Catching Kindness from My Children

This The Following Interview was First Published at Collecting Moments. 

Tells us the kindest thing you’ve ever experienced as a parent?

As we were preparing to adopt two of our children through the foster care system, friends of ours asked us if they could go through the rigorous process to provide state approved childcare for us. After becoming approved, they watched all three of our children a few times to give us a much-needed break. Each time they cared for our children, they noticed and brought to our attention that we were too exhausted to even see our own needs.

Who/what inspires you to be kind? Explain why they/it inspires you to do so.

I’m inspired to be kind when I recognize how naturally tender and empathetic my children are if I’m sensitive and kind to them. My worst regrets in life are times I could have been listening more carefully to their behavior and words, and chose rather to ignore their emotional needs for the sake of convenience.

It’s important to be kind to others, but it’s just as important to be kind to yourself. What do you do (or plan on doing) to be kind to yourself (either as a mother, as a professional, or as a woman)?

One major improvement I need to make is to schedule the predictable breaks I desperately need to lower my stress. When I’m less stressed, I’m naturally more sensitive, friendly, generous, and considerate to those I interact with each day.

It’s often said that kindness is easier said than done. As a parent, what valuable advice can you give for showing kindness to others (especially to those who may not seem like they want or deserve it)?

Because I’m continually learning valuable lessons as a parent, it’s becoming more natural for me to see others in the same way that I see my children. My children do the best they can do with the skills they currently have in their toolbox. When they aren’t doing well, they typically need rest, food, or for me to teach them how to do better in any given struggle.

When I remind myself to give others the same grace I give my children, I am more kind. Often as a result, my children see grace modeled and learn to be grace-givers.

As a parent, what does kindness mean to you?

Being a parent, I’m constantly aware of how my actions and responses directly impact people who are developing their own worldviews. When I’m impatient with one of my children, I watch him crumble. When I respond by listening to my child’s words and behavior and patiently taking the time to meet his unique needs, I watch his confidence grow.

What lesson do you want your kids to learn about kindness?

One day, I hope my children will realize that being kind is about their own character and not about the person offending them. As they learn to seize those moments of betrayal as opportunities to give grace, I expect their hearts will smile and the world around them will be brighter as a result. 

Fear or Love

Fear is powerful.

But not as powerful as love.

Fear builds walls.

Love builds bridges.

Fear must create “others” in order to define self

and dismiss others to approve of self.

Love makes unexpected friendships

-being completely unaware of self.

Fear is against.

Love is too busy standing for and with to have her attention diverted.

Fear survives.

Love thrives.

As I scroll through my Facebook feed, I'm met with fear-filled posts that are dismissive to strategically created "others." As I read, I'm reminded that those who are defensive are currently submitting to fear and, therefore, momentarily, incapable of love 

                                               - just as I am incapable of love when I'm a slave to fear. 

And I recall  treasured words I memorized as a child- words I still believe and cling to...

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18

Let's Be Brave, White Parents of Future Black Men

My husband, Matt, is an excellent story teller. He comes alive in every detail of each moment in such a way that his stories can often be longer than the event they’re describing. He’s engaging and people hang on his every word.

However, there is one story I despise hearing from him- the story of how he and his friend Ryan were roughed up by police officers outside of Chicago.

Matt and Ryan were driving in Matt’s swanky 1988 Ford Taurus and were pulled over because Matt didn’t use his blinker correctly. During their drive, they had been listening to a lecture by one of their college professors on a handheld mini-recorder. Seeing the flashing lights behind them, Ryan suggested they record their interaction with the officers on the recorder. Matt thought the idea was hilarious and Ryan crossed his arms and positioned the mini recorder so that it was pointing out from under his left arm.

As the officer approached Matt’s window and looked into the car, he suddenly jumped back and ran back to his vehicle because- as the black men reading this have realized all along- the end of the recorder resembles the barrel of a handgun.

What followed was forty-five minutes of being surrounded by twelve squad cars, listening to screaming obscenities over a megaphone, being ripped out of the car, slammed and pinned on the ground, cuffed by S.W.A.T. team members with guns drawn, and, Ryan, having a gun pushed into his ribs (as the officer said, “If you make one move, you’ll be breathing through your chest.”)

Every time I hear the story, all I can think of is how close to death Matt was.

