five months.

Our boys have now been with us five months, and we have wonderful moments and other moments that can only be described as desperate.

I took Gabriel and Noah to our pediatrician soon after they came home in April, and she told me, “Expect a good six months’ adjustment period for every member of your family.” I so appreciated her wisdom. I was worried about many things. But she said she didn’t want to consider any kind of next steps until we reached that six month mark. She said, “The very most healing thing for all of you is to be home together as a family. Just be patient.”

That has helped me a great deal. But this week I realized I’ve been hanging on for dear life to that six-month pronouncement as the moment when everything will magically click into place and become “normal” for our family.

And yet. Here we are at five months, and while we’ve come such a very long way in our bonding/healing process, I’m now realizing that we have a long way still to go.

In other words, I’m still burrowed deep in the tunnel, and I see that I will be here for quite awhile.

Suddenly I remember other wisdom, from friends who have adopted, from blog posts like this one by Jen Hatmaker, and books I’ve read, that let me know it takes a whole year for this kind of adjustment to happen.

We’re not even half way there yet.

There are so many layers and as we get through some challenges, I’m staring others full in the face, and some days I just cry because I want to fix my children right now. Not just the adopted ones — all of them, who struggle in various ways with brokenness.

My kids’ brokenness reveals my own brokenness and I’m just so impatient with the lot of us. I want us to be bonded and healed and happy. I want to be Fun, Laid-back mom — to be kind and gentle with all their struggles, and have a sense of humor on the days when things fall apart, and have wise words for their questions (okay, to actually answer their questions instead of brush right past with my arms overflowing with laundry), and to smile and shrug my shoulders when the house is a mess.

But I just can’t be that mom, and honestly, I’m so weary of trying. I’m weary of this journey, which is stretching me to my limits and exposing my deep inadequacy. It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon, and I’ve never really had good stamina.

As I write this I’m sitting in a flood of tears, because like a light turning on, I see that that at the heart of it all, I do not want to surrender my kids to God. I worry over them all constantly and problem-solve and desperately want to protect each of them from pain. But I’m holding on too tight. I’m striving to do something God has not called me to.

I am not God.

I am not in control.

There are things He asks me to do as a parent, yes, and I need to be faithful. But the outcome of what I do is His. I can’t fix anyone. I can’t make anyone’s path clear and smooth. God has used pain and brokenness in my own story to change me and help me love other people better, and He probably wants to do the same thing for my children.

And yet I’m here, grasping their precious, fragile stories in my hands, trying to manipulate the sentences into something I think is tidy and pretty. In the process, I’m trying to write a chick-lit novel where the world is bubble-gum happy and bright.

But God is their Writer, and He’ll settle for nothing less than a classic. He has challenges and depth and beauty in store for them that I can’t even imagine. He has rich plot and conflict and character. His sentences sing.

So what is my job? I think it is probably just humble acceptance. It’s not straining ahead for some abstract six-month or one-year point when life will become easy. You know as well as I do that that won’t happen. One day we’ll probably emerge from this particular tunnel, yes, but then new challenges will replace old ones, because we are all sinners, and because we live in a beautiful-but-broken world.

And so now, here, at five months’ in, I see with a new kind of clarity that my job is to surrender and to sit with my children, just as they are here and now. I’m to love them the best I know how, even when I can’t fix them, even when I can’t be everything for them. I’m to celebrate their stories.

Instead of responding in sharp frustration because I desperately want to meet their every need and can’t, I can relax. I can repent when I need to, and other times I can smile kindly at them as I make my boundaries and say “No.” “No, I can’t be everything for you, and no, I won’t try.” I trust that my inability to meet all their needs and heal them is part of their process of needing and loving and being healed by Jesus.

This light-turned-on is also like a heavy weight slipping from my shoulders. I would never trade my life. But I want more than that, I want joy. If you’d pray for that, I’d be grateful.