Adoption

We went through the adoption process four times during our infertility journey. (Note: we ended up only bringing two children home. You can read that whole story in my book, Counting Grains of Sand.)  I can tell you, without question or qualm, that adopting did not and could not fix our infertility. It wasn’t a…

I’m convinced there is nothing more heart-crushing than facing a moment when it feels like you have to choose between your children. The day we finally made phone calls and placed one of our children in out-of-home respite care for an extended period, was the day I realized I was going to lose my other…

Two weeks. Fourteen days in a row of solid negativity. Fourteen long days when there were a lot of things said from my child to me, but none of them could be twisted into anything nice. I heard that I was “not a real mom”, I was “annoying”, that I was “a murderer” (don’t ask,…

Adopting a traumatized child is not like a short-term missions trip to an orphanage where all the children are slightly unkempt but ever so sweet and want to be held and play games and tell stories. In fact, nothing is really like that in reality. (Not even the orphanage you might have visited.) This kind…

Marriage is hard. It’s also beautiful and life-giving—but that’s a subject for another day. For today, we’re going to address the fact that marriage can be hard and a healthy marriage takes a certain amount of cultivating. Relationships in general take a certain amount of cultivating. And nothing throws a relationship off course like trauma….

I still remember where I was sitting the first time another mom explained to me that my child wasn’t as difficult as I seemed to think. She wasn’t mean about it. Not at all. But the words still shocked me into silence. The truth? I had barely brushed the surface of the issues we were…