Still, when Matt tells the story he's clear that even though the incident was physically excruciating and terrifying, the officers acted appropriately considering the situation.

And I’m quickly reminded of how two of my children would never have survived the same ordeal.

Matt and his friend Ryan evoked fear in the officers because they appeared to be armed and ready to fire.

As two of my sons grow up they will elicit fear because of the color of their skin.

They are so innocent.

Yet, we’re raising them in a culture where they will one day be guilty until proven innocent.

We have to learn how to better parent them so they can be the safest they can be in a world that sees them as a threat.

We Need to Listen

When it comes to racism, we can learn concepts, but we will never have the opportunity to learn from experience. We live in an age where it is easy to find voices to listen to. We need to listen to black men and women. We need to listen to mothers of black men and women. We need to listen to grandmothers of black men and women.

We need to listen to the angriest voices. We need to listen to the voices that make us most uncomfortable.

We cannot pick and choose. Every black person has a perspective and that perspective is influenced by his or her experience and every experience shared is a gift as it’s an opportunity for us to learn so we can become better parents and community members.

With adoption, it is particularly important that we listen to transracial adoptee voices. Once I heard an adoptee speak about how different her life was as a black woman once she went to college because she was no longer experiencing the umbrella of white privilege she had by being her parents’ daughter.

It was the first time I realized my black children experience white privilege.

It was the first time I realized one day they won’t.

Unfortunately, many of us adoptive parents didn’t realize the impact of racism before adopting black sons, and now, we aren’t immersed fully enough in communities of color.

We Need to Humbly Seek and Engage in Community

We need community to raise our children well and our children need role models who look like them.

Chad Goller-Sojourner, an adult adoptee, says, “Your child should not be your first black friend.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. Furthermore, as white parents of black children we need to embrace humility so our black friends know they can directly confront us on the parenting of our children. We need to invite their criticism.

Beyond that, my sons need to have safe men to look up to who look like them. My children shouldn’t be responsible for finding everyday role models on their own.

If I want my sons to respond to racism safely, bravely, and in a way that evokes respect, I must raise them in relationships with people who experience racism.

We Need to Take What We Learn and Teach our Sons the Rules

Often, with adoption and children with a history of trauma, routine is better accepted than rules. Yet, if we as parents are unaware of the rules black men follow to stay as safe as possible, we’re unable to start the right routines- routines that may keep our sons alive.

Due to some special needs in our family, we started many routines long before our friends began teaching their same-age, black sons simple rules, such as “how to wear a hoodie." We always narrate the “why” behind the routines in a developmentally appropriate way, and yet, we know our children may not yet trust us enough to believe us. They DO come to trust routines though. Routines feel safe.

Informed routines could lead to their increased physical safety as well.

We Need to Correct Our White Community

When we’re in community with folks who honestly believe we can either be loyal to black men or law enforcement, we need to lovingly call them out.

When our friends or family members use offensive and outdated language to refer to our black children, we need to lovingly educate them.

When our community members make broad brush racist statements, we need to lovingly speak up.

When opportunities present for us to lovingly point out racist behavior in others who are not in community with people of color, we need to seize those opportunities. .

This goes beyond being an ally.

This is first about being parents.

Parents willing to take risks to love our children well.

We Need to Be Willing to Cut Ties

I’m going to be honest with you, being unfriended is a gift. At least you don’t have to initiate the conversation when you’re unfriended.

Also, we can no longer associate with some people who used to be friends. When we initiate brave conversations and the response from a friend is hateful or dismissive, we need to veer our path from theirs.

Please hear me. Of course, we still care about former friends as human beings. We hurt for them. We love them. Our children learn compassion as we love those who are incapable of loving us back.

But, if a relationship with a friend is a threat to my child’s trust in me as a compassionate human being, the friendship must end.

We Need to Consider Trauma and Trust

With adoption and trauma, we often have to be so much more sensitive in our conversations with our children because if our words overwhelm them, they can go into fight, flight, or freeze.

We know that our children's fight, flight, or freeze responses often look scary (or guilty) and generate fear in those around them- making them targets for the very violence we hope they can avoid.

Adoptive parents, many of you get this. At times, it will be a challenge because people of color who do not have extensive experience with early childhood trauma will disagree with how you’re raising your black sons.

