Adoption is a Puzzle, and Everyone Has a Piece

I had no idea what to title this post, and that just sort of rolled out of my head.  It sounds right, too.

I don't have all the answers.  I don't know where to find all of the pieces of the puzzle, or who has what pieces, but I do know what pieces of the puzzle we, as a hopeful adoptive family, have to offer:

love- the same love we have for our biological son;
security- a stable home and family to grow up in, with a mom and a dad, so that all of our child's energy can be spent on being a child, learning, and growing;
self-confidence- the kind that enables a child to succeed, deal with peer pressure, and reach their potential;
faith- the knowledge that God lives, and that He loves each of us, and the assurance to teach our child what we believe, then let go and let them choose for themselves.

Some of the other pieces of the puzzle are pretty obvious, others aren't, and others are still unknown:

a child- pretty obvious, but this is probably the central piece of the puzzle, or even the completed puzzle itself;
a mother- I don't mean myself, either- I mean our child's birthmother, the next most central piece of the puzzle, without whom solving the puzzle would never, ever happen;
a friend- someone who can help the birthmother make the most difficult choice of her life- to place her baby for adoption- not to "give up" her baby, but (cliche as it may sound) to "give her more."

Other pieces of the puzzle can be mundane, routine, and seem unimportant, even though they are still pieces to the whole picture:

word of mouth- telling people that you know someone who is adopting, or even telling someone that you know someone who knows someone who is adopting, can play a key role in finding some of the other puzzle pieces;
agency- perhaps the most difficult decision other than whether or not to journey through adoption is the choice of which agency to use- where will I find my child?  Will it be with this agency or that?  What if I choose the wrong agency?  How will my child find me?  It's in this type of decision that I wish life, and the adoption journey, came with an instruction manual.

We have some pieces of the puzzle that we will never lose: love, security, self-confidence, faith.  But there is another piece that is extremely easy to lose:

hope- it is soooo easy to lose the hope that this journey will end the way that we want it to end, and if we lose this, we essentially lose all of the other pieces- they become invisible to us, like the blue sky on a cloudy day.  It may be there, but we just can't see it.

We are in the middle of this journey, and trying to find all of the pieces of the puzzle- of our puzzle, our child.  Each puzzle is different, and the pieces only fit together when its the right puzzle.  We thought we had found our puzzle, and all of our pieces, but came to realize that the pieces we had gathered did not fit together.  Whether we just simply gathered random pieces, thinking they would fit, or whether some of the pieces were counterfeit and given to us with the intent of deception, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that in the end we find all of our pieces to our puzzle, and figure out how to put them together.

This is our journey.  Share it.  Tell someone.  Tell someone you know.

Be a piece to someone's puzzle.

First Day of Preschool

I can hardly believe it has been 3 1/2 years since this little guy came into our hearts and lives! First drop-off at preschool went seamlessly. Hope he has a good day and lots of fun!

Who Cares?

Sometimes I like to weigh-in on controversial topics.  All the talk of Paula Deen is prompting me to give my opinion.  

Is she racist? Is she not racist? Who cares! Has she committed a hate crime? No. Has she discriminated against someone because of their race? Not that I know of.  

She grew up in the south during the civil rights movement.  She hears African American young people calling each other the "n" word in her businesses.  What did you expect?! So why is it such a crime that she has used a stupid little word, that just happens to be offensive to some people? First of all, if African Americans don't like the word, maybe they should stop using it themselves (I know not all black people use the word in reference to each other, but I am talking specifically about those who do).  Second, I thought we had a thing called freedom of speech.  Does that mean freedom of speech, unless it offends someone?  Or freedom of speech for some people to use certain words, but not for others to use those same words?

And the food network and Smithfield brand did not drop Paula Deen.  They made a statement that they will discriminate against you if you either: do not conform to popular opinion, appear to not conform to popular opinion, or at one time did not conform to popular opinion.   They are only protecting their bottom-line.  They simply don't want to lose money over this.  So they will do whatever their cowardly little butts need to do in order to make the majority of people happy, so that they make the most money they can.   If it was socially unacceptable to have red hair, they would fire every redhead they ever had in front of the camera!

I could go on, and branch off on other topics, but I am guessing that that will likely happen in the comments anyway, so I will end for now.  Bottom line- big deal if she said a an offensive word once, a long time ago.  We have way more important things to worry about in our lives and in this country!

Ok, I'll Join the Gun Debate...

First of all, it's the 2nd amendment that says that we have the right to own a gun.  Because of this being a major part of our nation's constitution, I think it would be pretty hard to change.  Plus, with all the red tape and political tension surrounding the issue, I am not sure anything will be done anytime soon.

I am all for having stricter laws for buying a gun, especially for mentally ill, or criminals.   I am also for having stricter laws on owning combat-type weapons, although I still feel that laws like this may be an infringement on the right to bear arms.   I just don't know how it would be practical.

