budget. $400-500 doesn’t exactly fit in, you know what I mean?

But there’s this thing called determination. When I want to buy something, I find a way. I move mountains if I have to. It’s both a very admirable quality, and also a little scary. Why can’t I have this kind of mad perseverance when it comes to prayer?

But I digress. I knew that the only way to get a stroller was to raise the money myself. So, with the help of my sister (who pulled stuff out of my parents’ garage for me), I listed EVERYTHING that we’ve had lying around. Does anyone else have a few things in their garage that they “might want to sell someday”? After 3 moves in the past 2 years, we have a lot of them.

In FOUR HOURS, I made $260.

Hooray, I thought! Now I can go on Craigslist and buy the first BOB stroller I see!

Wrong. I didn’t factor in the fact EVERY SINGLE STROLLER LISTING was written by rude people who never answer their phones or check their email.

I emailed dozens of people over the course of 3 days. Only ONE reply, telling me the item was sold (the listing is still up as we speak. Why are people so rude???).  How hard is it to text back, “No, I want more $ than that”, or, “Sorry, sold”???

I got pretty fed up. So I posted this little number:

Did I really post that? Yes. Was it un-Christian of me? Probably. I do feel bad about it, somewhere deep down under the blind determination that I feel when I want something for my babies. Also, there may or may not have been some PMS crazy affecting me too. And I’m semi-insane without Jesse, who’s been working at the Midstate Fair until 1am the last couple nights.

Whatever. No excuses.

But it worked!!! Within 30 minutes, I got an email from a woman who had been thinking about selling her BOB and got on Craiglist to price compare. My ad was the first that came up.

We met at the park 3 hours later and voila! We now own a like-new BOB stroller for only $60 out of pocket cash!

We went on a walk tonight, and I can already tell that this thing is worth EVERY LAST penny. I was able to turn it with one hand. The boys were super comfy and made up songs together in the seat while I jogged along. Did I also mention that the stroller only take up half of our trunk? And I can fold it up with one hand? Wowza! It’s like the wizard of all strollers!

Alls well that ends well.

Here were a few pictures from our walk tonight. We live in such a gorgeous neighborhood! I guess I didn’t quite realize how nice the streets are around us.

However fun the walk, it’s always nice to come back to our home sweet home on a hill.

Want a crash course in adopting? I could sum it up in one phrase: Unconditional Love is terrifying. So terrifying, that it causes confusion and agony for a traumatized child. We learned really early on that the more we repeated how unconditional our love was for C, the more we emphasized that there was NOTHING she could do to earn it or take it away, the more the situation got worse.

For a foster child who has made their way through life by being their OWN parent, manipulation is a second language. They don’t even know they are manipulating, after a certain point. They don’t even understand that they are twisting love into leverage.

Unconditional love becomes translated as the ultimate manipulation, made even more terrifying because they’ve never experienced it and don’t know how to handle it. When normal children encounter something new, they respond according to their personality, but they use it as a learning experience and change as a result. Traumatized kids take something new and scary like unconditional love and try to fit it into a box that they already have within their experience. And, since manipulation and trauma are 90% of their experience thus far, Love becomes the most uncomfortable and unsettling thing out there.

So, we adapted. Learned how to communicate with C differently. Instead of saying, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll love you regardless”, we eased off and said things like “If you do this and this thing, we will be closer”, or, “If you do this, we will love each other more.”

Holy batman, right? As a parent, try imagining for ONE SECOND that you would ever tell your kid, “I will love you more if you do these three things.” It’s inconceivable to me. Makes me want to vomit. But the minute we started operating this way with C, things would get relatively better.

This particular aspect of our dealings with C has taught me so much about our relationship with God. It’s well-known to me that the main critique of Catholicism and Orthodoxy is that we are “works-based” and trying to earn our Salvation, messing with the concept of the gospel. I work at a Christian school where kids say things on a routine basis about how “Catholics aren’t even Christians because they don’t believe in Faith or the Bible”.

Please, hang with me. TRY to think of it along the lines of our relationship with C. When we set out “works” for her to accomplish, it didn’t change the end result any. We still loved her unconditionally. The things we outlined for her weren’t about whether or not we loved her. They were about drawing us closer together as a family, mercilessly tearing down all the sin and manipulation that was keeping us apart.

I can’t speak for the Catholic church, but since I have been a part of the Orthodox church for 7 years next month, I can safely say that I have NEVER heard of good works in relation to “where we go when we die”. All the structure in the church, all the good works we strive for, are only made to bring us closer to God. It’s no secret. You could, perhaps, mishear a homily in an Orthodox church because of preconceived notions, but I promise that if those weren’t in the way, you’d hear the message loud and clear– the Orthodox church does NOT believe that we can earn our salvation. The Orthodox church wholeheartedly believes that good works have a unique and irreplaceable role in bringing us closer to Christ.

Take a few for example:

Going to church several times a week: I’ve seen many a protestant raise their eyebrows on this one. Sundays are all that’s mentioned in the bible, right? I can’t even begin to describe how much healthier my soul feels when I go to church even TWICE a week. It’s like going from eating all McDonalds to organic home-made dinners. It doesn’t mean that I’m trying to earn my salvation, reminiscent of Awanas where the Blue Jewels on the crown were for church attendance.

Forgiveness: I was always terrified by that verse in the Bible about how if you don’t forgive, Christ won’t forgive you. But it makes so much sense. Resentment is like hard water deposit on our heart– we get crusty, and pretty soon the pipes are clogged. We cannot feel or accept Christ’s forgiveness if we are not forgiving others!

Confession: This is a super controversial one for Protestants, because only Christ can forgive sins. However, if you listen to the specific word-for-word prayers that the priests use at the end of confession, it’s similar to what the officiant says during a wedding: “By the power vested in me by the state of ___, you are now man and wife”. Only God makes a marriage valid. And only God’s forgiveness makes a confession valid. But the Church knows that saying things out loud to someone else actually makes a difference and actually has the power to heal and draw us back into communion with Christ! How many times do we say in our own head, “Wow, I shouldn’t have done that, I’ll do better next time” and we never do?

The message I was given regarding works in the Protestant world was, “we do good works out of our love for Christ”. But which comes first? I honestly believe that good works come before love.  We DO things to grow closer to God, and as a result, we feel closer and love him more. DOING things help us love a person better.

The difference? Our good works do not help GOD love us any better. He already loved us so much while we were yet sinners that He sent Christ to die for us. But they do help us, because we are not God, and cannot love Him the way He loves us.

Long and short: when we asked C to do “works” for us, it wasn’t to change whether or not we loved her. We asked her to do them because it was the only thing that would heal our relationship and draw us closer. Likewise, the more we labored over her, the more work we put into our relationship with her, the more we loved her.

I think that God works the same way with us.