Ready to Receive: A Call to Adopt

Our family has a new addition!  Meet Chessie.  

It seems appropriate that we adopted Chessie during National Adoption Month, and so I wrote a story about it.

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The puppy looked at me eagerly from behind the wires of her cage.  Anxious eyes and a wagging bobbed tail expressed anticipation that she could not keep contained, as her entire little body shook with excitement and apprehension. I slid open the door to her pen and reached for her.  I knew that it was all over now.  I knew that the moment I held her, I would be hooked, and that she would be coming home with me.

I did not really want another dog.  My husband and I had already owned what we knew would be the best dog we would ever have.  A pure-bred mutt, she’d been the most obedient, gentle, loyal, and intelligent pet anyone could possibly imagine.  When we’d found her, left abandoned as a puppy on the side of a forest road, she too had shaken with apprehension mixed with excitement. My husband and I were newlyweds when we found her, and she became our first “child”.  Little did we know that she would be our only child for the next decade to come.  We named her “Sage”, in hopes that once she outgrew her puppy years, during which she acted like she didn’t have much of a brain, she would live up to her name and become a wise and faithful companion.  By the time she passed away, silently in her sleep on our front porch sixteen years later, she’d become all that and more.  She’d become irreplaceable.

Soon after we lost Sage, my children began asking if we could get another dog.  Not yet, I’d said.  Maybe not ever, I thought.  How could we replace a dog that was irreplaceable?  No other dog could ever meet the standard that Sage had set.  Besides, we had three children now, including a toddler, and that was more than enough to take care of.  Getting another dog, especially a puppy, would just add to the load.  And so, for over a year, I’d pushed back when they’d asked.  God will send us a dog when he is ready, I would say, but I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for one.  And as I tried to explain my rationalizations, I felt an old familiar feeling, and my mind went back to a memory from many years ago.

Sage was five years old in this memory, and my husband and I were in our mid-thirties.  We’d been trying for five years to have a baby and had just lost our first pregnancy in miscarriage.  I sobbed and wrapped my arms around Sage, our only “baby”.  I thought about how hard this had all been, how unfair, how perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a mother.  I thought about how old I was getting, how long it had taken to get pregnant just once, how I’d likely never get to parent more than one child, should I ever get that lucky. I thought about how my biological child whom I’d just buried, was irreplaceable.

And I thought about adoption.  But not much.  Not seriously.  God will send us a baby when he is ready, I would say to myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for one.  How could any child replace a child of my own flesh and blood?  How could I understand any child that did not share my or my husband’s biological background, with all the personality quirks and habits that our genetics express.  It all just seemed too risky, to take on a child with no real knowledge of his or her ancestry, genetics, and with having no control over the environment to which they’d previously been exposed.  Much like taking in a puppy, I wasn’t ready for that load of unknowns and unpredictability. What I was ready for was a child like the one I’d created in my mind, one that I considered irreplaceable.

As time passed, I prayed for the hole in my heart to heal, but instead, it grew bigger and bigger. I begged God to take the pain away and felt abandoned by him as my prayers for a child remained unanswered. Another year passed, and by the time it ended, I was emotionally and spiritually spent.  I had no more energy left with which to fight God. As experienced by so many of the saints, I felt trapped within my own “dark night of the soul”.  No longer convinced that my desires were those of God’s, I slowly began to surrender my plans and slowly open myself up to his.  One night, wiping tears from my face after yet another month of disappointment, I spoke the words that I had been trying to push out of my head for over a year.  “I want to adopt”, I said to my husband.  It was a moment of complete surrender for me and once I actually said the words, I realized it was the calling that I had been resisting all along.  My husband agreed quickly.  His heart ready and now, so was mine.

The healing began almost immediately.  Hopelessness turned into hope.  For the first time in years, I felt like God was hearing me again and helping me along my journey. Was this what he’d wanted all along? We excitedly began the long, arduous process of contacting adoption agencies, weighing our options, calculating the financial costs, starting a home study.  Fingerprinting, background checks, training sessions, profile books, interviews, and writing lots of checks dominated all our free time for the next few months.  None of it was fun nor easy but we embraced it all nonetheless, knowing that each step brought us closer to filling the hole in our hearts.  And then the waiting began.  Waiting to be chosen by a birthmother.  Waiting for someone to say that we were good enough to be their child’s parents.  Waiting for someone to believe that we were irreplaceable.

I thought about all those feelings as I scooped the little black and white puppy in my hands.  As she looked up at me with coal black eyes, she relaxed in my arms, just as my children had done the first time I’d held them.  Her coloring and markings reminded me of Sage, who also had been a black and white lab-mix.  But this was not Sage and I was finally ready to accept that.  I was ready to receive what God had been preparing for me.