When it boils down to it, if a bad guy wants to get a gun, they are going to find it somehow.  Speaking currently, the guy (I don't want to use his name because I don't think he deserves it) who murdered the children and teachers last Friday was turned down to buy a gun a few days before, according to the news, and he got his hands on weapons anyway.

Even if we had a weapon buy-back program, and stopped selling them to the public, I just don't think that we could get them all off the streets.

Heroin, cocaine, meth - all of these and many other illegal drugs are not legal to sell, but that hasn't hurt the drug trade coming into this country.  It hasn't stopped thousands from finding, using, and in many cases, ultimately overdosing on illegal drugs.

Ultimately, the problem is not the gun.  The problem is the "crazy" person (I use that term colloquially, of course) with the gun.  Yes, let's make it harder to obtain a gun.  I wouldn't mind waiting to buy a gun while my background got checked, but during the time that that background check was happening, some sociopath just stole, borrowed, or otherwise obtained a gun and shot 20 innocent kids and 6 adults.  So, how do you prevent that from happening with stricter gun laws?

My choice in this matter is to carry a concealed weapon myself.  If, heaven forbid, I were to ever find myself in the position of that principal, or teacher, or movie-goer, I want to have the ability to protect myself and my family, as well as those around me.  If more of us, and I mean responsible, mentally capable, healthy, temperate individuals, were to exercise our right to bear arms, perhaps this would not only stop these killers when they are on a rampage, but deter them from even beginning one.  Let's not be those who fear, but those who are feared.  Maybe it's because I am mentally healthy, but I would think twice about going on a shooting spree if I knew that it was a common thing for people to carry a concealed weapon.

Finally, we don't give a second thought today (maybe we do during an election year:)) to our government becoming a dictatorship, or to the idea that our government might exercise power over us through the use of force - but what if the military and government officials were the only people who had weapons?  And then, what if our government became corrupt and exercised power over us in a way that violated our rights, or even our lives?  What if the government used intimidation tactics to influence us because it was able to do so because we had no means of realistically defending ourselves?  I think this is why we have the 2nd Amendment.  While is seems unlikely that our nation would ever move to this level of power and control, it is the reason we have this Amendment.

At this point I will end my debate on gun control.  It could easily turn into a debate on much more than that, including the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment and the history behind it, even debating entire government systems and beliefs.

In the end, my stance is that we have the right to bear arms.  There should be strict laws for obtaining firearms, especially for criminals and mentally ill, as well as semi-automatic and combat-type weapons.  I don't see these regulations keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys.  In the meantime, I will use my right of the 2nd Amendment by obtaining a concealed weapon license and pray that I will never have to use it, and I believe that many more of us should exercise that right.

One of the Nine

I had some thoughts this morning regarding religious symbols and how so many people want to remove them, so as not to offend someone of a different religion. In face, I don't know how accurate it is, but I recently heard that someone wanted to ban Christmas trees because they had become a "religious symbol." 

We are all pretty familiar with people or groups demanding the removal of crosses from hills, parks, even cemeteries, as well as demanding the removal of other religious symbols from different locations, such as sculptures of the ten commandments from parks or public buildings.

Before now, I have never given much thought as to "why?"  I always just dismissed these occurrences with thoughts of disgust and frustration, chalking it up to some disgruntled person who is angry with themselves or their circumstances, or had a bad experience with religion, who wants everyone else to be as unhappy with the world as they are.

But today, I really did wonder, "why?"  I thought, "isn't the majority of our nation Christian?"  And if so, why would we put up with these occurrences?  I decided to research it a little bit.

There are 311,591,917 people in this country.  73% of those people identify themselves as Christians.  20% of the population say they have no religious affiliation.  The remaining percentages include religions that are not Christian. 

So I thought maybe I could blame the 20% of the population who have no religious affiliation.  Yes, they are the ones to blame.  They are the ones making us take down our crosses on hills, and our ten commandments from public places.

Then I thought about Congress.  A lot of the enforcement of the removal of religious symbols is the result of law-making at that level.  Yes, it's them.  They're the ones.  It is their fault.  They are the ones taking God and prayer out of schools.

But 87% of Congress is Christian.  And, even if we removed the religious affiliation from members of Congress, they still represent all of us, whose makeup is 73% Christian.  So, you would think that the majority rules, right?

I began to think that the problem is not the 20% of people who have no religious affiliation, or the .00017% of our population that makes up Congress, but the 73% of us who claim to be Christian. We ultimately are the ones responsible for the things that happen in Congress, since we are the ones that vote those members in to those positions; and we are the one that would make up any majority in a group of voting members locally who might vote for some local ordinance or regulation.

However, it turns out that even though 73% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, only 9% of Americans said religion was the most important thing in their life.  Only nine percent.  I was very saddened by this.

