for those suffering in silence

In an effort to make good on my previous commitment to be real, I wrote the following as a guest post for Kim Van Brunt's blog {Honestly} Adoption:

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. May, 2011.

The screams have finally ceased, replaced by shuddering sighs as my newly adopted daughter gradually surrenders to fitful sleep in my arms. Perched on the edge of the mattress, I complete my third consecutive hour of rhythmic rocking and humming, and then begin another. It will be several more minutes before I can ease my rigid embrace and attempt to lay her down.

My arms burn from the extended effort of restraining a thrashing two-year-old. Perspiration, hers and mine, soaks my shirt, the blanket with which I’ve swaddled her, and her brand new Carter’s pajamas. The hot dampness smells of strife and mocks my pre-adoption visions of this bedtime ritual. I’d imagined the rocking, swaddling, and humming. I just hadn’t planned on the full-body wrestling, blood-curdling screams, clawing fingers, and buckets of sweat.

Then again, few things about our three weeks in Africa have gone as planned...

(To read the remainder of this post, please click on {Honestly} Adoption.)

Being Me.

It's been 97 days since my last post. I've been avoiding you. But please, don't take it personally. It's not you...it's me.

I've been trying to figure out which Me to be. Facebook Me, who's mostly happy and hopeful and always out to capture simple, quirky everyday moments with my kids? Blogger Me who once wrote mournful posts about the insufferable adoption waiting and now composes mini-sermons that vaguely allude to troubles at home but wrap the solutions up with pretty, uncomplicated bows? Pinterest Me, who is obsessed with planning decor for our new house and uncovering ingenious new homeschooling techniques for getting my kids to memorize sight words?

Or Real Me, who watches marathon episodes of Burn Notice instead of studying her Bible, plucks white hairs out of her scalp while waiting at red lights, and has been known to eat peanut M&Ms off the floor as long as she can still remember with reasonable certainty when they were lost.

Real Me is dangerous, because she knows things I'd rather hide and forget. She knows that there's no sin in the spectrum of evil that I'm incapable of committing. Real Me makes me face my utter depravity and calls me to surrender the many tools I use to anesthetize myself from honest introspection and the corrective action that must follow.

This week Real Me has been contemplating Jeremiah 2:12-13: "Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate," declares the Lord, "for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water."

What are my cisterns? Some of them are easy to name: television, novels, food, respect from peers, financial success, etc. But what about the ones that don't look like cisterns? There's one right under my feet. I'm standing in it, in fact, and until just now I didn't even realize it was here. I can't quite make out the name, but it has something to do with Adoption.

Expectations of. Disappointment with. Challenges through. Heartache over. Failures in.

Real Me wants to figure out how she got down here, find a way out, and warn others not to fall in. Facebook Me wants to write a status about how beautiful the night sky looks through that narrow hole in the top. Blogger Me wants to quote a line from Beth Moore's Get Out of That Pit and wax eloquent about scaling the walls, but not actually go anywhere. Pinterest Me wants to figure out how to make a bench for myself out of an old suitcase and some pillow stuffing.

Real Me wins.

I hope.