On Finding Joy

I recently stumbled across a quotation that said, "Learn to feel joy."

That's it. Learn to feel joy.

(Dramatic pause here).

At first glance, it didn't seem like all that profound of a statement. But the more I pondered it, the more I liked it. In fact, I liked it so much that I taped it up on my bedroom mirror. It sums up the essence of the very thing I try to do each day: To live this life in front of me. To love it, not tolerate it. And that is anything but simple.

It's not that I don't have joyful things in my life. My life is so full of things that fill me up that it's almost a little ridiculous. Two healthy, happy children to hug and kiss each day. A husband who is also my best friend. A job that I love so much it truly feels like play. A beautiful house. A healthy body. A car, food in my fridge, clothes to wear. Joy, joy, joy.

But I don't always feel joyful. Cognitively, I know that I've pretty much got it made. But I sometimes struggle to emotionally connect to that reality. I've gotten better, though. These days, I'm feeling more joy than I've ever felt before. I think it's because I'm discovering my own little joy formula: those things that I *must* do to feel the joy that exists inside my life. What are those things? I'm so very glad you asked (I was going to tell you anyway).

I blog. Blogging has become a form of self therapy for me. It helps me sort through my feelings, step back from the nitty gritty details of daily life and regain perspective. And I *love* up the comments I get in response to the things that I write. Not because I crave the validation (well, a little bit because of that), but because it's an awesome feeling to connect with others across space and time all while sitting here on the couch in my living room. And there is just something about knowing that my words have connected with someone else's journey that lifts me up.

I run. Correction: I ran. This summer, I was up to three miles at a time. And oh, it felt good. I learned to push through the feelings that I couldn't go one step further. To tolerate feeling crappy, to accept it as part of the moment, to trust that I could do the very thing I was sure I could not. And the runner's high when I got done? Freakin' awesome. But something happened along the way (it got hot, my husband returned to football practice and left me a single mom, I got lazy) and I stopped running. So now I'm back to walking. And although I don't get that same runner's high, walking is still an absolutely essential part of feeling good. When I start to feel decidedly unjoyful, it's often because I've skipped my walk for too many days in a row.

I remind myself to let go of the idea that worry helps. Many of us subconsciously believe that worrying about something will magically keep it from happening. We hold our worries in the back of our mind as we go throughout our day, convinced that this somehow protects us. And when the things we worry about *don't* happen, we attribute this to the fact that we worried about them. Which only reinforces our belief that worry helps. So then we worry some more. This works well, except for the fact that it doesn't really work at all. Worry doesn't actually help. And worse, it prevents us from actually engaging in the moment that's right in front of us. I put this little nugget of wisdom in action this past week after I dropped off my (tearful) Joseph at his first day of kindergarten and my (crying) Baby Girl at her new daycare. I could have spent my day worried about them, and in the past I would have. Instead, I consciously let it go and enjoyed my day at work. At the end of the day, I got to return to them, inhale their sweet scents as I swooped them into hugs, and hear all about their days (which were wonderful, by the way). Joy indeed.

I read. I love everything about books. Their smell, their weight in my hand, the way a brand new book creaks slightly when you open it. And I love the power of a book to take me to a different place and time. To open my eyes to new thoughts and experiences and perspectives. To shift my perspective so that, after reading a book for just a little while, I can return to the day in front of me with a new appreciation for what I have.

I try not to expect too much. One of the paradoxes of this whole joy thing is the recognition that every moment isn't going to be chock full of joy. In fact, most moments really aren't all that incredibly exciting or pleasurable. It took me a while to learn this. I think I'd envisioned most motherhood activities being inherently joyful. But really, much of motherhood is mundane and repetitive and, well, kind of boring. Expecting too much is a recipe that has disappointment written all over it. Instead, I try to take the moments for what they are, dirty floors, snotty noses and all. Joy has a way of creeping into the most mundane moments just when you've stopped looking for it.

