Jan 1, 2015
I remember sitting with Joe
sometime during January 2014 and strategizing and saying, “This is going to be
a really hard year for me because I already am so ready to start the adoption
process, and I have to wait another whole year.” We made it through, with
flying colors might I add. It was a beautiful year, filled with freedom,
adventure, preschool, Disneyland, Legoland, curiosity, patience, and stillness.
My three boys have kept my hands busy, but there has not been a day that has
gone by that I haven’t thought of Bella, prayed for her, longed to know where
she is, wondered if she is alright, pondered who her birth mother is, questioned
what age she is. It is amazing how much time I have spent thinking about her
and praying for her.
Being a stay at home mom has been
a refining fire for my type-A, task oriented, straight-A student heart. It has
stilled me and changed me more than anything else in my 29 ½ years of life. I
have learned, finally, to be ok with stillness, to be ok with doing nothing
with my boys, to be able to quiet the ever present voices whispering at me to
keep striving, to keep pressing forward, to do more, to BE more. I have become
in the last 4 ½ years so much better at accepting myself, and that trying my
best whether or not anyone else notices is enough.
I have learned to empty myself of
expectations. I still walk forward into every day with a to-do list: laundry,
preschool, park playdate, Target…. But I have become so much better at being
okay, for the most part, of surrendering my day. Of laying down what I want my
day to look like, on an hourly basis because that is usually how often I need
to do it, and allow myself to be flexible to what may happen, which has made me
such a happier person. If naps don’t happen, if the boys refuse to do what I
had planned, if I drive down to Legoland and they won’t go on a single ride, it’s
ok.
Every day is a struggle to be
patient, but I have grown so much. No matter how many times the boys yell at
me, cry, whine, yell at each other, ask for insanely crazy things, I have
learned to take a deep breath, smile, and answer calmly. I have learned to not
let their emotions affect my internal world. I have become so much more
emotionally stable through the boys. They have trained me to be able to hold a
screaming child and comfort him and remain internally still and peaceful.
The hardest thing for me is
parenting with an audience. I am fine with calmly disciplining, teaching,
talking with an emotional and unreasonable child, but when I have to do it
while friends or family are watching, for some reason, it is a 1000 times
harder. Doing what I believe to be the right thing is one thing, but doing it
while imagining if someone else thinks it’s the right thing makes it so much
harder for me.
I need my friends. I need to talk
with them and share with them and struggle through this parenting mystery with
them, but I struggle with them seeing my children’s weaknesses and my own.
Being a parent is so hard because day in a day out you try your best to pour
good principles and right and wrong into your children, but at the end of the
day, you never know what they will do. You can’t control the words that pop
from their mouths or the way they shove a kid that grabs their toy. You can
respond after the fact and try your best to handle each situation with grace,
but it is hard not to see your children as a reflection on you on a daily
basis, as little Hayleys, in that people look at you like you are doing a bad
job if your kiddos throw a tantrum.
The good news about this is that
it has made me very nonjudgmental of other parents. I put myself in their
shoes, and even the parents that are yelling at their kids with angry faces, I
understand. I understand the emotional breaking point you can get to after
watching your kids for ten hours without two minutes to think in quiet, and I
just smile and hope that their day gets better.
So we begin the year of
paperwork. A year I have prayed for and sought and thought about for so long.
And now that it’s here I am nervous: nervous of roadblocks, of rejection, of
hang ups. I have had so much energy and passion and desire to be my best as a
stay at home mom for so long that I am afraid I will wake up somewhere along
the way in the next 12-18 months, which is how long the adoption journey will
take and realize I am tired and am not sure I can handle another one, and then it
will be too late. And I know that I will need every ounce of love, and strength,
and passion I can muster once she is here. I feel so ready for her to come
right now. So ready to jump into the challenges and long nights and hard won
joys that will come but so afraid that once we jump on that plane, I will not
have the strength that I have now. I pray for patience in the sitting and the
waiting and the being. Because God’s timing is perfect, and he knows which
little girl a world away is for us. I have read so many comments from so many
families waiting on specific paperwork at different times and how many exact
days they have been waiting because they have been counting, and I am worried
about being too obsessed with the waiting and forget to live.
I want to release my fear. The
fear of which special need we will be tackling and the fear of my energizer
bunnies accepting and loving their new sister who is going to come at them not
with blinking newborn eyes but with grabbing toddler hands, the fear of the
difficult transition for our baby girl who has so much ahead of her the next
two years.
2015 is going to a big year. A
year of changes. A year of kindergarten and of schedules. A year of notarized
paperwork and holding our breath. And I pray for the strength and the patience
and the energy to be the best version of myself day by day by day.
Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll
