No Doubt
S has been out of control lately, beyond anything “usual,” even for her. She’s been consistently mean and violent and screaming. She created a fake ebay account and purchased $400 worth of items, and this has been a nightmare to fix. She is eating whatever she wants at lunch at school, mostly sugar, and refusing to eat the healthy lunches (or, for that matter, suppers) that I make; food has been an issue all along, but it’s really escalated recently.
Worst of all, she is showing little remorse for her actions. Every little request turns into a fight. Every boundary is a challenge meant to be broken. Even if she agrees—yes, you’re right, I can’t handle the computer, please take away the keyboard and mouse—the next day she is screaming at me and her college buddy because I’ve taken away the keyboard and mouse. Living in my home has been exhausting.
This past Tuesday, things reached a head when she blew up and cussed at a teacher. Up until that point, most of her aggressive behavior had been aimed at me. The issue was minor—a student in her class saying that the snow was melting—and after blowing up at him, when the teacher asked her to calm down, she got physically aggressive, grabbed the phone, called me, and refused to let the teacher have her phone.
Afterwards, there was little remorse, and she was completely unable to recognize how minor the student’s words had been, how they definitely didn’t merit a meltdown. This kind of behavior has been common enough that the school has asked for a meeting; we’ll be meeting next week to try to hash out how to handle these kinds of outbursts, and how to best support her education in what we hope is just a phase of aggression.
That night, on our way to therapy in a town two hours from ours—a trek we make every Tuesday—S told me that too many things were changing. Her godparents are splitting up. My father is gone—and she does not want to go to Ohio for the holidays, where our family is from, now that we won’t be able to see him or spend time at his place. Her beloved college buddy, J, will be leaving soon. Too much change.
Each week, I call her therapist and leave a message with the week’s highlights. I described her aggressive behavior—she had physically attacked me multiple times in the last week—and what had happened at school. After the therapy session, the therapist came out and said that S needed to have healthy snacks with her and to have access to them at all times. The trouble is, I’ve offered this option to her—in fact, she has enough food with her to be able to eat between classes—but she refuses to do so. She also said S realized when she’d blown up but was too embarrassed to apologize for her behavior. Again, the trouble was that this simply wasn’t true—she had spent much of the ride to therapy explaining why what she’d done had been justified, grasping at straws.
I left the session frustrated, something that happens all too often. Our family therapist and I have been working on pushing her a bit lately—on forcing her to talk about why she’s doing what she’s doing, why she’s remained obsessed with childish things—and it’s worked. She’s able to “go there,” even if it gets ugly in the process. Part of her reactions recently, I think, have to do with how afraid she is of the future, and how unwilling she is to move forward. She’s stuck, but her therapist is not helping her get unstuck. She’s swimming in the stuck-ness with her, not trying to push her out.
I have been unable to find her a better therapist, or even another one who is closer—it is difficult to get someone to take on a child with her level of trauma, and difficult in general to find a therapist who isn’t booked these days. In the car on the way home, I said that it was frustrating that she was lying to the therapist, and that they were not addressing the root causes of any of the issues. What was it about snow melting that was so upsetting? I wanted to know. Why was she so obsessed with a certain kind of very realistic baby doll that she purchased $400 worth of items related to the dolls? These actions had to be triggered by something related to her abuse—they otherwise simply didn’t make sense.
She began to pull my hair, pulling out large chunks of it. I pulled over and managed somehow to stay calm, but the rest of the ride was grueling. She was screaming or sobbing for much of it, telling me over and over again that she planned to kill herself, and how she would do it, that her life was completely meaningless. At other times, she would grow calm and tell me that she knew she needed more help. “I feel like I’m going crazy and I don’t know what to do. I know my therapist isn’t pushing me hard enough,” she said several times. “I need more help.” She vacillated between talking rationally and screaming irrationally, and I just tried to keep the car on the road, get us home safely—which, finally, I did. But, by the time I got home, I was in a lot of pain, physically and emotionally.
Just as we were about to get into town, I said quietly to her, “I wonder if you will feel any better when you see our dog.” I have no idea why I said it. And then we were in the house, and our dog was jumping on her, and she put on his leash and told him how much she loved him, how glad she was to see him. We walked him around the block. As usual, he sniffed at everything as if he’d never been on our street before, running around in circles, marking his territory.
“Look, Mom,” S said. “Our dog is saying, ‘Sniff everything. Live life to the fullest. I think that’s good advice.’”
