Being Different

Being Different

by | Jun 22, 2017 | Uncategorized

Through the years, I have taught my children that not everyone is going to like them – for whatever reason – and the reasons can be ridiculous sometimes. It is OK to not be liked by everyone. People who need to be liked by everyone tend to make poor decisions. However if it leads a person to closely examine oneself and improve their character and qualities, then it can be beneficial.

Learning to love yourself for who you are, despite the areas where you know you need to change, will prove to be invaluable. Without conceit, can you look in the mirror and appreciate who you are?

“Being an adoptive parent, brings struggles one would not expect. Through the years, I have learned that I am not understood by many people. My peers do not relate to me, nor I to them, but I have learned that being different is OK…..Due to our firmness in parenting, our friends have inadvertently undermined our parenting, thinking they are ‘helping’, which has caused insurmountable repercussion in the decisions of our adoptive children. Regardless of our children’s life decisions, however, we did our best….They may never realize the sacrifices we made for them, but they know we understood and loved them.” Taken from my portion of the book, Empowering Women to Succeed: Turning Tragedy into Triumph, Collaboration by Pat Gillum.

When someone who is fake or toxic for me to be around decides to leave my life, I view it as a ‘gift’ – the gift of goodbye! For example, I have learned through the years that I do not mix well with people who do not mean what they say. I take people at their word and I am left to feel like the idiot. I now recognize it quicker and move on from that relationship. We need people to value us.  We need people in our lives that will build us up, not keep us down. We need people who will tell us the truth, rather than tell us what they think we want to hear. We need to seek people out who make us better people. I am continuously making friends, only to learn that they did not like me as much as I liked them but that’s OK.

Is there a lost relationship that has been especially difficult to see as a ‘gift of goodbye’? What is the main reason you cannot let go?  Pride, anger, embarrassment, insecurity, or simply a strong love for them?  We cannot make someone love us. God Himself, gave us free will to love Him or to leave Him. The most powerful tool we have to change hearts, whether it’s ours that changes or theirs, is Prayer. We might be surprised at what we learn from our prayers.

Have you prayed today?

Room For Improvement

Room For Improvement

by | May 16, 2017 | Uncategorized

There’s always room for improvement. It’s a perspective that I have. As I’ve mentioned before, I do not live in guilt, shame or discontentment but I do strive to be a better person than I was the day before. It’s our duty to humanity to continue to work on ourselves. As we go through life, with it’s crude hardships, sometimes we can become jaded, hurt, bitter, confused, and angry. With this, we may develop bad habits, bad attitudes or twisted perceptions. For example, our older girls saw things so differently from how we saw things, due to their past traumas, we were often left confused and hurt.

As a way of improvement, some people like to regularly write out goals.  Others write their New Year’s Resolutions. And yet others, do not believe in any of that because they’ve learned it doesn’t do them any good. I am a believer in writing goals but also writing smaller attainable objectives. If I can control the date that something gets done then I will set my mind to get that one thing done within that time frame. Well, recently, due to some difficulties with my past publisher, I decided to leave her services and venture out on my own into unknown waters. I am as clueless as an ant in a bee colony. But I know I did the right thing.

That being said, I am excited to announce my newly released SECOND EDITION of PHOENIX BOUND: An adoptive mom of 13 shares her struggle raising traumatized children. I have added a few specialty pages and I am doubly proud of my accomplishment. I am more excited about the lives PHOENIX BOUND will touch and perhaps even, change. The most noticeable difference between the first and second edition is the cover. I hope you like it as much as I do. I especially like the lighter, brighter background color. Although our lives have not always been light and bright, a dark cover gives PHOENIX BOUND a darker feel. Like I told one of my readers who had a difficult time with reading a specific situation we found ourselves in – our most difficult and dark times, brought us light. The depression, fear and anger of our older son’s behaviors and result of those behaviors, led us to our only newborn son. It brings me to my knees when this realization hits.

There’s always room for improvement. What are you going to improve today?  What have you been working on that needs finalization? What goal do you need to break down into attainable objectives?

Big Brother and Big Sister Program

Big Brother and Big Sister Program

by | Mar 19, 2017 | Uncategorized

Before adopting thirteen children, my husband and I volunteered through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Program. It is a nationwide organization that facilitates matches where you would mentor an inner city child that has a need whether it be poverty, dysfunctional home, loss of a mother or father or foster care.