Still, we must be brave and be faithful with the wisdom shared with us by those who've experienced racism while considering our children’s already complicated experiences.

It won’t be easy.

I’m reminded of a beautiful evening Matt and I had about a month before our sons came home. We were surrounded by friends who came to our house to pray for us and for our sons. Matt and I were the only white people present.

As my friend Regine prayed, she wept over our bravery to choose to raise black sons. Over how scary and heart wrenching the journey would be. About how, as white people, we could have avoided the vulnerability and the risk we were actively seeking by becoming parents of our sons.

After she prayed, I noticed most everyone else in the room was nervously shifting and avoiding eye-contact with us as if they were all wondering if we had any idea about the weight of raising black sons.

I was also wondering if we had a clue. We’d heard stories. We knew facts. We knew statistics. But we did not know what it felt like to be the mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, or uncle to a black male. Neither of us knew what it was like to grow up black.

Neither of us were yet weeping specifically over the weight of raising black sons.

And we’ll never know the weight in the same way the other people in our living room that night knew as we can’t change our past experiences or the privilege our skin color affords us.

Which is why we know we need help.

Many of us didn’t adopt knowing how high the stakes were for our black sons.  

But now that we know more, we need to be responsible with our knowledge.

Let’s be brave.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou

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Openness is Adoption...True Story

We adopted our children through an Interstate Compact, which means they were placed with us by another state for the purpose of adoption. Their sending state was in the Southeast. During the meeting where we signed the final papers before bringing them home the area Adoption Director of the Department of Social Services said, “They’re young enough. You don’t even have to tell them they’re adopted.”

They were four and five-and-a-half.

They’re African American.

We’re white.

We were obviously dumfounded.

Luckily, we did our foster care training in our home state where we were instructed to be as open as possible with our children’s stories. Creating a lifebook for each child was encouraged. The social workers suggested we post photographs of birth family and former caregivers on the wall in their bedroom.

We completed our training and were quite pleased with ourselves for being so well-informed.

However, our children came home and as we utilized “best practices” in our home, we were getting unexpected responses from our children.

Something I’m just now realizing is that, although our training was highly informative and helpful, it tended to lump our kids together in a this-is-how-to-parent-through-trauma sort of way.

Individual comfort, acceptance, and personality were not considered. Likely the social workers assumed we could figure that part out.

We didn’t.

A couple years after our children came home I finally thought to ask them, individually, “What do you want to know about your adoption and about your life before coming into this family?”

Surprisingly, they wanted to know very little and they each were comfortable with separate facts. When I gave them only the information they requested, they treasured each detail and retained the information for the first time.

My children were asking for their story in small doses and were taking the time to digest what they had learned before asking for more.

Thanks to the brilliance of a treatment provider, our current goal is to begin new lifebooks that include only the requested information in them so we could build them over time.

And everyone’s thrilled about it.

I would love to learn what openness in adoption looks like in your family!

If I had five minutes of peace

If I had five minutes of peace,

I’d weep

For the intensity that defines every interaction with one of my children

For the peace that’s absent in our home

For the tears that wouldn’t come

for years

While I was entrenched in battles I hadn’t seen coming

Without the energy to fight the very battles I had anticipated being most invested in

For the loss of friendships

For friendship redefined

For the loss of myself.

For myself redefined

Through the weeping, Despair would dissipate as Hope made her entrance

Reminding me that through the battles

the pain

the loss

the grief

My Precious Children have exposed my Ugliest and my Worst

They've brought me to my knees

I am humbled.

grateful.

I will never be the same

This is a gift.

Adoption is Awkward

Awkwardness in Adoption is the exact reason I started writing. No matter how diligently we prepared to bring our children home, one barrier could not be removed:  Our sons didn’t know us as parents and we didn’t know them as sons.

And we were only going to be family because they had lost their first family.

Adoption is born out of loss. Our children are beautiful. We are becoming a beautiful family and we love each other.

The contrasts in the above statements are complex and uncomfortable.

It’s no wonder adoption is awkward.

Our Children are Misunderstood

I do not wish to speak for my children, but I know they are misunderstood because- for a long time- I misunderstood them. [Tweet This]

At times, I still do.