Placing the puppy in her crate, I loaded her into the passenger side of my car and took her home to her new family.  To my family.  To three happy little boys, two of whom had come to us through adoption, and who were, without a doubt, irreplaceable.  

Goodbye Summer

I do not care much for summertime (although I do love September).  I suppose that's not exactly the most popular opinion these days. And I also suppose that if I were writing this blog post in late February, rather than late September, I'd be more hesitant to make such a statement. But it is not February and right now, all I can think about is just how weary the summers make me.

When you grow much of your own food, and process it, summer means more work.  A lot more. The long days of sunshine bring twelve or more hours of activity, and by season's end, I am wore out. Rising early and squeezing the most out of every moment before sunset, I parcel my day out into pieces. This summer, in particular, was a challenge, as I added some part-time biologist work (away from home) to an already heavy load.  Tom traveled more than usual on business this summer, and homeschooling, summer camps, and a couple of short family trips filled in the gaps.  Together, we all made it work, and we have a lot to show for our efforts, but I am ready for the season to end.

Right now, at the moment that I write this, I am part of a perfect, universal balance...the autumnal equinox. Beyond this day, there will be more darkness which, for me, brings more rest. Six months from now, the balance will be struck again, and I will feel the anxiety and hurriedness that comes with each extra hour of sunlight. But not today. Today, I celebrate a productive harvest and all that summer brought, but most of all, I celebrate the fact that for a few months to come, I no longer have to keep up.

Happy First Day of Autumn!

looking for potato bugs

chamomile harvesting

sweet potato slips under the jugs

a natural beauty we found in the woods (yellow fringed orchid)

conquering a fear of the water slide

when you forget your swim clothes, you swim anyway

school on the front porch and breaking beans

capturing the morning sunshine full-faced

a furry friend I found while working

too many cucumbers. again.

a sign of summer's end.

and another sign...he just turned two.

Saving the Strawberries (My Take on the Church Scandal)

We're all reading the news about the latest scandal in the church. Like many, I'm very disturbed about it all. However, I remain optimistic that better days are ahead for our church. I need only to look at my children and the many faithful Catholic bloggers and young adults that I know to believe that. If you are interested in doing something in reparation for the sins within our church, check out Kendra Tierney's blog at Catholic All Year.  I will be joining her and many others in small penitential acts and prayer that will hopefully bear beautiful fruit.  Mary, Queen of Heaven, pray for us.

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I stared at the grass growing tall in the raised bed in the corner of my garden and tried to find the motivation to start over.  Three years ago, this same raised bed had produced plump, juicy, red strawberries that my sons would squabble over as they picked their way through the leaves to find the biggest one. But that was three years ago, and now, as I stood staring at it, this bed of strawberries looked only like a patch of weeds, and I had no one to blame but myself.  

It’d happened so slowly and so effortlessly. The first summer, I’d allowed the weeds to move into the edges of the bed, and told myself that the strawberries would be fine, that there were only a few weeds and still plenty of strawberry plants mixed among them. The second summer, I’d allowed a few more weeds to move into the spaces between the strawberry plants, and as a result, my harvest began to decline. Now, well into the third summer, I had no strawberry plants left to be seen, and my last harvest had reaped only a handful of fruit.  With feelings of guilt and regret, I now stared at the strawberry bed, and saw it as a lost cause. Was it worth saving? Could I ever bring it back to what it once was?

I took a deep breath and pushed my spading fork into the soil of the bed, lifting the compacted soil with all my might, as the weeds struggled to hold it together despite my effort. As I lifted the great clod of dirt, I turned it upside down, then gave it a hefty thump with the back of the fork. The dirt clod broke apart and the weeds separated.  I reached down, pulled the weeds by their stems, and shook off the remaining dirt, then tossed them into a pile, where they would wither and die in the sun. 

The heat of that August morning was already bearing down on me, and as I pried each hardened clump of weeds up by their roots, I began to rapidly lose enthusiasm.  Better to just give up on growing strawberries, I told myself.  I could just buy them from the local strawberry farm nearby and let someone else do this work for me. Or, I could just cover the raised bed with black plastic and kill everything at once, and then start over again next spring.  Surely there is nothing worth saving still alive in this raised bed, I thought. My mind raced with rationalizations in an attempt to avoid the hot and dirty task at hand.  And as my mind wandered, in the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a strawberry plant, brown and dry, nearly hidden under the dirt where a weed clod had been.  I gingerly pulled the strawberry plant out, shook the dirt off it, and scraped its rhizome root with my fingernail.  It was struggling, but it was alive. 

With renewed vigor, I plunged my spading fork back into the sod and pulled up again, turned over another clump of weeds, and found yet another dry and brown strawberry plant hidden beneath.  I separated the strawberry from the weeds and repeated the process over and over.  The sweat ran down my brow and my arms began to ache, but I did not care.  My focus now was on one thing.  I would save the remaining strawberries.