I escape. When I've really had it, when my brain is full and my body is tired, I stop. I don't clean, I don't blog, I don't read, I just plain don't. The only thing I do is turn on the TV and disconnect. If I'm lucky, there's a Real Housewives Marathon on and I sit on the couch and don't move a muscle for three hours while I watch the drama unfold. The irony of this strategy is that it needs to be applied the most when I feel the least like I can afford to use it. It's when I'm feeling the most overwhelmed, the least self-confident, the most in need of action that I make myself stop. And sit. And watch. The next day, I'm almost always ready for action again.

I consciously shift my perspective. Dirty dishes waiting to be cleaned mean that I got to feed my children. A trip to the physician's office means I have access to the health care and the medicine I need to care for my children. Piles of laundry mean my children have clothes to wear. You get the drift. This strategy works best when I've already used other strategies to help clear my head a bit. Otherwise, I just end up feeling guilty and grumpy, and that's not good for anyone involved.

I pull myself out of my head. I have a terrible habit of living inside my head. I compose blog posts, analyze voicemails from work, mentally review my to-do list, plan the next activity, try to think of a witty response to a facebook post, yadda, yadda, yadda. But when I'm living in my head, I have a tendency to treat my children as interruptions and I hate that. I try to counteract this by making myself see, really see, what is in front of me. It usually works to smell my baby's skin. Or watch joy unfold on my son's face when I kneel down to really pay attention to what he is showing me.

I go to church. Beyond the obvious filling up of my spiritual cup, church is a place where I go to find my mom. It reminds me of the Sundays we spent in our own church, singing the songs, passing the peace, and waiting for the sermon to begin so that my mom would hand me a tic-tac to suck on. My bribe of choice for my own children is gummies, but there is something very calming about repeating the rituals of my childhood. Much of my mom is gone, but she remains in those rituals. And this brings me peace. And in peace, there is much joy.

I connect with other moms. Mommy bloggers, play dates for mommies (er, for the kids), and girls nights out (my personal favorite). All comprised of other moms who commiserate with me, encourage me, and laugh with me.


So how about you? What's in your recipe for joy?

A World Away

It happens every time one of my babies is sick. I think it's because when a child of mine is ill, everything else falls away as I rock and worry and soothe and pray and love. The outside world marches on, but inside our four walls, everything is whittled down to one simple goal: making baby well again.

At first, of course, my thoughts are relatively mundane and mostly self-centered. I question my decision to work and expose my children to the wide plethora of germs that can only be found in a daycare setting. I worry about the canceled plans that result from having to stay home with my sick children. I try to determine how many loads of laundry it will take to get us through the illness and back into germ-free territory. I send my husband out on errands for Pedialyte (for the baby) and hand sanitizer (for the family) and chocolate (for me). And because I'm me, I spend hours mentally calculating the incubation period of the illness and trying to decide how quickly the disease will spread to the rest of my family.

But then.

At some point, usually in the wee hours of the night when I am rocking my baby in the quiet moonlight, my thoughts take a turn. I start thinking about all the other mommies out there who struggle to keep their babies well. In those hours, it's all too easy to imagine what how desperate it would feel to have a sick baby and not be able to make her well again. I envision not having blankets in which to wrap my shivering baby to keep her warm. No clean water to keep her from becoming dehydrated. No roof above our heads to shelter us from the pouring rain. No food to give her when she is hungry again. As I rock on, tears begin streaming down my face because I know that this is the reality that women all over the world face every minute of every day. And knowing that there are so many mothers out there who endure the utter helplessness that must come from being unable to protect their babies is achingly sad.

I'm not sure if these flashes of understanding happen to other moms as well. I do think that perhaps it hits closer to home for me. We all know, cognitively, that this reality exists for way too many people. We've seen the commercials, we've heard the pleas, we've read the articles that describe the plight of those that struggle to meet their most basic of needs. And yet I think that many of us have a tendency to distance ourselves. That, over there, is happening to them. Not us. They're not like us. I know this because I used to think like that, too. But then my Joseph came home. His adoption swiftly and completely erased the lines between us and them. Suddenly it was *my* child--my sweet baby boy with the chocolate eyes and the beautiful giggle and the bright future in front of him--it was him without blankets or food or medicine or hope.