My little girl was matched at age 6 and my husband and I loved her dearly, but that is another story for another time. It can also be found in my first book, PHOENIX BOUND: An adoptive mom of 13 shares her struggle raising traumatized children.

My husband’s match was a 10 year old boy living in the projects of a nearby city. His mother struggled with depression and his father struggled with a Heroin addiction. This boy needed someone desperately and so, we took on the challenge. We adored him, as well as his little sister, older sisters, mother and father. It wasn’t always easy to keep this boy entertained because he was a city kid and we were country people. He often had difficulty slowing down his pace and enjoying the peace and beauty around him. He enjoyed movies, electronics and being busy. We introduced him to a new life and a new way at looking at life. He rode a horse and go-karts and went swimming. He went to amusement parks, ice skating, basketball camps, zoos, museums, ballgames and made homemade ice cream by rolling it down a hill in a can. I shared my homemade applesauce, strawberry jam, hot peppers, and spaghetti sauce with his family. At one point, we were even prepared to pay for his high school education at a local private school to get him out of the poverty stricken dangerous city school settings.

I am not writing this because I am bragging about all that we have done. In reality, we often struggled to connect and wondered if he was benefiting at all from our time and energies. We did not witness him rising above his situation and going to college. Actually, he struggled with breaking his family’s cycle and his little sister had a baby at age 14. We stayed in touch with them through the years of our parenting thirteen children. We have helped him out here and there when he has called us and he has always been impressed with our willingness to help him so quickly.

The other day, my husband got a phone call. It was the boy, now in his early thirties. He wanted to thank my husband and I for all that we did and to proudly announce that he was finally getting his GED. He told my husband that he and I were the only people in his life that demonstrated what a family looked like. He was the only father he knew that had a stable job, went to work every day, and tried to better himself and his family. We were the only ones who had a bank account and a steady income. We were the only role models that he could look at and want to emulate.

Sometimes when we think what we do is a waste of time or does not make any difference, we are wrong. Everything we do and everything we say makes an impact. It is important to do what we can, to make a positive difference in people’s lives! But we may not know how much of an impact we made and we need to be ok with that until it is unveiled to us. Go and make the world a better place!

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day

by | Feb 10, 2017 | Uncategorized

Valentine’s Day, like many other holidays can be difficult for some adopted children, or anyone who has had a great loss or trauma in their lives. There are many different ways to show love, understand love, perceive love and receive love. Sometimes people’s pain builds a thick brick wall around their hearts, making it more difficult to handle the concept of love. In many cases, the people that have vowed their love to them, are the same people who have hurt them. My African born son once told me that he does “not trust black people.” This was only a year or so after he arrived from Africa. Our Hispanic daughters balked at the idea of learning their native language; Spanish. The more excited I got about having a personal tutor, the more they refused to speak any of it.

Upon arriving with an enormous amount of pain and trauma, I have allowed each of our children to come to us in their own time, allowing them to first get to know us and then see that they can trust us. It’s the ‘stray cat approach.’

Unfortunately, we have seen the slightest thing ripple this trust and love for us even years later. Valentines Day was among the worst holidays when their hearts were not at peace. And worse yet, we do not always have the kind of friends and family who understand our children. Therefore, they have not pointed them back to us and our love for them.

To help our children know our love for them, I started a ‘Chocolate Bar Tradition.’ Each year, I buy a large package of Hershey Chocolate Bars and measure a blank piece of paper to match the Hershey label that wraps around the candy bar. I then write a personal love note to each person in my house. I do not keep it vague. I get deep into their hearts and minds. I want to grab them out of the muck and mire, reminding them of their purpose in life and the love we have for them. I then wrap it around the Hershey Bar face down so it remains a personal note, sealing it with tape. Each year, the kids are excited to find their chocolate bars either at the breakfast table or on their night stand as the wake up.

One year in particular, it completely changed our daughter’s heart. She was about 15 years old at the time and was so broken and confused and angry by the time Valentines Day came around, I thought I’d get the chocolate bar melted onto my pillow, but my letter was like a healing breeze to her soul. She needed it so badly. She cried in our bedroom doorway as she told us she loved us and needed us and did not want to ever get that deep into her confusion and anger again. (Well, she did…in college….and when people that knew better could have helped her out of it, they helped her dig deeper inside her brokenness and anger. But don’t worry, I pray for her and prayer breaks through the thickest walls. She won’t allow me to send her a Valentines Day message but that’s where God comes in. He breaks through walls.) My point is, sometimes we all need to just know that someone cares. We all tend to dig deep into our own self-pity, self-righteousness, self-absorbed fears, ……  Sometimes, we need some help.