I turned my face away from her so she wouldn’t see me start to cry. How could she go from wanting to hang herself to learning this simple lesson from her dog? “It’s so beautiful out, Mom. The snow didn’t melt. And look at the clouds. I’ll bet it’s going to snow more tomorrow, and everything will look beautiful and new again.” Her voice carried a true sense of wonder.
We got inside and she played with the dog for about half an hour, throwing his ball over and over, laughing unselfconsciously when he would run back to her arms.
Then, we cuddled on the couch. She told me that the weather had looked an awful lot like the place she is from for a long time, too long, and that she wanted to go back to the happy memories of when she visited me for the first time (it was snowing) and when she moved here (the ground was snow covered). She didn’t want to be stuck in the past. She wanted to be in a good place, not a bad place.
I asked if she thought I was pushing her too hard. “No,” she said. “I need to be pushed.” She paused for a minute. “I’m sorry for everything, Mom. I’m sorry for how I’ve hurt you and how I hurt the kid in my class and my teacher. I don’t want to be the kind of person who hurts people. I don’t want to turn out like my bio family. I want to get better.” We cried together for awhile, and then, finally, she went to bed.
I called J then; I’d texted her a couple times during the night because, as usual, I just needed someone who loves us to know what was happening—someone who would really get it but also wouldn’t get scared away.
We have only two more weeks with her, and I am going to miss her terribly. I have been struggling with how much to tell her recently—I don’t want her to feel guilty for leaving, but at the same time, since S got to me, J has been one of our most important supporters, either experiencing or hearing about every up and down, even when she spent a semester abroad last year. I told her the story, and when I got to the part of our dog jumping on S, of her glee at seeing him again, she began to cry, and so did I.
“I keep forgetting how much I’m going to miss her,” J said.
I asked if I should be telling her everything, still, now as she’s trying to say goodbye. She said she wanted to know. I think that’s the best kind of friendship—the friends who want to know, even if knowing isn’t convenient or easy.
Earlier that week, J had sent me a link to an NPR story about unconditional love. A couple adopts a child who turns out to be mostly unable to love them for several years. The story goes through the abuse the mother experienced—abuse much worse than what I am experiencing now, but eerily similar in many ways—and over and over, the reporter asks her in different ways why she kept going. She can’t give an answer—she just did. It was the right thing to do. The boy is now grown up, and doing well. At the end of the story, the reporter asks the mother if she thinks he loves her. “I’m not worried that he wants to hurt me,” she says. “Yeah, I mean, I think he does.”
The reporter, Alix Spiegel, ends the story with these words: “It’s a very unsentimental view of her relationship with her child. But that is what has made Heidi so successful. Heidi is an unusually pragmatic person…realistic, tough minded…and these are precisely the characteristics that are needed in this situation. If you are the kind of person who actually needs love, really needs love, chances are you are not going to be the kind of person who has the wherewithal to create love. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business.”
I listened, and of course, wept like crazy. Then I sent J the following e-mail:
I've probably told you this story before, but I remember during my second interview with S's team, one of the social workers (the sternest one of all of them) asked, bluntly, "What are you hoping to get out of this?"
I thought about it for awhile. I remember thinking, well, if I wanted a normal life, I would adopt or try to give birth to a baby, and have at least a slightly higher chance of acquiring said normal life--at least, as normal a life as any single lesbian adoptive mother with all of my issues/personality traits can have, I guess.
And I remember also thinking, wait, why AM I doing this? And I remembered how for years people had asked me the same question about why I always taught the basic writing classes (full of students who were likely not to make it through college) or why I have always let random people land on my couch for weeks on end or why I have driven random people out of town to get the help they need, sometimes in the middle of the night...whatever, you get the point--and how I had never known how to answer them, or even how to explain how I got myself in these situations where I was doing these things.
And all of the sudden I thought, either this is a really unhealthy or a really healthy impulse that I have, this desire to help people who are at the end of their rope, who by all measures seem hopeless to everyone but me. Maybe this makes me codependent or crazy, I thought. It wasn't the first time I'd had these questions, but it was the first time I'd encountered them since wrestling with them when I first began the adoption process. Suddenly, I couldn't remember how I'd resolved them before--or if I'd resolved them. I felt confused and scared and...
Then the social worker impatiently and sternly repeated the question. And I remember feeling this sense of total calm by the time she got to the end of it the second time.