Lest you think me a Mother Theresa sort, let me assure you that I am no angel. As my babies get well, my thoughts quickly snap back to the reality of the life that I lead most of the time. I resume my worrying about important things like when I'll have time to catch up on the Grey's season premiere that I missed while cleaning up baby puke, and how on earth I'll ever manage to get all the laundry done, and how I can save enough money to buy some new clothes and get a new haircut so I that don't look like the frumpy 34 year-old mother who is exhausted from caring for sick children that I am. It's easy to slip back into daily life; easier still to forget the fact that others suffer so endlessly and so deeply. It's much easier to forget than to remember. This is in part because it is simply too overwhelming, too paralyzing, to dwell in this dark reality for too long. If I spent too much time there, I would end up so depressed that I wouldn't be any good to anyone.

And yet those other mothers and their babies are never far from my mind. Now that I know what I know, I can't act as if I don't. So I remind myself that just because I can't do everything, that doesn't mean I can't do something. And then I do something. I find a really good organization on the ground in Ethiopia and sponsor a child so that, for 20 measly dollars a month, we are able to give a child clothes and food and education and a future. I unwind at night by playing word games at freerice.com, where bags of rice are donated to the World Food Program for every right answer (and I get lots of right answers). I learn about simple solutions, such as malaria nets and building new wells, that have the power to save lives. I investigate hunger and learn that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone and yet somehow there are still 925 million undernourished people in our world right now. I search out opportunities to buy Fair Trade, so that I can support the work of those who are trying to build a lives for themselves. I watch TED videos of Andrew Mwenda and Jacqueline Novogratz talking about how we can reframe the way we provide aid to countries like Africa so that we are providing Africans with opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty. I learn how many people face homelessness and hunger right in our backyard. And I listen for other opportunities to change how I live so that others may live too.

And I urge you, loyal readers and dear friends, to do something along with me. Read and explore and learn and DO. Something. Because if we all did such small things, the world would be forever changed.

Its a Onederful Life

I spent yesterday afternoon shopping for supplies for Baby Girl's upcoming birthday party. I'm usually not much of a shopper and I'm generally not a very girly girl, but there was something about ordering pink balloons, buying pink utensils, and paging through pink decorations to adorn Baby Girl's cake that made me deliriously happy. Truth be told, the elation could also have been from the Starbucks coffee running through my blood combined with the thought of the three child-free hours that stretched out in front of me as I ran those errands. Regardless, I happily bought a lot of pink. My mom, a confirmed pink aficionado and a woman who loved to shop, would have been tickled pink. It was fun. As I went about my shopping, planning for the party we are about to have to celebrate the one year anniversary of my baby girl's arrival into the world, I realized that I wasn't nearly as sad about reaching this milestone as I had envisioned I would be.

It's not that I'm not sad at all, of course. Raising children is essentially one long process of letting go and birthdays are always a little bittersweet. I'm hanging on to Baby Girl's babyhood where I can. I haven't, for example, been able to put away the sleepers she used in her first few months home. I've put away the rest of the clothes she's grown out of, but not those sleepers. Every once in a while I sneak into her room and pick up a sleeper and smell it and I am instantly transported back in time to those first surreal moments after she came home when the whole world seemed to shrink to just her and I and the love that emanated immediately from and for this tiny little being took over everything else. There is a period of time after a baby comes home when the outside world ceases to exist and you are seduced into believing that the whole world is full of the magic and possibilities that seem to surround you as you smell your baby's skin. (I will pause here to note that it's entirely possible that at least some of this bliss was post-cesarean Vicodin induced. But you know what I mean). So I can't put those sleepers away. I can't let that feeling go. Not yet.

And I officially retired my pump this week. We're not completely done nursing, but we're trying to cut back to morning and bedtime nursing only. There is no sadness involved in the actual retiring of the pump; I disliked pumping as much I loved nursing (and I loved nursing a lot). The tasks associated with that pump seemed endless. Bottles, and bags, and washing, and lugging, and freezing and thawing again. So I will not miss the pump. But I will miss what it represented. I *love* the closeness of nursing. I love being able to take a hungry little girl, feed her from my own body, and know that I had the power within me to give her exactly what she needed to feel completely satisfied. As long as I am nursing, I can do that for her. I can give her *everything* that she needs,without needing a single thing from outside of myself. I love being able to do that for her. The older she gets, the harder it will be to give her what she needs, to make her feel safe and loved and warm solely by giving myself to her. There is such a simplicity to the first year of life. I will miss that immensely.

