Perhaps the biggest reason I haven’t been blogging, however, comes down to one thing.  I feel extremely compelled to write a book.  It seems strange to even say it, because I have never aspired to be a writer.  I simply feel that God is asking me to write something for mothers of wounded kids, because there is nothing out there just for them.  When I was struggling the most, I searched high and low for something that would help me make sense of all of the emotions and issues I had to deal with on an ongoing basis.  I found nothing.  Sure, there were lots of books out there on techniques to use in parenting the wounded child, but there wasn’t anything that I could find to help me understand what I was going through.  I never want any mom out there to feel as alone as I did then.  So, in my “spare” time, I am working on a collection of thoughts and processes that I have gone through in trying to understand my own reactions to wounded kids and the daily abuse that they give out.  I want to share my own feelings and issues I have faced in parenting my kids, so that others will know that they are not alone.  I am working on collecting stories from our experience, as well as the experiences of others.  I am collecting wisdom from our own learning curve in the middle of being in the trenches, as well as the wisdom I have gained from others.  Through this book, I hope to help moms in the trenches understand their situation better and find hope to stay in the battle.

I also hope to help those outside of the trenches to understand the mother of a child with RAD much better.  Because I found myself in an unusual situation in life, I have found myself doing a lot of educating of friends and family to help them understand my situation, reactions, feelings, and struggles.  This takes a lot of time and energy, which, when parenting wounded kids, can be sparce at best.  I want to provide a resource to other families, so that they can help their family members and close friends understand what they are going through.

Here is where you come in.  I would love to include stories from other families, as well as the insight and wisdom you have gained on how to make it through these murky waters called parenting wounded kids.  I’d also love it if others wanted to submit blog posts, so that we can continue to make this website a place where we can help encourage one another and to know we are not alone.  Either way, I would love for you to write and submit your stories, feelings, insights, so that all of the amazing moms out there in the trenches can know that they are not alone.  I want this book to be a place where honesty and openness help to bridge the gap and show us we are more alike than we realize and that what we feel and experience in these situations is normal.  

Also, Lynn is working on getting an entire blog system set up for anyone interested.  You will be able to post your blogs in a way that makes them as public or as private as you’d like, meaning that you could post your blog entries for anyone to see, or for only family and friends of your choosing to see.  It will be like an online support group, where we can all post how our days are going and be able to encourage one another and pray for one another.  I’m extremely excited about this addition.  Look for information about it sometime this summer!

I have been doing a bit of research on the effects of writing on healing, and research shows that simply the act of writing out our deepest feelings, secrets, and circumstances can bring amazing results in terms of our own emotional and physical health.  I firmly believe that this project could be extremely therapeutic to all of us, as well as helpful to those who read it.

I want to inspire you to share your story.  The joys.  The sorrows.  The lessons learned in the midst of it all.  You have a story to be heard, and countless others can benefit from sharing it.  Even if it’s just a story about one incident, a small victory, or a big defeat.  What is your biggest struggle in parenting a wounded child?  What has been your biggest roadblock, or perspective change that had to happen in order to be able to love your child unconditionally?  What have you done to help yourself stay sane in the middle of complete insanity?  What are your secret fears in being a mom to a wounded child?  What are your dreams and hopes?  Your struggles?

Let’s continue to provide a place where our openness and honesty can help others know they are not alone, as well as to help others understand what we go through in our attempt to help wounded children heal.

More and more, I realize how important having contact with other moms of hurt children can be for those of us on this journey.  Who else can understand our pain, joys, fears, and overall feelings?  This mom and I were discussing how abnormal we sometimes feel around those who don’t have wounded kids.  While others discuss their last pedicure or how well their child is doing in school, we’re dealing with urine, poop, and sex.  It can sometimes feel like we live in an entirely different world than everyone else.  And that can be isolating!

Having contact with others going through what you are going through can be so important.  We need to know that we are not alone, that what we feel is normal, and to feel like others care and know us.  For this reason, we have our once a month Forever Homes support group meetings.  While our vision is to have one in every city, right now the extent of the meetings has been only in the Tri Cities of WA state.  It has been incredibly exciting, though, to watch this group of people develop into a true community of people who care about each other and provide support to one another.  Such a blessing!  These moms have become my friends and cheerleaders. They are precious to me, and I am incredibly thankful for them!

We have also begun to have a time for just the moms to get together, because we all started to feel like once a month was NOT enough!!  (By the way, if you are interested in this get-together and live in the Tri-Cities, it will be this coming Thursday – June 11 – at 6:00 PM, in the banquet room at Round Table Pizza on Leslie Road in Richland – We’d love for you to join us!)  We moms need each other for encouragement, laughter, and hope.