And I said, "I'm not sure, but I think the answer to that question is that I'm expecting to get absolutely nothing out of it. Which makes me sound like I'm crazy, I realize..."
And the social worker said, "No, it sounds like you're the perfect person to be a mother to a kid like S."
I swear that was the moment when she decided I was the one, even though it took another interview before they picked me over the other family and even though she continued to ask me really hard questions until the moment I drove away with S to the airport a few months later to bring her home.
And I also swear that when I said it I had never been more sure that what I was saying was the truth.
Anyway, I honestly think my problem lately (and I could change my mind about this by tomorrow, who knows) is that I have up until now gotten so much more from S than anyone ever imagined was possible--that she has attached relatively easily and does clearly love me and a lot of other people, too, something the social workers told me would never be possible. Yes, she has been violent and mean and done some crazy things, but for the most part, my journey has been easier than anyone expected. She’s not in jail or dead, as one record I read suggested she would be by the time she was 16. We’re making good progress, in the big picture.
Maybe she just needs some time to be the kid everybody told me she was, and maybe I have to go back to why I did this in the first place, which was not because I wanted to live with someone who would give me unconditional love, but because I thought I was capable of giving it to someone who (up to that point, at least) didn't in any way deserve it.
I mean, she was beating the crap out of people physically and emotionally all the time before she moved here. Maybe she does just need me to be with her through this so she'll know I'm not going anywhere and so she'll work through whatever it is she needs to work through right now and so, finally, we can get back to how it was at the beginning, where I think she sensed it was all about her and not about me (which has not been the case lately, when I've needed so much more from her b/c of everything else I'm going through).
It also occurs to me that her bio mother was depressed a lot of the time, and irrational, and always feeling like a victim, things that I have been feeling a lot lately because of all the losses I’ve experienced recently, and there's no way she's not picking up on those things and no way that's not freaking her out...
Anyway, I have also been reading all these spiritual books which are reminding me that nothing ever stays the same and nothing is really ever about me, that the universe is way bigger than my feelings and thoughts and that the best way to get back to being right with the universe is to realize this...and the whole time I couldn't grasp what they were telling me, b/c I'm too full of grief right now about everything...and it wasn't until I listened to the first woman talk about her son that it made sense. I liked this so much that I actually wrote it down, what the journalist said at the end of the first story: "If you are the kind of person who actually needs love, really needs love, chances are you are not going to be the kind of person who has the wherewithal to create love. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business."
Anyway, all of this is to say thanks for sending this, and of course, for everything else, too. (p.s. Sorry for all the ellipses...)
J responded:
I think I sent it to you because you remind me a lot of that first lady. Not because you have a silly voice, but because of how she responded when the interviewer asked her if she'd ever considered just giving up -- there's this sort of surprise in the woman's response, as if it's something she's never even considered -- the unthinkable.
I remember being so amazed and unnerved when I first met S, that day in the coffee shop--I couldn't understand why exactly you'd chosen to bring this large frightened girl into your life. You'd been telling us quietly that you were going to adopt and now here she was, sort of unreal.
I very quickly learned why, yes. There are no immediate external benefits -- you are not doing it to earn money or to have something good on your resume, which sometimes seem to be the reasons why anyone my age does anything good ever -- but soon there were intrinsic ones; S riding Honey, S hugging you passionately, S going up to old people in the grocery store and asking them, "Sir, what was it like when you were in high school?" (This happened three days ago, by the way.)
When she succeeds it makes me feel like humans can do anything. When she fails it makes me feel like the bad guys will always win. And this unnerves me -- why have I so clearly defined success and failure for her?
Success has happened already -- she's here, and nobody is going to hurt her anymore, and she has a cat and a dog and a mom whom she loves, who she is slowly learning is like that first mother – for whom giving up has never been an option.
I read this e-mail and cried a lot, and then, when I was done crying, I felt an intense gratitude for J—there is no doubt that she was meant to show up in my life, and meant to be there for the two of us for the last 2 ½ years. There’s also no doubt she’s meant to be moving on to the next thing—to the person she loves, to the country where he lives. Change is inevitable; we aren’t supposed to try to stop it, but rather to try to stay in the moment, to be grateful for what we have in that moment, for how each person we come to know and love changes our lives.
