Homesick

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

We had a new placement in the home recently. We’ve done a little bit of respite, but we haven’t had anyone stay longer than a weekend since the kids left.

It was hard. Not just in the sense that I’m sleeping on the pull-out couch, waking up in the night to comfort crying children who miss their mom terribly, dragging them to activities when they can’t remember my name, or cooking endless meals and cleaning an endless stack of dishes. It was a little bit of that, but it was mostly keeping my head up under a tsunami of emotion.

When the kids left, I closed the door to their bedroom, but I left the items they didn’t take with them exactly where they were. Then life started to happen. I got busy; I was distracted with drama and responsibilities and my boys. I buried feelings of loss in a shallow grave and walked away. Now all of a sudden those items were being disturbed, moved, asked about. “Whose bed is this? Whose toys are these? Why do you still have their clothes in the closet if they don’t live with you?” Excellent questions.

I still have an Easter dress I bought last year when they had only been gone a few weeks, and I thought they’d be back before the holiday. It’s been hanging on a coat rack hook in our living room for 8 months. Why can’t I move it?

The answer to that would be the same as why I haven’t cleared out their drawers. I haven’t done it because there was always hope that goodbye would be temporary.

When does the hope completely die in foster care? When does the roller coaster finally stop and let you off? Because right now, it’s awful all over again. I’m weak again and lost in a trap of my own mind. I miss my kids.

There’s chatter coming from the other side of their bedroom door. In the middle of the night, my half-asleep fog imagines it’s 8 months ago, and I still have the promise of forever. As I come to, the foreign timbre of a homesick child comes into focus. I move towards the door as I did so many times in those four years. It’s a familiar movement met with unfamiliar faces. I get to work comforting, for it’s both of our homesick hearts that need it.

I read the following post a while back, and it has not left my mind since. Adoptive parents’ brains change when they fall in love and meet the needs of their adopted children. These kids rewired my brain, and it’s a change I can’t go back on.