It took me years to begin to understand my children were mostly communicating through their behavior. Even though their behavior was often alarming to me and even dangerous to them and to those around them, it was the only way I could begin to understand how they were feeling and what they were thinking.

Their behavior was a gift and as I finally began to respond appropriately and empathetically, my children became less stressed and began to learn skills they needed to thrive in their new environment.

Unfortunately, we failed consistently for the better part of a year. As behaviors alarmed us, we became slaves to fear. Eventually, anger informed most of our interactions with our children. We didn’t understand. Their schools didn’t understand. Sunday School didn’t understand.

And the adult responses to my children’s behavior told them clearly that they weren’t good enough for any of us.

Even as I consider how much better life is these days, I wonder how often my children are misunderstood today. Their experiences have been complicated. I long to be a good listener and I long for my children to be understood.

When they’re understood, they are accepted and loved.

Because my children are inherently lovely.

Adoptive Parents are Misunderstood

During our first week as family, I spent about forty hours gathering the correct legal documents I needed to enroll my children in school. (Somehow nothing current or useful had been included in our five-inch binder of imperative information from the state.) About fifteen hours were spent trying to access healthcare because our children were placed with us from another state and there was a sixty day waiting period for insurance. And we all had Ringworm (some on their scalps). (While dealing with this fiasco, I learned that in some states being in foster care promised the worst medical care in the developed world. It took me fifteen seconds to Google search how to treat Ringworm on the Scalp- something my children’s “doctor” clearly hadn’t picked up in medical school or in her years of practice. Or by using Google herself. I could go on...)  About seventy-five hours were spent holding one of our children who was petrified and could not regulate his body to keep himself out of danger. (In fact, his scared body seemed to be drawn to life-threatening behaviors.) At least two hours were spent attempting to call my child down from a play structure on a playground when he refused to come home with me. (That only happened once during our first week because we stopped leaving the house out of fear for our lives.)

In my spare time, I was attempting to fix things that were constantly being shattered and smashed while hoping we wouldn’t be evicted from our apartment due to the noise, chaos, and broken stuff.

When you do the math, you realize I was often holding a scared child, while on hold with the school district, and drafting an email to my children’s former caregivers. After our children went to sleep, Matt and I would unearth the power tools and fix stuff until we finally fell asleep. Matt would then wake at 3:45 am, daily, to rock our most scared child when he would wake up trembling.

All the while, my phone was ringing nonstop with people - genuinely excited about our children- who wanted to get together for play dates.

And the pastor’s wife wondering when I would return to lead the Children’s Ministry.

It all went straight to voicemail.

Some of you may be wondering, if we were so prepared, why hadn’t we prepared our community? The truth is- we tried to. Still, some people believed their prior misconceptions. To them, we were “getting two children who were already potty trained.” It’s as if we had adopted to “skip all the hard stuff.”

While it’s good to realize some people will refuse to acknowledge depth and hardship, if I were to do it again I would prepare a concise letter with documentation and cited sources to describe our expectations of becoming a family. I might even ask for feedback as it would have been helpful to have at least known whom would have the ability to process the information and respond in a way that made our relationship a safe one to continue in.

Please do remember this, friends:  Your loved ones are making up for months and years of lost time with their new child. Their children need their new parents as a newborn, a toddler, and an elementary school child- often all at the same time. Your friends are struggling to meet these complex needs. They cry tears over their child’s losses and they wonder if they’ve done the right thing by bringing their child home. They don’t even know if they can meet a small percentage of this precious human being’s intense needs. Your friend may not have the ability to answer her phone. She may not have the ability to shower once weekly. She likely can’t invite you into her house as her child still does not understand whom his new family is made up of.

She will be grateful for every meal, bag of groceries, or jug of milk you drop off on her porch. Your handwritten notes of encouragement are priceless to her. Your ability to listen to her unique challenges without judgment is a rare find.

We Need Consistent Community

I want to be clear, I’m not angry about the awkwardness of adoption. However, I do want to expose it. The more our families are known, the less isolated we feel. The less isolated we feel, the better we love our children. The more our families are understood, the more our children are accepted and the more others begin to empathize with their unique struggles and love them where they’re at.

Our children are treasures.

And due to the misunderstandings and awkwardness around adoption, they are often judged unfairly.

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