The Waiting Game

June 11, 2010

It's a waiting game. The days go by slowly, I try and think of things to fill my time, to keep me distracted but somehow my mind ends up there. Thinking of adoption. Thinking of my daughter.

Where is she? What has she gone through? What will she go through to make her way to me and my family? How much pain has she gone through? Is she silent in her pain? Does she ache for a family to call her own? Will she be open to coming into ours? Or talked into it by the caseworkers?

These things go through my mind as I wait.

I send fleeting prayers up for her. That God will set His angels to protect her. To keep her safe. To help her heal. To help her begin the process of one more transition, hopefully her last.

Does she look up at the moon like I do? Maybe we are looking at it at the exact same time, wishing for each other.

Wednesday morning, I went to a class. It wasn't required, but I highly recommend it! "Understanding and Responding to the Sexual Behavior of Children." It's taught by Linda Bello, MSW, she is from the Portland State Universities Child Welfare Partnership program.

Good stuff. Meat to sink your teeth in. One out of every three girls will be sexually abused by the age of 18 yrs. That is a pretty high number. So sad too. Being robbed of their innocence, sometimes by their own fathers. Sometimes by a mother so desperate for drugs to get high on, that they pimp out their own daughters, letting some greasy, creepy guy take their little girls in the other room and do "whatever they want." How awful for those little girls.

I feel so sad that there will be a good chance our daughter has experienced something of this type of abuse. How can I help her heal from that? I want to so desperately.

To me, these kids are like a type of Helen Keller child...only instead of being physically deaf, blind and mute, they are developmentally, socially and mentally unable to cope in the real world. To them, all their abuse WAS the real world, they don't KNOW any difference! It will take a teacher, much like Anne Sullivan was to Helen Keller, who does not give up on them, who consistantly sets out to reteach them the world.

Anne Sullivan repeated the process over and over and over, until finally the light bulb came on and Helen understood. I hope I can be consistant enough, strong enough, with just the right amount of determination and love to reach through the shell and find the inner child...to re-teach her what real love is...

By example. I am not perfect. I know this. I make lots of mistakes. I did make alot of mistakes with my boys. I see that now more than ever. Their trauma was the whole divorce and our family being ripped apart. Everyone deals with trauma in their own way. I just want to be honest and real. To talk talk talk things out. I want to have unconditional love. No strings attached. Give for the purest reasons, with no thought of anything back. May never get anything back.

This little girl has already been through so much. She has hurt far more than I could imagine. My soul wraps her inside of me, to nurture her needs...even now, in my thoughts...while I wait.