Healing

I have a painting hanging in my home, a beautiful picture of a veiled, brown-skinned young woman, with long, dark eyelashes softly shading her eyes. Painted by a niece of my ex-husband long before I imagined myself an adoptive mother, I treasure this piece of art. I have always felt some connection to the girl in it. Claiming the picture as mine when I left the marriage, it hangs in my living room. When I look at this girl, I daydream about my connection to her and to my daughter.

I chose to adopt as a single parent. One day not long after my daughter arrived, I noticed that the image bears a striking resemblance to my own cherished child. So much so that Amy refers to the image of the girl as if it were a picture of herself at some future time.

I was thrown into the role of a parent without the traditional 9 month anticipatory stage to grow into the job. Five months after my initial phone call to the adoption agency and two months after first meeting her, my daughter, Amy, came home. A six-year-old child has pretty well-developed likes and dislikes, as well as plans and dreams about how things should be. A six-year-old has memories of other times and other places, of other families and other ways of doing things. My six-year-old was her own person with clear perceptions of who she was. And that did not include having a single, white mother.

Needing to be held tightly, but struggling and tearing at my grip, Amy was a handful right from the start. Emotional and behavioral difficulties stemming from unidentified ADHD and movement through 11 foster homes between the ages of 3 and 6 left scars that seemed to me (and still seem) more damaging than the reported abuse and neglect she suffered in her biological family. I had to make room in my heart for her birth family and these "other" families, whose memory in some cases she treasured, even though some seemed to have caused many of her difficulties.

I wanted a child to cuddle, yet I got a child who couldn't sit still long enough to hug and who pushed me away. I wanted a child to teach, yet I got a child who thinks she has nothing to learn. I wanted a child to love, yet I got a child who challenges my ability to remain loving in the face of the most outrageous behavior. I wanted a child to form my own family, yet I got a child with allegiances to other families I never knew and to whom I felt no loyalty. I wanted a child to mother, yet I got a child who did not recognize me as a "real mother," and relegated me to a second class status compared to her deified memories.

My daughter's behavioral issues can at times be so exhausting that I feel like giving up, that I am not equipped to deal with the hand that life has dealt her. But then, somehow, the spirit essence of this child will emerge and call me back, letting me know that change takes time and though love is not enough, it is surely a soothing balm to tender wounds.

I remember once sitting at a table in a fast food restaurant. Dallying over her french fries, Amy asked me a most profound question, "Do broken hearts ever get better?" Deeply touched by the question and knowing from my own heart that indeed they do heal, I reassured her. I told her I didn't know when or how, but I know certainly that hearts heal since my own had. I could only gulp when she looked at me, eyes full of tears, and said, deadly serious, "But Mommy, you don't understand, my heart isn't just broken, it's shattered."

So when I find magic marker pictures painted on my walls of balloons, palm trees, smiley faces and hearts, I remember that this child's spirit has suffered tragedy and she needs to make contact with her own pure life force in which balloons abound and hearts are whole. And when I yell complaining that walls are not for drawing, that she is "too grown up" for this (the last wall drawing was when she was 13), and make her scrub away her artwork, I wonder where my own childlike joy is and who is really the teacher here.

Parenting has taught me about my naivete in racial matters. I lived in a mostly white area. When my daughter was first placed with me, I noticed that my upstairs neighbors stopped talking to me. Their two teenage boys also acted very widely to Amy. On another occasion I came home from a meeting and found a letter on my door, stating that a complaint of child abuse had been filed against me. This completely false complaint apparently alleged that a white mother was allowing her black child to room the neighborhood unsupervised. The letter said that a worker had tried to visit me & would visit again the next day.

My daughter, who was seven at the time, had been removed from her birthparents by Child Protective Services. At this new threat, she became hysterical, begging me to hide her, to take her to my brother's home and "not give her back." I told her we would have to let them see we had a good home. I tried to reassure her that everything would be all right though I felt ferrified.

It took a long time for Amy to get to sleep that night and she woke up many times with old, familiar nightmares. I called friends, talked, cried, got angry, and paced the floor. I thought of the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac. I sensed that I did not have the faith of Abraham, and I realized what real faith must be like. I prayed that I would do what was right, and I prayed that all would be well, and that the worker would see that I was a "good parent."

All went well in the next day's meeting with the social worker, and my daughter is still with me, though we now live in a different neighborhood. But I realized in that experience the depth of my feeling for my child, and what I would be willing to do to preserve Amy's welfare. In the moments of that night, holding my daughter through screaming nightmares of bloody seas and sharks, hoping to kinesthetically imprint a sense of safety, I understood parents who have killed to protect their children. I cursed racism and my own race, and felt a shame and murderous rage that even now is not fully resolved.

There have been other times too when I wonder if I am equal to the task of raising this gift named Amy. Yet something always pulls me back, some inner knowing that this is this is what life is all about. It's a tugging back and forth, one step forward and one step back, tending to the earth, to the roots of the rose, pruning branches, fertilizing and hoping that from such care a strong and sturdy bush will grow, capable of withstanding another winter to bloom again in spring.

A mentor of mine once told me that there is a particularly strong karmic connection in adoption. My lessons, as well as hers, have roots in this connection. In parenting Amy, I have had to heal my own wounds and face my own demons so that I could really be there for a child who needs more than love and nothing less than total commitment to her well-being. "Let the little children come to me,"Jesus of Nazareth said, "because the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them." There has certainly been loss, disillusionment and pain in raising Amy as well as joy, challenge and fulfillment. But in those moments when the essence of my daughter stands out -- when she is this vulnerable child who needs contact -- that's when I know Jesus was telling the truth.