Why tell the story?

As we get ready to head on a week long road trip with Mom, and I think about all of the things I need to find and pack so that we have all of the information we need to draft a solid outline for the telling of the rest of the story, I still question whether I should be broadcasting our business to the world. Why tell our story?

If I had to bet, I’d guess a solid portion of my family wishes I’d just shut the hell up already (hi, Dad!) and leave it alone. Which seems easy enough, right? Just move forward and pretend like nothing bad ever happened. We’re all sunshine and puppy dogs and rainbows! Forever! And, we ride unicorns to work every day!

Good, bad, or otherwise, I just don’t operate that way. I never have.

There are a lot of reasons I’ve decided to tell this story, some of them selfish, some of them not. I’ve spent years trying to decide whether or not to share it with the world because, really, it’s not a nice story. God willing, it will have a happy ending, but to get to where we are, there’s a lot of ugliness and a lot of shame. It’s uncomfortable – for me, for my family, and for all of you, I’m sure. And, it’s certainly not how I want to define my life or my kids’ lives. But, at the end of the day, it’s our truth. Running from it doesn’t make it go away. Pretending nothing ever happened doesn’t heal the wounds. Acting like everything is perfectly normal makes me a big, fat liar. Everything is not perfectly normal. Everything is FINE, but it’s not NORMAL.

I’ve maintained, since the onset of all of this, that I will be honest with the kids about what happened. I will answer their questions as honestly as I can with the information I have. I will shield them from any details that are too gory for them to handle right now, but I won’t ever mislead them about what happened. I don’t ever want to be the one who fooled them into believing that there was just some big misunderstanding so that they’re blind sided by the truth when they find it.

As time passes, more of the details escape my memory. For awhile, I welcomed the forgetting. I thought it was a lot easier to forget what happened than to be constantly reminded. I’d forget a detail, and then I’d catch a glimpse of a court document and be reminded and the emotional reaction would hit me again, just as hard as it did the first time I got the information. Forgetting became more exhausting than remembering.

Before I lose any more of the details, I want to tell our story so that it’s a more accurate reflection of what occurred than my mind will be able to recall in 10 years, 15 years. I need to record the details as I know them now, so that I won’t have to rely on memory clouded by time when the kids are grown and demand a more thorough understanding of why.

Of course, I don’t have to share those details with the world. Many people wouldn’t. But, again, that’s just not me.

Selfishly, I’m sick of feeling like the bad guy. I’m tired of constantly being on the defense with family, always trying to prove that I didn’t steal anyone’s kids away, forever attemping to make you all understand that this is not the life I asked for. This is not what I wanted. At no time did I ever wish that my sister would get knocked up, twice, fall into an abusive relationship, battle mental health issues, and succumb to drugs and alcohol so that I might get custody of and raise her children. I know it’s hard to believe, but this was never how I imagined my life unfolding. I did not ask for this.

I’m tired of feeling a divide, like it’s either her side or mine, and no matter how nice we all are at Christmas, feeling that you secretly feel sorry for her and wonder how I could have done this to her. I’m sick of the imposed feelings of guilt, and I’m fed up with the victim act that so many of you have fallen for with her.

I want you to understand how unbelievable the reality of the situation is. I want you to comprehend that I could not have forced any of this to happen. There’s no way I could have just declared a desire to have her kids and caused the whole chain of events that led to that eventual reality. I want you to know how many – very many – chances she had to make it right, and how hard I tried to help her do just that. I want you to realize the gravity of the situation, the made-for-tv-movie kind of script that caused things to get this far, and the unfathomable decisions that were putting my kids’ lives in danger. I want you to fully know why this was necessary, how the process works, and how hard we had to fight to make sure the kids stayed in our family. I want you to understand how unpleasant it was, how intrusive and burdensome it was, and how much easier it would have been to stay distanced and uninvolved in my little utopia in Texas, away from the drama and chaos and just let it all happen some other way. I want you to stop questioning my love for my sister and start believing in my love for these kids. And, I want to stop feeling like the bad guy in this story.

The big push, though. . . the shove that made me start writing was this: I want to share our experience as a family navigating some of the serious issues that come with adopting kids from a child protective services case. I want to help people understand the challenges we face on a daily basis as a result of the environment that a lot of people think my kids were too young to be affected by. I want people to get a small feel for how much strength and discipline it takes to maintain patience with a child who doesn’t understand why he’s so defiant and angry and uncontrollable. I want you to get a sense for how heartbreaking it is to have to make decisions that seemingly punish an angel of a child just to maintain consistency and structure with the other child. I want you to see how seriously much a little guy can be molded and affected in the first 18 months of his life, how much it carries forward, and how hard it is to explain to a 5 year old WHY he feels the way he does when he was too young to actually remember any of the moments that made him who he is.

I want you to get a small sense of the reality of our situation, and maybe develop some compassion for the parents who CHOOSE to put themselves through this for the sake of forgotten children, and I want you to maybe gain a tiny bit of perspective that might help you start to understand, just an itty bitty bit, how a woman could throw a kid on a plane to Russia after she realized what she’d gotten herself into(but I still want you to believe that it was a bad decision!).

And, if somehow, in the telling of our story, someone else out there can relate and not feel so damned alone, to me, it will have been more than worth the effort.

If it’s too much for you, don’t read it. Simple enough.

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