So of course I am a bit nostalgic for what I am leaving behind. But mostly, I'm excited about what is ahead. I'm sure this is in part because Baby Girl has already evolved from a baby into a little girl. A little girl with really cute pig tails, to boot. And she is *such* a joyful toddler. She wakes up and goes to sleep with a smile on her face, gives us all kisses whenever we ask, and explores the world with a vigor that is quite simply a delight to watch. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to watch her grow from a tiny baby into a little girl; the road to Baby Girl was long and not a day goes by that I don't remind myself of how extraordinarily blessed I am to have her in my life.

I think my easy acceptance of Baby Girl's first birthday is in also in part due to the perspective I gained from watching Joseph grow from a teeny tiny baby boy into a nearly self-sufficient five- year-old. I am still stunned to realize how swiftly the years have gone by. Experiencing this first hand has taught me that trying to hold onto time is like trying to grasp water running through your hands: as hard as you may try, the feat is simply impossible. The best you can do is immerse yourself in the water, surrender to the feeling of it flowing over your body, and enjoy it while it lasts. That is the perspective I tried to bring into mothering Baby Girl. It gave me tolerance for the imbalance in our lives that the newborn stage created. Rather than flounder in it, I accepted it. I ate it up. I loved the crazy as much as I could. I gave myself over to that tiny little newborn baby girl. I let her drink from me and sleep with me and take nearly everything I had. And when I had to go back to work, I let myself come home, take her into my arms, and spend the rest of the night on the couch just holding her, ignoring the dishes that would go undone. I gave myself permission to say "no" to extra work, "no" to dinners out, "no" to any of those things that would mean more time away from her. All because I knew that this moment-- her one year old birthday-- would come sooner than I could possibly imagine and that when it came, I would want to know that I had lived those moments as fully as I could.

The Beauty That Remains: Ramblings on Being an Adoptive Mama

I distinctly remember when I learned that before being allowed to adopt, we were going to be required to attend a two day crash course on adoptive parenting. I recall being so excited to adopt, so ready to bring a baby into our home, and so annoyed that I had to jump through more hoops to get there. I remember thinking it very unfair that everyone else got a free pass at parenting. After all, no certificate of parental competence was required to give birth to a child. Why should potential adoptive parents have to go through such trials and tribulations to prove their worth? I was sure that adoptive parenting would be no different than parenting a child who I had conceived and carried and was beyond frustrated that the professionals were telling me otherwise. But as grumpy as I was about the "educational experiences" in which I was being asked to participate, they were required. So off I went. To be educated.

And you know what? I'm so very glad I did. It turns out they were right. (Damn, I hate it when that happens). Adoptive parenting is different, and in some very important ways.

Don't get me wrong. The vast majority of the time, our family just chugs along like any other family with two kids. Our lives revolve around school and soccer, play dates and T-ball, morning routines and bedtime stories. And the love our little family shares? It's beyond words. I always knew that I loved Joseph just as much as if I'd given birth to him, and then Baby Girl was born and what I had long suspected was confirmed. I've experienced both ways of building a family, and now I can stand here and tell you without a moment's hesitation: there is simply no difference in my love for the two children who have stolen my heart.

But I don't confuse the fact that my love for my children is no different from the fact that my parenting may need to be. Adoption begins in loss. Before becoming part of our family, Joseph had lost the mama who carried and gave birth to him. He had lost his first father, and his first country. By the time he arrived in my waiting arms, he had been cared for by many different people and uprooted many times. All the love in the world will never erase the fact that his little life began with such profound loss and uncertainty. While I don't know how Joseph will process his adoption--that's his to find out as he travels down the path of life--I do know that there are things I can do as a parent to support him along the way.

