In an effort to redeem the brokenness of my own history, I am disheartened when I don’t see the faultless fruit of the beautiful family I meant to create. I beat myself up for the things I wished I had done better, and tend to only see the negative role I’ve played from the collective days, weeks, and years of my parenting.
When I was three and a half, I was adopted out of foster care. I am so thankful for the way God intervened in my life and gave me my family, but the years that followed were bumpy; full of pain and hardship. I struggled with severe attachment disorder after bouncing around in foster care from the time I was a baby until I was adopted. The effects from being born to a drug addicted mother and suffering from extreme medical neglect carried over to the new mother/daughter relationship that was attempting to form. This relationship, especially, was always strained. I was slow to trust; I pushed back and resisted her efforts to extend love. While my mother did the best she knew how at the time, the difficulties I struggled with from my past, combined with the difficulties my parents endured as they merged me into their family, left gaping holes that begged to be mended.
My husband came from a different kind of brokenness. His parents were divorced when he was young and he grew up without a healthy model for relationship or family. He was raised in the middle of chaos and addiction that required him to shoulder some heavy consequences he didn’t deserve to bear.
Children came immediately, entering the scene filled with reclaimed remnants of two people committed to marriage, but carrying invisible wounds. We were desperately trying to learn how to heal and how to function as a healthy unit. We were struggling, but I had a craving to create a certain kind of beauty in the way we lived as a family.
My husband brought up his desire to homeschool, and feeling unqualified, I agreed anyway. Our focus became prioritizing family relationship over academics. We weren’t sure what we were doing or how exactly we ought to do it, but we started out on the unknown path with a timid sort of bravery.
Something new and lovely was beginning to take shape. Out of the fragments of our pasts, we positioned the pieces into our scrounged mosaic, creating beauty from the broken bits.
Still, we are in the process of learning and growing as we figure out this new way. I often feel inadequate, as I reconcile my reality that this isn’t quite what I pictured. I know that this could have looked so much better. Sometimes we argue in front of the kids, yell, or we say mean things in the throes offrustration. We get impatient with bad attitudes and irritatedwhen there’s a reluctance to learn. Our homeschool style isn’t securely cemented and we often leave undone the things I had planned to do. We are not all that I hoped we would be as parents and we aren’t the picturesque family.
And maybe we never get to become that family. Maybe it will come later, down the line with our children when they have families of their own. We are only one link in our family chain. I have realized that our role, right now, is to break the negative patterns for generations to come. I have resigned myself to the reality that we may not get to be the loveliest family with the most beautiful fruit we hoped to produce. And it is no longer my goal. I have realized, instead, that our responsibility was to drive our stake in the sand and declare that the hurts that haunt us will stop here as we draw a new line on which the promises of new mercies, redemption, and hope are carefully scribed. And from here, we press on. We press on in hopes of a fruit to come that
is even more lovely than what we are able to cultivate ourselves, right now. We press on for our children’s families, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and the family generations to come. As we heal and change and learn, I hope our kids are learning, too. I hope they take all that they have gone through and make something even more beautiful with their own lives than we ever could.
We are forging a new path; learning by doing. And in the doing, we make mistakes, we realize our shortcomings, we edit and revise, and we try again. Moving forward imperfectly, but nonetheless, moving forward. It’s the daily faithfulness that willchange the course of our family story. The fruit we hoped to see, now, will come with a future harvest.
Comments