For those of you who do not have a support group in your area, please do not give up hope.  You are not alone.  I know that you are very busy with your own wounded child, but I’d like to challenge you to the possibility of starting a support group in your area.  You will be able to meet other families going through what you are going through, and you can be there for one another.  

There’s just something about being understood that fills up our soul.  I think that’s the way God made us….to need to have connections that goe beyond the surface.  To be known, understood, and loved.  And sometimes that feels harder when you’re parenting wounded kids.  Not that many people really know what you’re going through. That’s why we need to stay connected to those who do.

Until Sunday.  I don’t know what it was about the service, but it touched me.  I suppose part of it had to do with the youth band playing with such passion, and it reminded me of a time when I felt passionate about God and life.  Another part was the sermon.  Well delivered, yes.  But, more than that – it was the topic that got my attention.  With garbage strewn all over the stage and the lights darkened, the pastor talked about how we gradually allow garbage into our lives and suddenly we find ourselves in darkness.  Now, previously I would have heard a sermon like that and would have associated the garbage with doing things that are bad for you, like going out and partying, doing drugs, etc.  But, God spoke directly to my heart.  The garbage in my life?  Bitterness, hurt, unforgiveness, self-pity.  Granted, those things can be understandable in the situation.  It’s not easy living in a toilet, with pee all around you.  Or having to watch your very own puppy at every second, so that no one hurts it.  Things like that become difficult to deal with.  

But God showed me something about the way I handle those things.  I tend to allow just a little bit of hurt to remain.  After all….after so many purposeful jabs, one is bound to feel hurt, right?  So, I kept a little bit of hurt as some sick, twisted badge of honor.  Look at what I’ve endured! 

Then, I allow myself the privilege of keeping back just a little bit of unforgiveness.  After all….most people would find it difficult to forgive such horrendous acts done against them?  Who wouldn’t find it difficult to forgive a child who wiped their hiney on your sheets, or smeared poop in your bathroom?  Who wouldn’t get frustrated at constant sneakiness, triangulation, manipulation, and plain old meanness?  So, I justified it all.

Until….I knew on Sunday that my backpack looked much like that stage.  Full of garbage.  I didn’t realize what I had been doing, until I felt so heavy that I struggled so much to even pick up my emotional backpack.  I wanted to run away.

God made it clear to me that morning, “You have been running away emotionally.  You need to either completely run away (from everything and everyone – and from My plan), or get yourself back in the game.”  I knew.  My kids weren’t going to change.  That’s just where they are at.  My husband….I love him dearly, but there are times he just won’t understand what I’m going through.  And that’s not going to change.  Men and women are different, and being the mother of wounded kids can be a much different experience than being a father of wounded kids….although both roles can be difficult.  No, it was clear.  Despite the fact that all I wanted to do was to whine to God and make Him change my circumstances, the only one in the scenario I could change right then was me.  And I needed to.  This isn’t how I want to live.

So, I wish I could tell you that when I came home the angels sang and that I was behaving like Mary Poppins toward my children.  But, I did come back a new woman, with a new attitude.  I can’t change anyone but me.  And I need to live the way that I know I should live.  Following God into the depths of human depravity, using His incredible love and mercy to heal what man cannot even begin to touch – the human heart and soul – will not be an easy task.  It’s easy, in the middle of it, to find ourselves elbow deep in muck.  And that’s not fun.  But, God never intended for us to be comfortable – He did, however, say that He would go with us and give us what we needed.  I just need to ask Him more for His mercy, joy (“the joy of the Lord is my strength,” Nehemiah 8:10), as well as His eyes to see my situation as He does.  I am learning.  Hopefully I get better and better at this whole following God thing.  

With RAD children, many times their consequences must go the opposite way from how we naturally think.  The norm says, “you made a bad choice; therefore, you need a time out.”  Sometimes with RAD kids, we must give them “time-ins,” where they are right by our side, instead of the usual time-out.  A consequence for a bad choice one time might be a natural, Love-and-Logic sort of consequence one time, and the next it might be cuddle time with mom.  It helps when they don’t know what the consequence will be each and every time.

Why?  We have to keep them on their toes.  We have to keep them wondering.  If they know what the consequence will be, many times they will sabotage anything good for themselves on purpose, because they don’t believe that they deserve anything good.  Then, they never find a way out of their negative cycle of relating and thinking.  Sure, they have to earn privileges.  But, in the middle of negative behavior, sometimes we have to give them what they least expect and least deserve.  It breaks through their walls of defense.

