Our Summer Safety Plan

Three years ago, we were jumping through hoops, ripping through red tape, and fighting for the right to bring home our sixth child (now 14). Apparently bringing home 3 unrelated adolescents through international adoption is frowned upon. We understood why, but keeping the connection between her and our son, because they were raised together, seemed worth jumping off the cliff of tradition and solid wisdom. Proverbial cliff jumping was something that was beginning to be normal for our family.

Besides we had all these trust-based parenting tools and understood trauma. It’s okay if you’re laughing at our foolishness. We failed to understand the impact and sacrifice it would take to utilize the tools. Perhaps that was by design because we would never have knowingly jumped if we had fully understood, and we fully believe that, despite the HARD, our family was called to this journey. I’ve said it before, but the last three years, even with the trauma inflicted on us, has been the most intense period of growth, personally and spiritually, we’ve ever experienced.

The irony of the valley we are walking through this summer is not lost on us. We fought to bring a broken, traumatized, insecure, frightened, and hurting child into our family. Some would say we asked for this.

I’m choosing to share our HARD publicly because:

1. I value transparency and authenticity…especially among God’s people.
2. We need all the prayer we can get.
3. When you live in the CRAZY, it can get lonely, and you start to believe you might be the crazy one. If your family is walking through anything similar to ours, I share because of you, so you know YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
4. There are families out there who think adoption is the best means to add to their family, want to save a child, want to be needed by someone, or think it’s the Christian thing to do. The only reason to adopt is because you are called—called to adopt and walk the accompanying journey, unconditionally. Perspective families need to know how to count the costs up front.

The bottom line is that our other five children are not emotionally safe when G is around. While we understand we are fighting a battle against trauma—not our child—we are not willing to sacrifice the emotional health of our other children while the battle rages on. Two of our kiddos are taking the brunt of it. Their safety has become a top priority.

The hard part is to also balance the felt safety of G because increasing her felt safety is the only way she’ll heal to the point where she can be safe around her siblings. Traditional respite and residential treatment are currently not on the table for financial reasons and because we feel they would compromise the progress G has made.

In the interest of all the kids, we’ve decided as much as possible to segregate G from her siblings for the summer. As bazaar as this may sound, we believe God orchestrated some details to make this “family reboot” a viable option with minimal disruption. We’re using a mix of having the littles away, having G stay with family, and having G and I stay out of the house for a couple weeks. She’ll be putting some extra time with our therapist over the next couple weeks as well in an effort to increase her stability.

While the schedule we’re attempting to pull off may sound stressful, it doesn’t compare to the stress of worrying about and managing the emotional health of all the kids when G is in the mix. Having a safety plan for the summer has brought a peace with it.

We’re just over a week into the summer plan. Just as with anything else, it’s had its ups and downs. I’m trying to focus on God’s faithfulness (which doesn’t have ups and downs) and just putting one foot in front of the other. Basically we’re all doing okay…except for when we’re not.