This morning towards the end of my running route I fought my way up this hill. It had been a great run and at the bottom of this hill there is a choice to stay on the flat path that essentially goes around the hill or just push on up the hill. At the bottom, I took a deep breath, noted the bush that marked the top, and decided to go for it.
It hurt.
It was really hard.
It took just a couple minutes, but those minutes seemed to last hours.
I was pretty mad at myself for even attempting it. But then I reached the bush that marked the top and was overcome with two feelings:
An amazing sense of accomplishment having made it…….
And a sense of total defeat when I realized what I had perceived as the top of the hill was in fact, not.
Standing there feeling duped I decided to just have a seat and contemplate while my body and mind recovered. I wasn’t ready to accept I still had an uphill trek just to get home and I was mad.
It’s interesting how God knows my heart and mind so intimately. He’s so familiar with how my brain works He knows to give me physical experiences that parallel my emotional ones so I can put words to my feelings. And man, was this a huge one – the link to my life as a parent, a parent of children from hard places, was such an obvious one I laughed out loud sitting at not quite the top of that hill.
Parenting is hard. Parenting in a blended family is really hard. Parenting children from hard places is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. This space we’re in right now is the toughest place Ray and I have ever been on our own or as a married couple. Much like this run, we took to this hill with eyes wide open. We accepted the call we’d been hearing in our hearts, and even with all the reservations we looked up the hill and decided to go for it. Assured that God would bring us to the top safely. But most days when we feel like we’ve overcome something hard we get smacked in the face with another reminder we’re not at the top of the hill yet.
There is some serious yuck in our childrens’ lives. The world they came from IS that darkness under the rock nobody wants to shine a light on. We only know a fraction of it, but we walk alongside them and see/experience the behaviors that result. We hold them at night when nightmares they can’t verbalize scare them out of their bed and into ours. We fight (and often fail) to tuck away frustration with them when they make poor choices. We hurt when we startle them and they freeze with fear. We are overwhelmed by their educational disparity from their peers at school. We desperately scramble to read and learn what we can about trauma so we can help other adults understand these children we have come to love. We are left speechless when our older children regress to toddler-like speech and temper tantrums, unsure of what to do and how to help. And we get angry. Oh how we get angry – sometimes so angry we can’t contain it and there is nobody to yell at so we yell at each other. We go to our own therapies to process our secondary trauma simply from parenting them through THEIR trauma.
And we sit looking up the remaining part of this hill not sure we could continue even if we wanted to.
But the thing about this hill, much like the one I ran, is it isn’t an impossible trek. I did run it, Ray and I are still running up it, and we continue to climb. We have each other, and we have reached “not quite the top” of many hills. Even though there seems to always be another mountain to climb, God keeps calling us forward. Asking and sometimes demanding that we lean in and we give even more.
What was I feeling sitting on that hill?
- Exhaustion – I’m tired and beaten down.
- Loneliness – this journey is isolating and lined with lost or neglected friendship.
- Defeat – There’s always more hill to climb.
- Anxiety – I am ill-equipped and short on resources.
But along with all of that is the ever-constant whisper of God – “Be Still. You are Mine. They are Mine. You are enough because I love you. They are enough because I love them. And that’s all you will ever need.”
Right now, the hill we face is the start of school. The impending meetings, the IEPs, the explanations of why typical strategies won’t work for our kids, and the ever-present worry over what is going to happen each day after we drop them off. Will this year be different or will we have the same conversations we’ve been having for two years? Will they feel safe and learn or will we tackle a whole new level of trauma we don’t know about yet? Will they settle down or sabotage themselves?
So we pray. We show up. We love them fiercely and we work on being patient with the world they live in.
And we hold on to the truth – God will not leave us sitting at not quite the top of that hill alone.