About Whirling Moms

"We come spinning out of nothingness,
scattering stars...
the stars form a circle,
and in the center we dance" --Rumi

I love the idea of something happy coming out of spinning around and around and seemingly getting nowhere, because that's what my life feels like a lot of the time. And I must admit I bring most of it on myself. I just can't help pushing things to the limit. The latest push involved the addition of one adorable, highly spirited 9 year old tigress straight from China into our almost grown family of 6. (We foolishly thought that after raising 4 kids nearly to adulthood, one more couldn't be that different.) That happened about 2 1/2 years ago, and I can confidently say things have been whirling around ever since, some days feeling like living in the center of a tornado, others spinning around on a sunny lawn until we collapse from laughter.

I've been married to the same wonderful man for 28 years and work as a family therapist with women in the prison system part time. Since our new addition, I've gone to many workshops and trainings on attachment, adoption, brain function, meditation, trauma--can you sense desperation?--and read more books than I can remember on the subjects.  I try to live in the moment, stay calm and do a lot of deep breathing, to love unconditionally and limit my chocolate intake. I fail miserably several times a day.

Adoption can be like falling off a log for some people. For others, it's more like falling off a cliff. Onto jagged rocks. Most are somewhere in the middle, at various times. While at first it seemed overwhelming, both physically and emotionally, now I'm getting into the swing of things and realizing this is a marathon, and there are real, tangible things a person can do to make it all work a bit better when one of those 'bumpy times' comes up. (Vague ideas like "just calm down" only make me want to scream and break windows!) Most of the crazy things that happen really do make sense, if you know more about brain development, trauma and attachment, and can calm down long enough to use that knowledge. Not always easy, but possible.

In this process, we lost some people we thought were friends, and gained a whole new group of amazing people in our lives, most of who are adoptive parents. (Apparently, that's not unusual.) From these new friends, I have learned so much and have had the privilege of knowing I'm not alone in the joys and moments of total frustration that no one else would get. We did the blog thing when we went to China, and it turned out to be a lot of fun, as well as a great documentation of a huge event in our lives.  Seemed to me that it was worth trying to put down some of the parts of the process again.  It's so easy to forget how far things have come.