Saturday, December 18, 2010
Easy Giving
My friend Laura wrote a post about my pumpkin rolls and about her personal canned food drive. For every comment left in that post, she's going to donate a can of food to our local food bank. With the terrible wind and low temps, utilities bill are going to rise and put even more of a squeeze on budgets. Leave a post and help stock the food bank for those in need!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Best Husband in the Whole Wide World
See- I promised you a shiny happy post!
I am married to, hands down, the best guy possible. Yes, he has his faults and during a certain phase of the moon I can enumerate them colorfully in three languages. But in the past 24 hours he has proven that mostly I'm a whiner. Except for that "doesn't listen to me thing"- that one is valid.
Last night in the wind storm, our roof started coming off. Apparently the guy who installed it didn't feel the need to use more than two screws per panel along the bottom edge and we're gusting to 75 here. So the metal roofing started to come loose at the bottom, blow up, and sheer off in places. In other places it just flapped up and down all night long. Who gets on clothes and goes out in the dark with a wind chill of 15 below zero to see what is happening? My hero. Who later today climbed a 30 foot ladder to install screws to prevent further destruction and another all-night thunder session? Same guy. Who then took Miss V to work (while I cooked supper without power) and then came home to figure out which battery in our stupid interconnected smoke alarms was causing them all to go off? Yes, him. To finally cement his super fantasticalness, he went back out to pick up both older girls because the car was out of the garage (power outages make automatic door openers very manual) and he was sparing me from the cold and the wind.
There was help today in the from our wonderful deacon who quietly takes excellent care of all of us (even from a snowcat on the hillside!) and Wilbur who brought the ladder and held it. Many thanks to you both.
I really can't ask much more for my daughters than that they find men like their father.
I am married to, hands down, the best guy possible. Yes, he has his faults and during a certain phase of the moon I can enumerate them colorfully in three languages. But in the past 24 hours he has proven that mostly I'm a whiner. Except for that "doesn't listen to me thing"- that one is valid.
Last night in the wind storm, our roof started coming off. Apparently the guy who installed it didn't feel the need to use more than two screws per panel along the bottom edge and we're gusting to 75 here. So the metal roofing started to come loose at the bottom, blow up, and sheer off in places. In other places it just flapped up and down all night long. Who gets on clothes and goes out in the dark with a wind chill of 15 below zero to see what is happening? My hero. Who later today climbed a 30 foot ladder to install screws to prevent further destruction and another all-night thunder session? Same guy. Who then took Miss V to work (while I cooked supper without power) and then came home to figure out which battery in our stupid interconnected smoke alarms was causing them all to go off? Yes, him. To finally cement his super fantasticalness, he went back out to pick up both older girls because the car was out of the garage (power outages make automatic door openers very manual) and he was sparing me from the cold and the wind.
There was help today in the from our wonderful deacon who quietly takes excellent care of all of us (even from a snowcat on the hillside!) and Wilbur who brought the ladder and held it. Many thanks to you both.
I really can't ask much more for my daughters than that they find men like their father.
Failed Adoption
Warning: This is not a shiny happy post about Christmas cookies or Advent wreathes. I'll try to get to that next week when things are (hopefully) calmer.
So I mostly don't blog about kids and adoption and adoption issues. And even now, I'm not going to run through the litany of reasons why one of our adoptions has failed so totally. I'm just going to say right out here in public that it has. Debra Gray talks in Attaching In Adoption about adoptions that have failed but still exist in a legal sense. They are more common than you would ever dream. Most parents who have lived through it just don't talk about them. The kids grow up and move out, everyone is relieved, and questions from others are answered in vague ways. The kids find a series of new parents who are sure that they can succeed where others failed. The new parents judge the legal parents as selfish, cold hearted, and cruel. At least until they are in the position of finding themselves lied to, manipulated, stolen from, and generally used. But when they start setting firm personal boundaries, it all blows up and a new set of kind strangers is found.
As miserable as the entire scenario is, there is a great deal of relief when everyone finally calls a spade a spade and the pretending can stop. We're there. It's sad and yet, it's a gift. The freedom to look reality in the eye and just deal with it instead of maintaining a polite fiction and having every (supposedly) pleasant event in the cycle of the year overshadowed by guilt and ugliness is a bittersweet kind of joy and I am grateful for it.
I am grateful for the people who are currently and will in the future designate themselves substitute parents for the extremely damaged people with whom I'm unable to handle any relationship. I wish them all well- happiness, health, prosperity, salvation, a complete renewal and a joyful life. I just have to admit that they must have that life away from me and mine. One may forgive the person who harms without wanting them across the table every holiday. Some people can manage more but I'm not that special. I need to keep myself sane and healthy and fully functional to raise the kids for whom we are still responsible- and to protect those kids from negative influences or from being victimized.
If you know me (or the kids in question) and you just don't get it, consider reading some blogs where other parents have the courage to lay it all out there. Cindy has been doing this longer and on a larger scale than I have and it's nice to know that I'm not the only one out there with PTSD- she's just nicer than I am.
So I mostly don't blog about kids and adoption and adoption issues. And even now, I'm not going to run through the litany of reasons why one of our adoptions has failed so totally. I'm just going to say right out here in public that it has. Debra Gray talks in Attaching In Adoption about adoptions that have failed but still exist in a legal sense. They are more common than you would ever dream. Most parents who have lived through it just don't talk about them. The kids grow up and move out, everyone is relieved, and questions from others are answered in vague ways. The kids find a series of new parents who are sure that they can succeed where others failed. The new parents judge the legal parents as selfish, cold hearted, and cruel. At least until they are in the position of finding themselves lied to, manipulated, stolen from, and generally used. But when they start setting firm personal boundaries, it all blows up and a new set of kind strangers is found.
As miserable as the entire scenario is, there is a great deal of relief when everyone finally calls a spade a spade and the pretending can stop. We're there. It's sad and yet, it's a gift. The freedom to look reality in the eye and just deal with it instead of maintaining a polite fiction and having every (supposedly) pleasant event in the cycle of the year overshadowed by guilt and ugliness is a bittersweet kind of joy and I am grateful for it.
I am grateful for the people who are currently and will in the future designate themselves substitute parents for the extremely damaged people with whom I'm unable to handle any relationship. I wish them all well- happiness, health, prosperity, salvation, a complete renewal and a joyful life. I just have to admit that they must have that life away from me and mine. One may forgive the person who harms without wanting them across the table every holiday. Some people can manage more but I'm not that special. I need to keep myself sane and healthy and fully functional to raise the kids for whom we are still responsible- and to protect those kids from negative influences or from being victimized.
If you know me (or the kids in question) and you just don't get it, consider reading some blogs where other parents have the courage to lay it all out there. Cindy has been doing this longer and on a larger scale than I have and it's nice to know that I'm not the only one out there with PTSD- she's just nicer than I am.
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