There is no doubt, either, that I’ll stick out this difficult period, no matter how long it lasts, and that I will never stop loving S. And, although I forgot this temporarily, there’s also no doubt that I’m strong enough to do this, even when I’m getting nothing back, even when parenting S results in pain, physical or emotional. I’ll keep loving her even when she can’t love me or herself or her life or the world—as well as when she can.
Worst of all, she is showing little remorse for her actions. Every little request turns into a fight. Every boundary is a challenge meant to be broken. Even if she agrees—yes, you’re right, I can’t handle the computer, please take away the keyboard and mouse—the next day she is screaming at me and her college buddy because I’ve taken away the keyboard and mouse. Living in my home has been exhausting.
This past Tuesday, things reached a head when she blew up and cussed at a teacher. Up until that point, most of her aggressive behavior had been aimed at me. The issue was minor—a student in her class saying that the snow was melting—and after blowing up at him, when the teacher asked her to calm down, she got physically aggressive, grabbed the phone, called me, and refused to let the teacher have her phone.
Afterwards, there was little remorse, and she was completely unable to recognize how minor the student’s words had been, how they definitely didn’t merit a meltdown. This kind of behavior has been common enough that the school has asked for a meeting; we’ll be meeting next week to try to hash out how to handle these kinds of outbursts, and how to best support her education in what we hope is just a phase of aggression.
That night, on our way to therapy in a town two hours from ours—a trek we make every Tuesday—S told me that too many things were changing. Her godparents are splitting up. My father is gone—and she does not want to go to Ohio for the holidays, where our family is from, now that we won’t be able to see him or spend time at his place. Her beloved college buddy, J, will be leaving soon. Too much change.
Each week, I call her therapist and leave a message with the week’s highlights. I described her aggressive behavior—she had physically attacked me multiple times in the last week—and what had happened at school. After the therapy session, the therapist came out and said that S needed to have healthy snacks with her and to have access to them at all times. The trouble is, I’ve offered this option to her—in fact, she has enough food with her to be able to eat between classes—but she refuses to do so. She also said S realized when she’d blown up but was too embarrassed to apologize for her behavior. Again, the trouble was that this simply wasn’t true—she had spent much of the ride to therapy explaining why what she’d done had been justified, grasping at straws.
I left the session frustrated, something that happens all too often. Our family therapist and I have been working on pushing her a bit lately—on forcing her to talk about why she’s doing what she’s doing, why she’s remained obsessed with childish things—and it’s worked. She’s able to “go there,” even if it gets ugly in the process. Part of her reactions recently, I think, have to do with how afraid she is of the future, and how unwilling she is to move forward. She’s stuck, but her therapist is not helping her get unstuck. She’s swimming in the stuck-ness with her, not trying to push her out.
I have been unable to find her a better therapist, or even another one who is closer—it is difficult to get someone to take on a child with her level of trauma, and difficult in general to find a therapist who isn’t booked these days. In the car on the way home, I said that it was frustrating that she was lying to the therapist, and that they were not addressing the root causes of any of the issues. What was it about snow melting that was so upsetting? I wanted to know. Why was she so obsessed with a certain kind of very realistic baby doll that she purchased $400 worth of items related to the dolls? These actions had to be triggered by something related to her abuse—they otherwise simply didn’t make sense.
She began to pull my hair, pulling out large chunks of it. I pulled over and managed somehow to stay calm, but the rest of the ride was grueling. She was screaming or sobbing for much of it, telling me over and over again that she planned to kill herself, and how she would do it, that her life was completely meaningless. At other times, she would grow calm and tell me that she knew she needed more help. “I feel like I’m going crazy and I don’t know what to do. I know my therapist isn’t pushing me hard enough,” she said several times. “I need more help.” She vacillated between talking rationally and screaming irrationally, and I just tried to keep the car on the road, get us home safely—which, finally, I did. But, by the time I got home, I was in a lot of pain, physically and emotionally.
Just as we were about to get into town, I said quietly to her, “I wonder if you will feel any better when you see our dog.” I have no idea why I said it. And then we were in the house, and our dog was jumping on her, and she put on his leash and told him how much she loved him, how glad she was to see him. We walked him around the block. As usual, he sniffed at everything as if he’d never been on our street before, running around in circles, marking his territory.
“Look, Mom,” S said. “Our dog is saying, ‘Sniff everything. Live life to the fullest. I think that’s good advice.’”