As I finished turning over the last clod of dirt, my curious son ran up to me and observed as I gently placed the old, dry strawberry plants in a tray of water.  “What are you going to do with these?”, he asked. I explained to him that those were our strawberry plants.  “These?”, he exclaimed.  “But these strawberry plants are dead,” he said, as he turned one over in his hands.  I stopped working and showed him how to scrape the rhizome with his fingernail, exposing the white flesh underneath the brown skin. “See?” I said, “It’s alive.”   He still looked puzzled.  “But not very much alive,” he said.  I thought for a moment, then smiled and said, “Yes, but it is alive and that’s all that really matters.  Sometimes, it only takes a spark of life to start things growing again.”   Finished with turning over the dirt in the strawberry bed, my son and I walked back to the house, carrying the salvaged plants with us, my son chattering about how he couldn’t wait for us to grow strawberries again. 

The same week that I tackled my long neglected strawberry bed, the news broke about the widespread and deep reaching scandal in the Catholic church in Pennsylvania.  I read the news stories and, like many others, was angered and disgusted by the level and degree of conceit, betrayal and cowardice that has been practiced by so many leaders of our church for most of my lifetime.  I found myself feeling thankful that my children are still young, and that I do not have to explain to them just yet the intricacies and sordid details that are making headlines today.  For now, my children are very proud to be Catholic and love their faith, and I want more than anything for that to never change. However, scandals like these are just the kind of thing that could jeopardize that.

And even though they are young now, and ignorant of such things, I know that in time, they will be confronted with the task of defending their faith from those who will choose to use these scandals to attack.  Just as the bad actors of the Crusades are still used as a means to attack the Catholic church 900 years later, these kinds of scandals will never be forgotten, and will provide fodder for those wishing to destroy the church and her faithful for generations to come.  It will not be easy for my children to defend a church marred by such ugliness, and I worry that they will have their own personal crisis of faith, just as I did many years ago.

Unfortunately, it seems to be a common trend these days, almost a right-of-passage, for those of us who are part of the post-Vatican II generation to struggle with our faith and our church once we reach adulthood. Unlike our parents or grandparents, we have had to grow up in a church filled with conflicting messages and dying traditions. As I came of age, I learned that the priest who baptized me left the priesthood to marry, the priest who gave me my First Holy Communion did the same, the parish priest who I admired for a decade during my formative adolescent years turned out to not be the man we thought he was and was caught in the 2002 scandals, and the charismatic priest who mentored me and so many other students during our college years left the priesthood a year after I graduated. By the time I’d reached the age of 23, I looked around at the church I’d grown up in and the priests I’d always known and saw no shepherd that I wanted to follow. And sadly, my story is not so uncommon among my generation. So, to read about scandals that happened during this same time period, while disheartening, is not surprising to me. The weeds have been growing for a long time.

But amongst the weeds, there are still strawberry plants.  There are the priests and bishops who love the church and show it by speaking the truth and reflecting it in the way they say mass, approach the sacraments, and encourage the faithful. They do not muddy the waters nor sit on the fence.  It was a priest like that who led me back from my own personal crisis of faith, simply by teaching the truths of the Catholic church and the meaning behind them, and demonstrating with his actions his great love for the priesthood.

I walked away from my garden that week carrying a tray full of strawberry plants that had been overtaken by weeds and deprived of the sunshine and rainfall and nutrients that they had needed to thrive. In short, they were slowly dying due to my neglect. Their potential to produce beautiful, sweet fruit had been diminished by my apathy and delay.  And looking at them, I realized that while strawberries may not have mattered so much to me, I’d robbed my children of one of their little joys in life i.e., picking and eating strawberries fresh from the garden while the juice dribbled down their chin.

 In the end, I decided not to replant those old strawberries that I’d saved from the bed, though they still had life within them. Instead, I will plant them on the edge of the garden, where they may still bear fruit, but I will not depend on them.  For the most part, they have run their course.  Rather, after uprooting the weeds and removing as many of their roots as possible, I decided to replenish the soil of the bed and start with new, young plants.  It will be another year before they bear fruit, but with a renewed commitment to tending them, I am hopeful that my children will soon be looking again at a harvest of sweet berries rather than a patch of weeds.

It is a similar hope that I have for my children as they grow in faith. That, when confronted with a garden that appears to be overtaken by weeds, rather than giving up and walking away, they will search amongst those weeds for the strawberries and anything else worth saving. Perhaps they will remember that even if what once thrived now appears lifeless, that with a little care, it only takes a spark to get it growing again. I pray the same will happen during their lifetime within our church.