Love can look differently for people in pain. Pain and trauma can be dealt with and overcome but it takes a consistent and persistent drive. Our enemy knows exactly where to aim his daggers and what pushes our buttons and gets us sidetracked in life. Our prayer life needs to be as carefully aimed – directly at those areas he will attempt to break down and destroy. So does our love for one another.

Happy Valentine’s Day !

Make it a special day for someone !

Gifts

Gifts

by | Dec 19, 2016 | Uncategorized

My mother made sure to give us a great Christmas – lots of gifts and lots of delicious food – but what made it special is that she put a lot of thought into each gift. She found what we asked for and if she couldn’t, she found something she thought might be comparable. She listened to our wants and she followed through. She enjoyed giving. Not to be left out, my father bought few gifts. He worked overtime during the holiday season, starting in mid-November, going through the end of December at least. He provided the funds for my mother’s extravagant shopping. The few times my father picked out a gift for us is still very special to me and I remember each gift as if it was a diamond ring.

I was brought up with the Spirit of Giving and I have grasped onto that in my own life as an adult. Giving when someone is not expecting it or giving anonymously is especially fun. When we listen to people’s needs or wants is when it means the most. A friend once called me to chat and in the conversation she complained that she was lonely, fat and depressed. Later that day, I brought her a Slim Fast drink, a $5 bill for gas money to visit me, and a hug. It made her laugh and if nothing else, it showed her I was listening and I cared. I stayed for a good hour and chatted which probably meant even more.

Christmas is a time to remind each of us of a special gift that was given to us – a baby named Jesus – who was born to be our Savior.  Non-Christians have traditionally grasped the meaning of giving and celebrate the holidays with joy.  It’s a happy time for all.

Or is it? As an adoptive mom of several traumatized children, Christmas brings up- well, everything. It can cause confusion, anger, depression, random memories and feelings of unworthiness. Holidays are a blatant reminder of what they’ve lost. I’m sure all of us can understand that to some point – especially those of us who have lost a close family member, a spouse, a neighbor,…..  Christmas can be a constant reminder of those people we miss dearly.

As we become aware of how the holidays can affect our adopted children and those around us who have lost someone special, we can be more attentive to their needs and wants. They need to know that we remember those people, we recognize the hardship and we care. Be creative in ways that you might show it. In the texting and emailing day in age, we need to perhaps back off from the technology and show true love in a personal way – a visit, a hug, a smile, holding the door for someone at the store, a phone call, a letter or card in the mail. Our time is the best thing we can give someone to show them we care because they know how much we value our time and how busy we are.

Be careful not to chase the American dream so intensely that you become numb. I had a co-worker whom I tried to befriend but the more I got to know her, the more I saw her running frantically through life, never having time to sit and process what was going on. Much of her ‘work’ was just being busy, not productive and not helpful. Sweeping your feelings under the rug only creates a big lump that becomes a hindrance for everyone else as well as yourself. Feel these feelings. Don’t run from them, using busy-ness as a hide-out. Heal from your own hurts and embrace those around you who need to heal too.

Smile in the long lines at the Post Office, smile in the longer lines at the store, and smile at the sold out concert you planned to attend. Turn to the person behind you and say a kind word. Ask them how their holiday is going? Ask them their favorite part of the holidays? Relieve stress by laughing together about the busy-ness of the season. Be present. Be a gift to someone who may need your smile or banter.

At times, I’ve been known to be a humbug when it comes to holidays because I believe that the Christmas Spirit and kindness should be all year, not just one day a year. Sometimes it’s the only time we hear from the ones we care about. That should not be the case. We need each other in this unpredictable, difficult life. We need each other to cry with us, laugh with us and be with us. I don’t need an emoji. I need you!

What was your best Christmas Ever ?  I would love to hear from you.

P.S. I have learned that the best gift you can give an author is a Review – so feel free to leave a Review of either of my books at the end of this Website and/or Goodreads and/or Amazon. Leave one on each site and you will hold a special place in an author’s heart. (smiley face)