I turned my face away from her so she wouldn’t see me start to cry. How could she go from wanting to hang herself to learning this simple lesson from her dog? “It’s so beautiful out, Mom. The snow didn’t melt. And look at the clouds. I’ll bet it’s going to snow more tomorrow, and everything will look beautiful and new again.” Her voice carried a true sense of wonder.
We got inside and she played with the dog for about half an hour, throwing his ball over and over, laughing unselfconsciously when he would run back to her arms.
Then, we cuddled on the couch. She told me that the weather had looked an awful lot like the place she is from for a long time, too long, and that she wanted to go back to the happy memories of when she visited me for the first time (it was snowing) and when she moved here (the ground was snow covered). She didn’t want to be stuck in the past. She wanted to be in a good place, not a bad place.
I asked if she thought I was pushing her too hard. “No,” she said. “I need to be pushed.” She paused for a minute. “I’m sorry for everything, Mom. I’m sorry for how I’ve hurt you and how I hurt the kid in my class and my teacher. I don’t want to be the kind of person who hurts people. I don’t want to turn out like my bio family. I want to get better.” We cried together for awhile, and then, finally, she went to bed.
I called J then; I’d texted her a couple times during the night because, as usual, I just needed someone who loves us to know what was happening—someone who would really get it but also wouldn’t get scared away.
We have only two more weeks with her, and I am going to miss her terribly. I have been struggling with how much to tell her recently—I don’t want her to feel guilty for leaving, but at the same time, since S got to me, J has been one of our most important supporters, either experiencing or hearing about every up and down, even when she spent a semester abroad last year. I told her the story, and when I got to the part of our dog jumping on S, of her glee at seeing him again, she began to cry, and so did I.
“I keep forgetting how much I’m going to miss her,” J said.
I asked if I should be telling her everything, still, now as she’s trying to say goodbye. She said she wanted to know. I think that’s the best kind of friendship—the friends who want to know, even if knowing isn’t convenient or easy.
Earlier that week, J had sent me a link to an NPR story about unconditional love. A couple adopts a child who turns out to be mostly unable to love them for several years. The story goes through the abuse the mother experienced—abuse much worse than what I am experiencing now, but eerily similar in many ways—and over and over, the reporter asks her in different ways why she kept going. She can’t give an answer—she just did. It was the right thing to do. The boy is now grown up, and doing well. At the end of the story, the reporter asks the mother if she thinks he loves her. “I’m not worried that he wants to hurt me,” she says. “Yeah, I mean, I think he does.”
The reporter, Alix Spiegel, ends the story with these words: “It’s a very unsentimental view of her relationship with her child. But that is what has made Heidi so successful. Heidi is an unusually pragmatic person…realistic, tough minded…and these are precisely the characteristics that are needed in this situation. If you are the kind of person who actually needs love, really needs love, chances are you are not going to be the kind of person who has the wherewithal to create love. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business.”
I listened, and of course, wept like crazy. Then I sent J the following e-mail:
I've probably told you this story before, but I remember during my second interview with S's team, one of the social workers (the sternest one of all of them) asked, bluntly, "What are you hoping to get out of this?"
I thought about it for awhile. I remember thinking, well, if I wanted a normal life, I would adopt or try to give birth to a baby, and have at least a slightly higher chance of acquiring said normal life--at least, as normal a life as any single lesbian adoptive mother with all of my issues/personality traits can have, I guess.
And I remember also thinking, wait, why AM I doing this? And I remembered how for years people had asked me the same question about why I always taught the basic writing classes (full of students who were likely not to make it through college) or why I have always let random people land on my couch for weeks on end or why I have driven random people out of town to get the help they need, sometimes in the middle of the night...whatever, you get the point--and how I had never known how to answer them, or even how to explain how I got myself in these situations where I was doing these things.
And all of the sudden I thought, either this is a really unhealthy or a really healthy impulse that I have, this desire to help people who are at the end of their rope, who by all measures seem hopeless to everyone but me. Maybe this makes me codependent or crazy, I thought. It wasn't the first time I'd had these questions, but it was the first time I'd encountered them since wrestling with them when I first began the adoption process. Suddenly, I couldn't remember how I'd resolved them before--or if I'd resolved them. I felt confused and scared and...
Then the social worker impatiently and sternly repeated the question. And I remember feeling this sense of total calm by the time she got to the end of it the second time.
And I said, "I'm not sure, but I think the answer to that question is that I'm expecting to get absolutely nothing out of it. Which makes me sound like I'm crazy, I realize..."
And the social worker said, "No, it sounds like you're the perfect person to be a mother to a kid like S."
