A Musing Maralee

December 12, 2012
by Maralee
8 Comments

Putting Intellect in its Place

I have a really dumb dog. A seriously unintelligent animal. How do I know this? I used to have a smart dog. A really smart dog. When we first got married we (stupidly, I know) bought a Border Collie. These dogs are the Einsteins of the dog world, which I guess isn’t saying much, but they can have the intellect of a toddler. And the mischievousness if you don’t keep them occupied. You could look into his eyes and it was like he was seeing into your soul. He knew lots of tricks and lived to work.

But all that intellect came at a price. He had a tendency to panic if he wasn’t in control (watching him “swim” was oddly humorous). He would sometimes trust his doggie judgement of a situation over the command we were giving him. He longed to explore far beyond our boundaries.

After growing up with dumb dogs (I had a Cocker Spaniel and Brian had a series of small mutts), we looked at this smart dog and said we would never buy a dumb dog again. And then through a series of events I won’t get into here (when you don’t own where you live, sometimes decisions are made that are out of your control), our beloved dog had to go live with friends of ours who he lives with and loves to this day.

And then we left ranch living, we moved to the city, we had kids. We had lots of kids in a little house in a state that spends most of the year in either deep freeze or hades hot with a husband who has allergies. Clearly not a good time to get a dog. But we had this son who loves animals. And he is also very cute. Very. Very. Cute. So we brought home this ridiculous hypoallergenic dog that a friend just today called “an old lady dog”. Now you’re getting the picture. He’s small, he’s fluffy, and he’s dumb.

I’ve tried to teach him tricks and he just stares at me. Or worse, he feels pressured so he pees before running to hide behind the couch. But he is intensely lovable and tolerates all kinds of terrible fierce love from our animal loving son (did I mention this particular son is very cute? Even the dog can sense it). So I value this little dog and the joy he brings to our family. At this moment he is sleeping curled up beside me as I write. The other day he got out of the backyard and just before I could panic I heard some whining at the front door. Yep. He used his big break for freedom to go sit on the front porch until I let him in. All these experiences with this dog have given me a different perspective on intelligence.

I know a lot of smart people. Nerds are the new jock, right? We read to our babies and play them Baby Mozart and feed them the organic carrots so they will be as smart as possible. We push our kids to do well in school and take personal pride when they’re successful. We pray they’ll grow up to be doctors or professors or something else that brings us status. . . I mean, brings them happiness. But maybe life is about more than what society perceives as intelligence.

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December 10, 2012
by Maralee
6 Comments

Can I Pray the Wrong Things?

I’m going to admit I have some prayer issues. This has been brought to the surface for me as I’ve gone through the book “A Praying Life” by Paul Miller. I’m glad I’ve been doing it as part of a study with a group of ladies who have such great insight and vulnerability. Seems I’m not the only one who struggles to know how to connect my unholy longings with a holy God.

My problems with prayer are pretty straightforward and maybe even typical for people who have been through pain. I became aware of them after experiencing two miscarriages and then having other women ask me for prayer when their pregnancies were in jeopardy. While I cherished the opportunity to pray for them and my heart yearned for them to experience healing and a preserving of life, I felt almost dumbfounded for how to express this to my God. I have found myself stopping before I even really get started:

“God, why would you hear me and save the life of this child when I cried out to you and you wouldn’t save my baby?”

I know I’m dealing with a common problem- interpreting God’s failure to do what I want as failure either on my part or on God’s part.

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December 8, 2012
by Maralee
2 Comments

A Life in Status- December #1, 2012

(Hear about our epic adventures in real-time here.)

Having boys (or the adventurous girl) means adjusting to that mini heart attack feeling you get when you see a giant plastic bug in an unexpected place.

Danny found “Puss in Boots” too scary, so he asked if we could watch a National Geographic documentary on deadly insects instead. Go figure.

The good thing about having a noisy kid- even when he’s playing at a neighbor’s house down the street, you pretty much know what he’s doing the whole time.

The hard part about having a Kindergartener and a baby is that at any point in time two of your kids could be teething.

Danny’s version of “If you love something, set it free”:
If you love something, break it in half.
If it’s repairable, it’s yours to keep.
If it isn’t, you probably weren’t supposed to be playing with it in the first place.

Thing You Wish You Never Had to Say #372:
“Mommy’s bootie is not a napkin.”