So, I cannot blame the 20%.  They have the right to protest.  I cannot blame the .00017% - the lawmakers.  They represent us.  I can only think to blame ourselves - the 91% of us Americans who apparently don't care. The 91% of Americans don't put their religion first in their life. 

I am not a statistician, so my interpretation of the numbers may not be perfect, but here is what this all means to me:

If there are 100 people lined up, 20 of them would step forward and say that they have no religious affiliation.  73 of them would come forward and say that they are Christian.  The other 7 people would step out and tell you they have some other religious affiliation.  Now, line them all up again, and you might think that 73 of them would come forward and say they put their religion first in their life.  But in fact, out of that line of one-hundred people, only nine of them would come forward and say that their religion is the most important thing in their life.  How can we ever think to affect the world, or stop the wave of change that is happening, with these numbers? 

So I ask, "who is to blame?"  Each and every one of us who are among the ninety-one.  Were you to be in that line of 100 people, would you be among the nine people who stepped forward?  Or would you be among the ninety-one who stayed back? 

Each day we have a choice.  We can choose to be among the ninety and one, and sit back and watch as the world changes, complaining when it doesn't change the way we would like it to, and asking "who is to blame?" and attempting to pin that blame on someone - anyone- other than ourselves; or we can choose to be among the nine, and do our duty as Christians, standing up for what we believe, and not apologizing for it. 

We live in a country where freedom of religion was among the most important thing to our Founding Fathers.  That freedom of religion was not declared to protect religious persecutors, but to be protected from them.  We have a right as Christians to put a cross on a hill, or a statue of the ten commandments in a park.  Other religions also have the right to do the same with their religious symbols.  Let us all remember that "freedom of religion" is not the same as "freedom from religion." 

That I might be among the nine is my hope for myself, and for all of those who espouse any religion- today, and always.  I hope that as I step forward from that line of one-hundred, that I will see you standing there with me, as one of the nine.

Things Were Simpler Then

As I watched my son play with my iPod this morning, after watching his regular cartoons before and during breakfast (first on the TV, then on the computer), I wondered if I was ruining him because of all the technology that he is constantly inundated with.  My thoughts went to the posts I regularly see on Facebook, declaring that:  "My curfew was when the streelights turned on.  My parents called my name not my Phone. I played outside with friends not online. If I didn't eat what was cooked for dinner, then I didn't eat. Sanitizer didn't exist, but you COULD get your mouth washed out with soap. I rode a bike without a helmet, getting dirty was ok, and most of the neighbors LOVED YOU as much as your parents did."

Whenever I see things like this, I can't help but think, "While this may be true, your parents and grandparents could make the same claims to simpler times.  Generations are always changing, and we as people also remain so much the same.  Is it bad that things change?  Specifically, is it bad that technology continues to change the way we live?"

I will preface the rest of my thoughts with the fact that I believe that we should have moderation in all things.  I am not advocating that children watch TV, play video games, and use technology all day long.  I think it is very healthy for kids to play outside, to invent and use their imagination to play new games, and read books that are made from paper.

That being said, is there anything wrong with kids today using more technology than we did?  It is because of technology that we can share our thoughts and feelings here on the internet.  Both of us.  It is because of technology that James is even here.  It is because of technology that surgeons can save lives, chemists can create life-altering and life-saving drugs, and astronauts can explore outer space. 

Did each generation, more technologically savvy than the previous one, also complain that when they grew up times were simpler?  Had they had Facebook and Twitter while they raised their children, would they have posted the same thoughts that we see today?

Perhaps we worry about the future generation not having the same things we had growing up - the simpler things.  But our lives have become easier and more convenient because of technology, even amid the worries that our children would grow up somehow "messed up."  Each generations' children have actually grown up to become as or more intelligent than their predecessors, evidenced by our increasing technology and conveniences.

So, whenever I begin to worry when I see a child playing a video game, or learning how to use a touch screen at 2 years old, or even just staring at a TV or computer screen, I think about the life they have ahead of them.  They will be using these things their entire lives, growing up around it, and even, when they become adults, recreating it.  The technology they will have, and the technology they will create, because they have become used to it and grown up around it, will save even more lives, create even more beneficial drugs and medications, and explore even more of the universe.  Perhaps when our kids have kids, whatever their Facebook or Twitter may be then, they will write something about their curfew, and the ways that things were simpler when they grew up.

Fall Leaves - 2012

The first day after a big wind storm came through I took James up the canyon to play in the leaves.  It was beautiful!  There were leaves everywhere, just like a fresh layer of snow, only dry.  I think he collected about 50 leaves that day, stuffing them into his pockets, and then, when his were full, stuffing them into my pockets.

Just look past the 'no make-up" face for these two pictures.  I didn't put them in because I love how I look.

I love James' look in this picture.