I swear that was the moment when she decided I was the one, even though it took another interview before they picked me over the other family and even though she continued to ask me really hard questions until the moment I drove away with S to the airport a few months later to bring her home.
And I also swear that when I said it I had never been more sure that what I was saying was the truth.
Anyway, I honestly think my problem lately (and I could change my mind about this by tomorrow, who knows) is that I have up until now gotten so much more from S than anyone ever imagined was possible--that she has attached relatively easily and does clearly love me and a lot of other people, too, something the social workers told me would never be possible. Yes, she has been violent and mean and done some crazy things, but for the most part, my journey has been easier than anyone expected. She’s not in jail or dead, as one record I read suggested she would be by the time she was 16. We’re making good progress, in the big picture.
Maybe she just needs some time to be the kid everybody told me she was, and maybe I have to go back to why I did this in the first place, which was not because I wanted to live with someone who would give me unconditional love, but because I thought I was capable of giving it to someone who (up to that point, at least) didn't in any way deserve it.
I mean, she was beating the crap out of people physically and emotionally all the time before she moved here. Maybe she does just need me to be with her through this so she'll know I'm not going anywhere and so she'll work through whatever it is she needs to work through right now and so, finally, we can get back to how it was at the beginning, where I think she sensed it was all about her and not about me (which has not been the case lately, when I've needed so much more from her b/c of everything else I'm going through).
It also occurs to me that her bio mother was depressed a lot of the time, and irrational, and always feeling like a victim, things that I have been feeling a lot lately because of all the losses I’ve experienced recently, and there's no way she's not picking up on those things and no way that's not freaking her out...
Anyway, I have also been reading all these spiritual books which are reminding me that nothing ever stays the same and nothing is really ever about me, that the universe is way bigger than my feelings and thoughts and that the best way to get back to being right with the universe is to realize this...and the whole time I couldn't grasp what they were telling me, b/c I'm too full of grief right now about everything...and it wasn't until I listened to the first woman talk about her son that it made sense. I liked this so much that I actually wrote it down, what the journalist said at the end of the first story: "If you are the kind of person who actually needs love, really needs love, chances are you are not going to be the kind of person who has the wherewithal to create love. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a tough business."
Anyway, all of this is to say thanks for sending this, and of course, for everything else, too. (p.s. Sorry for all the ellipses...)
J responded:
I think I sent it to you because you remind me a lot of that first lady. Not because you have a silly voice, but because of how she responded when the interviewer asked her if she'd ever considered just giving up -- there's this sort of surprise in the woman's response, as if it's something she's never even considered -- the unthinkable.
I remember being so amazed and unnerved when I first met S, that day in the coffee shop--I couldn't understand why exactly you'd chosen to bring this large frightened girl into your life. You'd been telling us quietly that you were going to adopt and now here she was, sort of unreal.
I very quickly learned why, yes. There are no immediate external benefits -- you are not doing it to earn money or to have something good on your resume, which sometimes seem to be the reasons why anyone my age does anything good ever -- but soon there were intrinsic ones; S riding Honey, S hugging you passionately, S going up to old people in the grocery store and asking them, "Sir, what was it like when you were in high school?" (This happened three days ago, by the way.)
When she succeeds it makes me feel like humans can do anything. When she fails it makes me feel like the bad guys will always win. And this unnerves me -- why have I so clearly defined success and failure for her?
Success has happened already -- she's here, and nobody is going to hurt her anymore, and she has a cat and a dog and a mom whom she loves, who she is slowly learning is like that first mother – for whom giving up has never been an option.
I read this e-mail and cried a lot, and then, when I was done crying, I felt an intense gratitude for J—there is no doubt that she was meant to show up in my life, and meant to be there for the two of us for the last 2 ½ years. There’s also no doubt she’s meant to be moving on to the next thing—to the person she loves, to the country where he lives. Change is inevitable; we aren’t supposed to try to stop it, but rather to try to stay in the moment, to be grateful for what we have in that moment, for how each person we come to know and love changes our lives.
There is no doubt, either, that I’ll stick out this difficult period, no matter how long it lasts, and that I will never stop loving S. And, although I forgot this temporarily, there’s also no doubt that I’m strong enough to do this, even when I’m getting nothing back, even when parenting S results in pain, physical or emotional. I’ll keep loving her even when she can’t love me or herself or her life or the world—as well as when she can.
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