Enough…

A sudden wailing fills the air — half panic, half pain — the kind of cry a mom knows is the real thing.  The kind that sets your heart racing and before you even register its direction, you are flying instinctively toward it.

There in a heap on the floor is your baby, clutching her face, an angry red scrape already showing next to her eye.  She is weeping inconsolably.  You pick her up and curl yourself around her, trying to comfort and assess the damage at the same time.  There is no blood, so your primary objective is to calm and soothe.  It’s a scenario played out every day by moms the world over.

But it’s also very different.  This little girl, visible scratch and already swelling eye, has been through more than anyone should in her almost four short years of life.  Abandonment, abuse, hospitalization, being flown halfway around the world to join a family of strangers, and those are just the details you know.

Two months ago she was terrified of you.  You couldn’t offer her comfort because your mere presence was a sign of change and disruption — things she didn’t want anywhere in her recently stabilized world — one that had found security in the walls of an orphanage, probably for the first time ever.  Two months ago you were the stranger who wrenched her from this place where she had found love.  When she fell and got hurt, she set her jaw, glared at you in defiance, and refused to cry.

Today, safe and secure, once again, this time in a family, she knows she can cry.  Because there is someone to respond.  The stranger has become a mama whose arms are safe.

As I sit there, holding her tightly while she wails, far longer than is probably necessary based on the injury, I wonder what else she’s feeling.  Is she crying for all the times the arms that were supposed to hold her were attached to hands that hurt her?  Is she crying for an ayi who comforted her when she was hurt in her orphanage?  Time seems to slow. I notice the mess that is my house.  I mentally berate myself for the amount of outside now tracked inside that I haven’t had time to sweep.  I notice the beads strewn everywhere by two little girls.  I register that my older daughter, also from a hard place, is very upset by the fact that her sister is hurt and is coping the way she always copes — by chattering incessantly and trying to insert herself into the situation.  I register the furry snout of the schnoodle as he tries to fix the injury (his spit is magic — he knows it), and the quieter schnauzer mix from hard places, who sits back away from the action, also concerned that his new small human is unhappy, but unsure of how to help.

This is my life.  This is my family.  The one that has been pieced together from three different continents and as a result of loss and brokenness.  I want to cry, but don’t.  I am suddenly overwhelmed by all of the unknowns in my girls’ pasts and also in their futures.  Our daily life is a canvas of joy, pain, defiance, reminders — so many reminders of the same thing, over and over again — and also the normal stuff of family life, like math homework, bath time and happy giggles.

Adoption is hard.  It is the hardest thing I have ever done.  But it is also beautiful, in its own broken way.  Daily it reminds me that, while I am not enough, I am all these girls have.  And that while I will never live up to my own standards of perfection, I am who God has chosen to be their mom.  I am humbled, I am blessed, I am honored and, more often than not I am terrified and certain that I cannot possibly give these daughters everything they need and deserve.

But God.  And so, with increasing frequency, I remind myself that the battle is mine, but it was, and continues to be, His first.  He is in control.  I am not.  I have so little control.  (This makes me crazy, of course.)  All I can do is the best I can do, and pray that it is enough.  And I wish, as I sit there, tiny, fragile, still sobbing girl in my arms, that I could crawl up into a lap somewhere and sob my heart out, too.

I can’t though.  Because now I’m the adult.  The mom.  The one who fixes things for others, even when she feels broken herself.  The realization gives me a strange comfort.  Maybe… maybe I am enough.  At least right now and in this moment. And while I cannot offer perfection, or even a reliably clean floor, I can hold them when they cry.  I can re-direct them, as kindly as possible, even when I am saying a particular thing for 433rd time.  And  I can trust the One who made us a family.  A family of broken girls and rescued dogs.  And dirt.  And beads. And love.

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