This need to switch things up all the time makes therapeutic parenting very difficult for me personally.  First of all, you always have to be thinking and staying one step ahead of the child.  You can’t just stick with your normal, do-it-all-the-time consequence.  You find yourself always evaluating what way each situation should be handled.  Also, therapeutic parenting requires staying in a place of giving mercy and forgiveness.  Sure, it’s easy when a kid makes poor choices to automatically give a negative consequence.  It makes sense.  Depending on what the child does, sometimes it make us feel better knowing they had to pay for their choice.  It doesn’t make as much sense to sometimes give what looks like a positive consequence for negative behavior.  Plus, much of the time their behavior makes us mad personally.  So, sometimes I find myself wanting to go for the automatic negative consequence, simply because I want to see them pay back for what they’ve done.  Sometimes we want to scream out, “But she didn’t deserve that!!”  It throws off our sense of justice to parent therapeutically.

So many times, I know what I need to do in order to help my child heal.  I struggle to give them those things, because of my own anger and sense of justice.  I want them to pay for what they did or how they purposefully try to hurt those around them.  That makes sense.  The level of extreme mercy we must give our children goes against what my brain says is right.

I fully believe that, as therapeutic parents, we will have more opportunity to understand God’s unconditional and overwhelming love much more than our “normal” parental counterparts.  God reaches down and pulls us out of our muck, despite how terribly we treat Him.  We push Him away.  He continually pursues us.  We spit in His face.  He continues giving us good things, despite the fact that we don’t make good choices.  His love doesn’t wait until we “get our act together.”  He loves us just as we are, and He loves us too much to let us stay there.  Isn’t that how we have to look at things with our wounded child?

Romans 2:4 “Or do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’ kindness leads you toward repentance?”

Since this was their first time, Shelly took them on the tour of the ranch and introduced them to the animals (including the chicken who thinks she’s a puppy and will let you pet and hold her).  Then, she taught them how to lead the horse, and they were able to groom two of them as well.  They had a blast!  By the time we returned, though I was exhausted.  So, after getting everyone settled in back home, my husband took over and I took a nap.  

Shortly after the beginning of my nap, one of my kids’ old habits began. My kids have tended to freak out when I’m in my room and not out with them (at all moments, mind you).  In the past, it was much more obvious.  While today the behaviors were not quite as obvious, they were still reminiscent of the old habit.  It used to be that, as soon as I was back in my room for a nap or just to have some time to myself (with my husband out there with them, of course), they’d be perfectly quiet out in the living room, going down the hallway, and then again when they were in their room.  Where they weren’t quiet?  You guessed it.  Right in front of my room!  They’d walk from the living room and down the hallway, completely quiet as a mouse, and then right in front of my room they’d suddenly remember some completley random question that they “needed” to shout out to one of their siblings at that exact moment.  So, they would yell out that silly question, making sure they made enough noise to wake me up, and then proceed quietly to their room.  This scenario would repeat itself more and more the longer I was in my room.  When asked about their behavior, they’d make it clear that they felt that I should be out with them, and they wanted to try to make me wake up and come out (again, the “how DARE you do something for yourself or that isn’t directly for ME!” attitude so common with RAD kids).  While my kids still have that attitude, they have learned to curb their behavior quite a bit in the last two years (dad having them make it up to mom every time they performed those little tricks has helped this greatly!).  

It sometimes still annoys me to think that my kids honestly feel that I should be at their beck and call at every blessed moment of the day.  Dad can be gone…that’s ok.  But mom – if MOM isn’t there, then she has completely abandoned them!!  At times, I struggle with being angry at my children for this completely unrealistic expectation.  Other times I understand where it comes from and I’m better able to shrug it off.  I go between the two attitudes.  I wish I could say that it doesn’t bother me still after two years, but sometimes the fact that it has been that long causes me to wonder just how much longer it will take for this to go away.  I think, though, that this self-centered way of viewing the world will probably be there for a long time to come.  I just need to figure out a way to handle it better without them changing!  Maybe I just need to reread the book Boundaries, by Cloud and Townsend, so that I remember what to do with people who step over my boundaries!  Even if it is a little kid!  :)

But my realization today was very freeing.  I don’t HAVE to like him.  In fact, I don’t know of too many people who would like this child if he treated them the way he treats my husband and me.  He is not fun to be around….at all.  So, I don’t have to like him…I just have to LOVE him.