When you’re the parent of a trouble maker, THIS sounds like a compliment: “Well, he’s not the worst kid in the class. . . ” #proudmommymoment

Step 1: Baby cries for a snack.
Step 2: I give Baby a snack.
Step 3: Baby feeds snack to dog.
Repeat

Me: Here’s an apple for your snack.
Daughter: I not want apple. I not like it.
Me: That’s fine, but then you can’t have a brownie tonight.
Daughter: An apple? I love an apple! Oh, thanks Mom!
Brownies. They’re magical things.

Overheard Husband talking to Children in the bathroom-
“Gross! Listen- once you wipe your bootie with something DO NOT wipe your face with it.”
Once again, we’re keeping it classy over here.

December 7, 2012
by Maralee
12 Comments

Do. Right.

I’ve been struck with a perspective adjustment recently- the “rightness” of our actions doesn’t mean the outcome will be pleasant. I was thinking about this as I read through a fellow adoptive mama’s words of grief about a child who has chosen to reject her love. Does that mean it was wrong to adopt him? I thought about it again with a friend who is loving a baby for just a brief moment of potentially days or weeks before Baby lands in her permanent home. This will be an act of love and sacrifice that may hurt. Does that mean it isn’t the right thing to do? And multiple friends who have committed to little ones they would love to keep forever, but their primary goal is reunification with a potentially troubled biological family. These friends are passionate about what is best for these children they have come to love as their own, even if that means they suffer the pain of letting them go.

I am so scared that as the Body of Christ these families are the exception instead of the rule. How many times do I hear somebody say, “I would never be a foster parent because I couldn’t bear it when they took the child away.” I have perfected the understanding head nod, but inside I want to scream. Do you think these amazing women- women who are changing foster baby diapers, dropping foster kids off at school, making foster kids’ dinners, loving adopted children who have come from places so dark they don’t even know how to accept love- are so cold-hearted they won’t be devastated by the loss of these children from their homes and lives, or by their rejection? I know each of these women will be broken hearted when and if that day comes. I know I was broken hearted when boys we houseparented had to leave because of their own poor choices or decisions made by their parents. I was doubly broken hearted when we had to leave that job and I had to cry with them about the break-up of the family we had created.

So because it is painful to love and to lose, does that mean we choose not to love? God forbid.

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December 6, 2012
by Maralee
Comments Off on Let Them Eat the Dog Food

Let Them Eat the Dog Food

Don’t you wish you could save your kids from having to learn the hard lessons themselves? So many times I wish I could just give them my hard-earned life experience so they’d never be tempted to make these mistakes. A couple weeks ago I was doing the laundry when I heard my three year-old Danny ask, “Mommy, this like goldfish crackers?” I turned around and saw him eyeing the dog food bag. I went back to doing the laundry and a minute later he said, “Mommy, this NOT like Captain Crunch.” I said, “Gross! Did you eat the dog food.” He looked down at his toes and said, “No.” It was pretty easy to see through that answer and I asked him, “How did it taste?” He kept his eyes on the floor and said, “It not good, Mommy.”

Poor Danny! I could have told him that dog food wasn’t going to be the sweet treat he was hoping for, but this was something he just had to learn on his own.

As a mom it is so tempting to want to shield my kids from ever having to make the tough decisions. I’d rather distract them from that cookie sitting on the kitchen counter than tell them they can’t have it and then have to follow through if they don’t obey. But have I really seen their heart if I’ve just been managing their behavior with distractions instead of letting them learn? The same way God allows us to make unwise choices, sometimes I have to give my kids the freedom to learn from experiences I wish I could shield them from. And then I’ll be right there to comfort and console, or offer consequences as needed.

December 5, 2012
by Maralee
5 Comments

Kindergarteners and Underwear Ads

So I about had a heart attack a couple nights ago and I’d like to share my experience and save you your own personal heart attack later. (note- I’m talking about boys here, but I know girls can have their own issues. You have my permission to change the gender and context in your mind to suit your situation.)

My Kindergartener son came to me with a confession. He said he and a couple boys were supposed to be cutting pictures out of magazines as part of an art project in school. They found an underwear ad in the magazine they were using. And they laughed about it and passed it around.

Bless my son’s heart for being sensitive enough about such a thing that he felt compelled to tell me. Best I can tell, I’m not even sure anyone was IN the underwear in the ad, but he knew he wasn’t supposed to laugh or look at somebody else’s private parts, or what goes on those private parts. He felt genuinely guilty about how he’d behaved.

