This article is from a four-year-old journal entry. Sarah is now six; we adopted her and her brother Christopher in 2005. I hope you enjoy the jaunt down “memory lane” as much as I did!
Every night before we tuck her in, two-year-old Sarah watches intently as we perform a series of little rituals so familiar to most parents. Each step must be executed perfectly if we hope to get any sleep that night.
Closet light on, check.
Shades pulled down, ceiling fan on, check-check.
Piggy, Dolly, and Dorothy the Dinosaur tucked in, check-check-CHECK.
This week we added another step that we ignore to our peril: pajamas must go on backward, or she will ditch her diaper, soaking the carpet and/or bed linen, depending on where she decides to sleep that night.
My favorite part of the routine comes next. “Snugga, snugga,” she reminds me. Lovey in one hand, bottle of water in the other, she straddles my lap and presses her chin into my chest, arms flung out in an all-embracing hug. I drape a special blanket over her and hug her tight, and her little face peeks out with a serious expression. “I-la-OO! I-la-OO!” she prompts, swaying back and forth. As I begin to sing, she pops her bottle contentedly in her mouth and for once that day, sits perfectly still:
I love you, a bushel and a peck,
A bushel and a peck and a KISS upon the neck,
Kiss upon the neck and a barrel and a heap
Barrel and a heap, and I’m talking in my sleep about you, about you …
The second time around, Sarah casts aside the bottle so she can chime in the last word of each line: “ … PECK! … NECK! … SHEEP!” (Okay, so her diction isn’t perfect.) It’s all very precious, and I know if she is still with us years from now, when adolescence hits, I will long for the days when she used to hug me with such abandon.
Yes, if she is still with us. Sarah is my foster daughter. I’ve had her and her brother since she was six months old. (Christopher is partial to Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You.”) Sometimes I watch them sleep at night, and marvel at how much I love them—I never expected that love could be so fierce, so all-encompassing, so unabashed. Biology, schmiology; these kids are mine.
Becoming a foster mom has been the single most formative experience of my life. All the little flaws I try so hard to hide bubble to the surface. Sleep deprivation will do that to you. Slowly I’m learning how to manage my temper, how to guard my tongue, how to put someone else first. I suppose I should have learned these things before I turned forty, but someone it was never so urgent before. There is no putting a “Christian happy face” on for a four-year-old. He can see right through it.
Yet, the most important thing this whole experience has taught me is not about me, but about God. I am finally getting a clue about what it means to say, “I am an adopted child of God.” You don’t have to be a foster parent to know this. Anyone who answers the call to love a child with whom she shares little or no biological connection—stepmothers, adoptive mothers, foster mothers, custodial grandmothers—understand this instinctively. You don’t have to be a blood relation to carry someone in your heart.
God is the same way. The only blood tie your heavenly Father needs to bring us into His family is the one His Son offered up from Calvary. He knew and loved us extravagantly while we were still a twinkle in our father’s eye. Since I first became a foster parent, I’ve discovered three principles of “alternative parenting” that help me to understand what God must go through with us:
