She wrote, “I’m glad adoption worked out for you, it doesn’t for everyone. Our adoption has destroyed us.” I would never consider that adoption has worked out for me. I would also wager to bet that I am not who I was before we adopted. I am broken and lonely. I fight voices that tell me I am fighting a… Read More

There are rules when it comes to raising children from hard places. It has taken me some time to understand them, and so I thought I would share what I have learned from my son and his spoons. I once heard of a spoon analogy with chronic illness, but it wasn’t until Israel, that I realized parts of it related… Read More

I know you. You began with such big hopes and a dash of hesitation. You knew the risks and had heard the stories. You waded through the advice from friends and strangers; and read all the books and all the blogs. You added words like attachment theory, trauma-informed parenting, reunification. You also found yourself using new acronyms like TDM (team… Read More

She sat in my lap and screamed and sobbed. Her denim jumper was damp; a mix of sweat and tears. My husband had just called me because she would not stop screaming. I met him outside the bank beside his truck and I took my raging and screaming child into the quiet confines of my car. Her shrieks echoed loudly… Read More

She sat across from me, a walking contradiction of motherhood, the embodiment of everything I had spent the last 10 years trying to repair. She represented the mother each of my children had lost when they entered the foster care system. The woman who I feared when we took the foster care training classes. This woman was the unseen spectre… Read More

I’ll never tell you it isn’t hard, or that it wasn’t scary. He turns 7 years-old today and I look back at his first months home and I wish I could have known then, what I know now. I wish I would have known that fear lies to you. Fear tells you things like, “You have ruined your life, this… Read More