I felt this anxiety about being sure I handled this situation with grace and tact so he would know he could come to me in the future about this kind of stuff. So here are some tips for handling that situation when it happens to you. Because if you’re doing your job right, Mama, it will happen.

Wait? If I’m doing my job RIGHT won’t this never happen? Won’t my child never come across such a thing? Can’t we toss out the TV, homeschool the kids, move to a homestead in North Dakota and never have to worry about my boy seeing a lady he’s not married to in her underwear? Good luck with that.

I am telling you, this WILL happen. A pastor friend of mine said recently (this is my paraphrase) that in his youth you had to LOOK for naked ladies if you wanted to see them. Now the naked ladies come looking for you and you have to be actively training your mind to turn away. If it isn’t the Hanes ad in Better Homes and Gardens, it will probably be the bra ad that came in your Sunday paper, or even the well-meaning girl in the row in front of you at church that leaned down to get her Bible and a whole new world opened up to your little boy behind her. Temptation is EVERYWHERE and in some ways it always has been. So unless we intend to raise our kids in a community of burqas (and even then, isn’t the potential glimpse of a wrist going to become the new temptation?), we are going to run across this situation. What’s going to tell you if you’re doing a good job developing a relationship with your child is if they choose to tell you about it.

So once “it” happens and they tell you, what next? Picture yourself driving on one of those narrow mountain roads with deep ditches on each side- we want to STAY ON THE ROAD. So here are the two ditches we need to balance ourselves between:

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December 4, 2012
by Maralee
2 Comments

9 Months up, 9 Months down?

Nativity scenes drive me nuts. If I’m not irritated that baby Jesus has blonde hair (blonde?!), I’m irritated that Mary looks so svelte and calm after apparently just giving birth. This was NOT my experience and maybe having a child born on Christmas Eve makes me draw the comparisons a little more readily. I look back at those pictures taken directly after my son’s birth and I more closely resemble a Weeble (remember- Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down) than any Mary figure I’ve ever seen. I love seeing the genuine emotion and the beauty of my baby in my arms, but it is a little tough to see that very squishy, swollen version of me holding him.

I’ve written about weight before (here) while very much in the midst of that struggle. I had heard the same line you’ve heard: It took you nine months to gain it, it’s going to take you nine months to lose it. I kept holding to that truth like it was my lifeline back into my world before pregnancy. Now that the nine month milestone has come and gone, I have some arguments with that logic. My first argument with this line is just one for accuracy’s sake- it did not take me nine months to gain that weight. I managed to pack it all on in about six months. So shouldn’t it have all come off in six months? Not quite.

My second argument is this train of thought would seem to imply after nine months you will be back to your original size. Maybe you will. But I’m not. I am nearly a full year away from the birth of my child and I am still heavier than I was before he was born. And the rumor I hear is even when/if you lose all the weight, you will not necessarily be the same shape. I feel like these are the things somebody should tell you when you’re hanging on to your pre-pregnancy jeans like they’re your passport and you might need to leave the country at any moment.

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December 3, 2012
by Maralee
3 Comments

Getting Pregnant after Adopting

This last month has been such a fun time talking about adoption. If you couldn’t tell, it is my passion. So what happens when a girl who has become an adoption advocate and spokesperson for the infertility experience gets pregnant? As we’re getting close to my baby’s first birthday, I’ve been thinking a lot about what that transition was like in my life. So here’s what I want you to know about what it feels like to get pregnant after adopting.

Just a year into my young marriage my husband and I received an infertility diagnosis. In some ways it was devastating, but we also felt confident that God intended for us to adopt our first child. Well. . . eventually we got on the same page and felt confident about that. As just about any honest post about infertility and adoption will tell you, there’s a grief process to go through and spouses rarely work through that all at the same pace. For us, I was pretty immediately ready to move to adoption, but Brian took some convincing. I couldn’t convince him, it had to be a work of faith. I actually had to give him a month where I promised not to bring up adoption at all so he could really think about it for himself and not just hear me in his ear telling him why this was right for us. At that point he was ready to move forward with adoption, although there were still a lot of decisions left to be made.

Fast forward 8 years and three adoptions (one international, two through foster care) later. We had unsuccessfully tried some infertility treatments, but had eventually come to a point of peace about adoption being the only way we would add to our family. We were now a VERY multiracial crew- one West African son, one Native American son, one Mexican daughter- and adoption had become a vital part of our identity as a family. I co-lead an infertility support group through our church and was also very involved with children’s welfare issues through the foster care system. We had grieved our infertility and had moved past it into a beautiful new phase of our life.

