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A moment in my arms, forever in my heart.
I feel like there are a lot of things about foster care that don’t ever get discussed. We hear about the children that have been in foster homes for months or even years and the grief that follows when those children are reunified or move to another placement. The goal of foster care is temporary. This grief kind of comes with the territory. If you are doing foster care right, you have to put your walls down, you have to attach and you have to love whole heartedly. These children deserve that. That’s not really what I want to talk about though. Obviously, if you have cared for a child…
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Skipping Mother’s Day
Well it’s the night before Mother’s Day and if I could just sleep through tomorrow that would be wonderful. Not for reasons you are probably thinking. It’s not because I’m physically exhausted. It’s not because I’ve been homeschooling 8 children for last few months. It’s because of the pain that tomorrow will bring. I wish that we could just blink our eyes and this particular day would be behind us. Mother’s Day is such a painful reminder for so many. I am incredibly blessed to be a mama to some amazing kiddos. Every day feels like Mother’s Day to me. I often just wonder how I got to be so…
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Trauma doesn’t take a vacation.
It’s 11pm. I should be in bed unwinding, maybe watching a little tv, or reading a book. Instead I’m walking around the hotel grounds, because vacations are a trigger. Since the folks in the hotel room next to us don’t understand trauma. Since slamming doors and screaming “Don’t touch me” are not acceptable things to do in a hotel room, we walk. We walk around aimlessly, in the cold, wearing our pajamas. I didn’t have time to look for my shoes, so I quickly slipped on my husbands sneakers and I could only coerce my child into flip flops without an additional melt down. You see I don’t even know…
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Hope.
This past week, I attended a memorial service hosted by S.C.A.N. of Iredell county. It was a service to remember all the children who lost their lives to child abuse and neglect in 2017 in the state of North Carolina. I have attended this same event in the past and every time, I leave there feeling extremely emotional, overwhelmed and completely helpless. I will never understand how a parent can hurt their child. I will never be ok with the fact that children die at the hands of their parents. I can not fathom why there aren’t more people there to show their support for the prevention of child abuse…
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Adoption equals loss…
So, I know the blog has been quiet for some time now. Our family has had a lot going on. We’ve suffered quite a few losses in the last few months. I apologize now for the heaviness of this post. My father-in-law, our “Zadie”, Bruce passed away just shy of three months ago. He was only 67 years old and was taken from us way too soon. He had been misdiagnosed for over a year and as it turns out, he had ALS. Bruce and his wife Karen were scheduled to come to NC to celebrate Eli and Gabe’s adoption, just two weeks after he suddenly passed. What should have…
