The Time of Our Life

I've been mia in the blogosphere as I adjust to 2nd year chaos.  I have a feeling in the next 52 weeks the posts won't be super frequent, but I assure you we're still here. . . trying to keep cool in the DC humidity (how sad is it that our A/C bill is more than our heating bill was this winter?????  WRONG!)

Today I attended the first day of a Play Therapy Institute @ Johns Hopkins University.  It was very good.  I'm looking forward to tomorrow.  Last weekend I was @ a Grief, Bereavement & Trauma Institue @ GW.  It was EXCELLENT.

I just wanted to share w/ you something that really impacted me today.  Warning:  if you choose to watch this it's likely to yield a fairly visceral reaction.  We ended with this video.  The youtube quailty isn't as good but the message is the same.





It hit me that this is what I'm doing.  These are the kid of families I have the privilidge and responsibility to work with and help.  There's a hall @ Children's Medical Center that has a really cool display on adoption right now.  The hall is lined by professional portraits of individuals in their late teens who are seeking adoption.  Watching this video made me think about each of those stories I've taken time to read.  I realized that these are kids that have probably spent most of their lives in The System.  The very very very broken System.

I have so much respect for foster families like this one  [this is a blog I stalk through my friend Jenny ].  I'm humbled and so deeply touched by how this family lives Christ's love.

I've got to be honest (and admit how very very very selfish I am), some aspects of adoption really scare me probably because I have gained a very clear understanding of how attachment issues/complications/neglect that happen in the first months and years profoundly impact a person FOR THE REST OF HIS OR HER LIFE.    The families who engage and work to provide corrective emotional experiences for these innocent children inspire me.

As I watched this video, the tears were streaming down my face uncontrollably as I thought about the family that God placed me in.  I was given to parents that I never earned or deserved.  The love that was given to me every single day of my life humbles me to this day.  I'm one of the "lucky ones" --- I hope that someday, some how, somewhere - I can do something that can touch the life of a child that wasn't so lucky.  I'm acutely aware that I could have just as easily been born to a mother who cared more about her heroin fix that making sure that I was fed when I woke up crying in the middle of the night.  The kids that live in my vanilla, upper middle class suburban neighborhood in Northern Virgina  right now are no more deserving than the kids I'm going to start working with in a few that live 15 miles away in southeast DC.  The kids who live every day surrounded by drugs, neglect, violence, homicide and trauma as a regular part of their everyday life.  The kids that live so close but are actually living a world away from anything I've ever know in my own life.