And then I found out I was pregnant. This is not the moment of joy you might imagine it would be. After “trying” to get pregnant for nearly a decade, here was a positive pregnancy test right in front of me. Instead of feeling joy, I felt totally overwhelmed. How could I go through a pregnancy, childbirth, and then raise a new baby with three other kids all under the age of five? I worried about my physical health- I was not the 22 year-old I once was when we were first trying to get pregnant. I felt intense guilt- would my kids resent me for being pregnant? Would my kids resent this child for being biologically related to us? I had always imagined one day when I really submitted control of this issue back to God, He might grant me this desire of my heart. I never imagined that when I submitted it to Him, it would be with such a peace that I really wouldn’t desire the very thing I had cried and prayed for.

I was also very sensitive about the things other people would say or ask. There was sometimes a subtle (or not so subtle) implication that this child was now the reward we’d earned for adopting the others. This was really hurtful. I also heard an amazing amount of stories about how other people had adopted and then had children “of their own”. Their own? What were my adopted children if not my own? It was frustrating to me to think somebody thought my adopted kids were some kind of last-ditch fertility treatment that had paid off. People also made the natural assumption that I must be thrilled to finally be pregnant which kept me from being able to share my honest feelings.

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November 30, 2012
by Maralee
Comments Off on Mom Athletics and Olympic Turtles

Mom Athletics and Olympic Turtles

We had so much fun watching the Olympics with our kids this summer. Josh was especially excited about the track and field events. The poor boy actually cried when he realized he wasn’t going to be participating in them this year. While the Olympics were on the kids did a lot of pretend Olympics around our house. One morning Josh was jumping off the bed and yelled to me, “Is anybody in the Olympics brave enough to do THIS!” I told him, “Well, there are the hurdles. They run around the track and then jump like that.” He gave me a very confused look and asked, “Can they talk? And I didn’t know they could jump and run fast.” I said, “What do you mean.” And Josh answered, “Mom, the TURTLES. I didn’t know the TURTLES could jump and run fast.” I guess that would have made the Olympics quite a bit more exciting.

I am surely not an athlete and probably have more in common with your average turtle than with an Olympian, but I do know a bit about running a race. In I Corinthians 9 we read “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.” Even if I don’t have the body of a runner, I have a soul that needs training and discipline. It isn’t always fun, but I do it because there’s a reward for those who will persevere. And when I run that race with grace and strength, I become a coach who inspires my kids to run, too.

November 29, 2012
by Maralee
7 Comments

Supporting adoption in Your community

Adoption can be a really daunting process to start. It can be a major financial investment and feels so very risky as you decide to love a child you didn’t birth and with the understanding you may experience a lot of heartache before that child ends up in your arms, and maybe after. Once the child is home the parents who worked so hard to bring him home may now find there are problems they didn’t anticipate. They need focused, intensive time to create a family bond with that child. They need a group of people who support them and hold them up in prayer and who work to understand the challenges of adoption.

We have been amazingly blessed by a supportive community who has embraced us and our kids from the start. When Josh arrived home we had two baby showers (one church, one work) to celebrate his arrival. He had been so prayed for by a large group of people who wanted to express their love. We also had a packed courthouse and a party at the park to celebrate the adoptions of our two children from foster care. They were given gifts, balloons, and a group of ladies from our church even decorated our driveway with sidewalk chalk, balloons and signs to show that something special was happening for our family. We are thankful our kids will grow up knowing many adults who welcomed them into their community with open arms.

So to help you develop that same kind of environment where you are, here is my quick list of ways you can be helpful to an adoptive family:

To Do for supporting a pre-adoptive family

-Pray! This can be a scary journey to start and requires SO much wisdom to make the right choices for your family.

-Be understanding of the financial implications and do what you can to help.

-Be respectful of their need to talk about adoption or avoid talking about adoption depending on how they’re feeling.

-Share their joy! Love that child without reservations even if the legal ink isn’t dry yet.

-Offer to help clean for a homestudy visit or watch the kids so parents can fill out paperwork.

-Read “Adopted for Life” by Russell Moore. It’s a great way to come to understand God’s heart for adoption.

-If the wait has been really long, give them some space. Check in about the adoption, but don’t make it the focal point of every conversation.

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