I know that sounds mean and uncaring, but when you’re dealing with a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder, sometimes you have to give yourself permission to be human.  If you lived with a drug addict who was constantly lying to you, stealing your money, and smirked in delight every time they wounded you (either emotionally or physically), you would kick them out of your house.  And you wouldn’t enjoy being around them.  Some of our kids, without intervention, would have potentially been the future prison inmates, drug addicts, and generally dysfunctional and not very likable adults.  We can help them become more than that, but that doesn’t mean that we are always going to feel the warm fuzzies toward them.  I have found that with RAD children, those warm fuzzies are honestly few and far between.

To love a wounded child means, I choose to do what is best for him, despite how he treats me.  I choose to treat him with respect, do good things for him, tell him that I love him, give him loving eye contact, etc.  It’s ok for my love to be a decision of the will, simply because true love many times comes down to just that.  It is not about feelings or warm fuzzies.  It’s about making the decision to do what’s right.

So, for today, realizing that I am not required to like my child in order to be a good parent or to help him heal really did help me to like him better.  It helped take the pressure off.  Because I really do feel guilty for not wanting to be around my child when he tries to make my life miserable on purpose.  I don’t like not liking my children.  But, some days, it’s just the way it is.  And that’s ok.

Regardless of where they are at in this journey, I find one thing to be completely obvious.  These moms love their kids.  Whether they’ve just started out or have been doing this for years, they love their kids.  Whether they are feeling burnt out or completely rejuvenated, they are doing an amazing job…and love their kids!

Did I mention that they love their kids?  Do they get burnt out?  YES!  Do they tire of dealing with attrotious behavior?  YES, YES!  Do they always know the right thing to do?  Nope.  But, these amazing moms, through exhaustion and emotional fatigue, push through to figure out the answers!  They get up, every day, and keep on keeping on.  And that, in itself, makes you a hero. 

And, just so you amazing moms know….I admire all of you so much.  You have put up with more than what is humanly possible, and they keep loving.  Even when you feel like you hate your child.  It’s not the child that you hate….it’s the incredibly awful behaviors that are exhausting you.

Remember, moms….You may not always like your child’s behavior.  Who would?  But, you absolutely would give your life for them.  In fact, you do so right now, day in and day out, in the little things you do, despite how you feel.  You give your life for them every day.  And you deserve way more applause than you ever will receive in this lifetime.  Thumbs up to you!!!  Know that the angels in heaven applaud you, every day, as you’re dealing with a mountain of laundry because your child once again peed in his clothing on purpose.  They cheer you on as you deal with the dumb questions, constant chatter, glares, “I hate you’s,” stealing, lying, and neediness.  I know that sometimes you don’t feel like what you do makes that much difference (mostly because the change comes so slowly).  I know there are times you want to throw in the towel and take the next bus out of town!  I know sometimes you feel exhausted, beat down, alone, afraid, and like no one out there cares or understands.  I know.  I’ve been there, too.  

But God sees what you do, day in and day out.  He sees the heartache you feel in your heart.  He sees the aprehension and the wondering if this child will really be able to “make it” as they get older.  He sees all of that.  And He hasn’t abandoned you.  You are not alone.  And He sees you as AN AMAZING MOM!  Despite your discouragement and fatigue.  He knows.

Please don’t let the messages from your children (or other people, for that matter) tell you otherwise.  You know…the constant messages you get saying, “You can’t take care of me.” or “You don’t love me.”  or “You don’t ever do enough for me (or give me enough – attention, love, hugs, stuff, etc.).”  You are amazing.  You are the one for the job.  A tough job…undoubtedly.  But one you were created for and can do like no one else can do.  Not many people would be able to fill your shoes.  Most wouldn’t last a day.  But, you have lasted this long.  Your child still lives, right?  You haven’t yet dropped him along side of the highway for him to fend for himself yet, right?  That’s a huge accomplishment!!  :)  Give yourself a pat on the back!!!!  And, you take it one step further.  You actually do good things for this child who repays you by spitting in your face emotionally (or perhaps physically from time to time).  You keep plugging along.

I’d also like to remind you that you are not doing what you are doing for this child.  Yes, we want them to heal.  Yes, we do lots of stuff for this child every day.  But, ultimately, it can’t be for this child that we work.  Otherwise, our love will fail and grow weak.  No….our work must be for the One Who loves us, Who saved us, and Who every day gives us the grace to go another moment.  His love – endless.  His grace – ours for the taking.  It can’t be on our own or for our kids we work.  It must be for Him and in His strength alone that we do this work.

May all of you awesome moms (especially those of you who don’t feel so awesome right now) have a blessed day!  (And, usually when you don’t feel very awesome, it’s because you are dealing with way more than one person should have to.)  I pray for others to come along side of you and encourage you right now in the middle of your struggle and pain.  May God’s love come down and remind you that God loves YOU…not just your child.