From Riches to Rags, and the Glory I Found There

  If you look around my house this Christmas season you will definitely see the effects of motherhood here. You'll see school books strewn about all throughout the place. Constant reminders of frustration and fights that feel completely unnecessary to a mom and completely life-changing to a kid. I never wanted to homeschool my teenage daughter. I simply didn't want this kind of hard. But I saw her struggles and her self-esteem start to crack as she fell more and more behind her peers in school. A scar from her years of home-hopping which led to inconsistent schooling. A kid who got overlooked and pushed along anyway. So I pulled her out and we started from the ground up. And she's bright, let me tell you. She's catching up one day at a time, and I get a front row seat to see her shine. I push her more than she wants, and she hates when I do it. But I didn't become her mother because of what she could do for me...I became her mother because I knew what I could do for...

  "Is adopting her harder than you thought it would be?"      I think, when I weighed the options back in 2021, before I brought my 12 year old daughter home, I knew how hard it could be. I accepted that it could be brutal. But, honestly, I hoped it wouldn't be. I hoped maybe, just maybe, trauma hadn't sunk deep into her bones and colored everything she did.  Some people may have different perceptions on how prepared I was, since I did jump into it pretty quickly. But I think that I did acknowledge, and accept, how hard it could be. But the reality of life is that there is no real way to know how hard anything actually is until you're living it. Meaning, I knew how hard it could be...but had no idea what that level of hard would actually feel like.  Because it hurts. Raising a broken teenager hurts. It hurts my daughter. It hurts me. It hurts our relationship. It just hurts.  But just because something hurts...does that mean we aren't called to do ...

I have often wondered how my daughter must feel about my family's relationship with my late husband. She never got to meet him. She came into our family after the harshest of grieving had happened, 7 months after he died. She still saw us mourn him and miss him...but she never knew him. And there is such a travesty in that. He would have loved her beyond comprehension...and I have no doubt that she would have connected with him far quicker than she has with me.  "I wish I could have met John...I think he would have been a great dad." Me too, babe, me too. He really would have been amazing. I am so incredibly sorry that he never had the opportunity to father her. Because it would have been amazing to behold...I just know it. But I also am just so thankful that she did not have to lose him...that her heart did not have to bear that brokenness as well...silver linings and all that. She still lost him, but much more indirectly than the rest of us. She lost him without the tra...