When he was first placed in our arms, I was very aware that he had been through much in his short time on this earth. Because I hadn't carried him for nine months in utero or fed, touched, and loved him through his first few months on earth, he didn't have any reason to trust or love me. So we shrank our world to just the three of us: Joseph, my husband, and me. We asked for no outside visitors for two weeks. We carried him in a carrier all the time, did skin-to-skin feedings, slept with him, massaged him, and responded to his every need. He grew to trust us quickly, this little boy of ours. And we fell in love with him.

That wasn't the end, though. It was only the beginning. As our journey together has unfolded, I've been constantly aware of the ways his life beginnings might shape how he processes himself and his place in this world. When I conceived Baby Girl, my first thought (after how the hell did that happen?) was to worry about how the experience of having a sibling who was born into our family would affect him. And when he started up with some challenging behaviors after she was born, I realized it called for a multifaceted approach. To help curb some of the behaviors, we implemented Love and Logic and we were very clear in our expectations for his behavior. But this wasn't enough. I also took a step back to our beginnings. I picked up my long 4 year old, folded him into my arms, and rocked him to sleep again for nights upon nights upon nights. And touched and hugged and snuggled with him, in an attempt to show him that my love for him would never be usurped by the new little being who had arrived in our lives.

And as he grows, I'm tasked with the challenge of helping him understand why he was placed for adoption. We've told him his life story for as long as I can remember, but his ability to process it changes as his little mind matures. We revisit his story often to give him a chance to ask more questions. As he gets older, I'm guessing there will be more questions and perhaps there will be more pain. This is hard to take as a mom- to know that my baby will experience pain and that, no matter how hard I try, I can't prevent this from happening. But while I can't take away his pain, I know that all I really have to do is walk next to him as he walks through it. And that I can do.

I'm also called to help him understand why his skin is a different color than ours. To help him learn that he is every bit as good and worthy as a person with "peachy" skin despite a world that bombards him with messages otherwise. To teach him about racism, both overt and subtle. To help him explain to his classmates why he looks different from us and how he came to be part of our family. To teach him to navigate the tricky terrain of curiosity from other people; to help him to know when to answer questions with humor, when to provide information, and when to just walk away. To help him learn about his birth culture while he is living in this American one. To help him process all of this while also helping him through the mundane tasks faced by any child as he learns to read and write and do math and be a kind, giving, self-confident person in a world where it's often anything but easy to do so.


Does all this overwhelm me? Sometimes. And sometimes is scares the pants off me. But when it does, I return to the quotation I hung on my fridge during our adoption process. It says, "For anyone who is in fear of the monsters that may be lurking around the corners of adoption, yes, as with anything, there are monsters to be conquered and there is that potential that they could gobble us up, which makes our actions so much more important. But please consider for a moment that as you are reading this, there is a child who is battling very real monsters alone. And imagine that when you make a commitment to take up arms, side by side with the child, how many unnecessary scars you, as a family, can prevent." Despite all the challenges we may face as a family, we are better off facing them together.

In retrospect, then, those adoption professionals were pretty smart. They spurred me to learn how to be the mom Joseph needed me to be, and for that I am very grateful. But you know what they didn't tell me? They didn't tell me how becoming an adoptive mama would change me.

They didn't tell me that how much guilt I would carry for not being the perfect mama I had envisioned. Parenting is a humbling experience for any parent, but even more so for an adoptive parent. I am ever so aware that the gift of parenting Joseph comes at the expense of another mother's loss. And so when I snap at him or send him to his room because I'm simply feeling grumpy, or engage in any other number of parenting missteps, I feel the weight of his first mom's loss on my shoulders pressing down, reminding me how lucky I am to have him in my life and how I should never, ever take it for granted.

And they didn't tell me how adoption would so swiftly erase the lines between "us" and "them." They didn't explain how I would suddenly feel so deeply connected to Africa, how I would see my son's face in the suffering of the people that he left behind, or how his presence in my life would deepen my understanding that so many people aren't given the chance they deserve at life simply because of where they are born. And they didn't teach me how to navigate the chasm between this understanding and the reality of everyday life in this country, where everyone goes about their lives as if none of this is happening.

And they didn't tell me how adoption would open me up. How it would teach me that life was messy and how, no matter how hard I tried, life would never have been perfect anyway and so I should stop trying so hard to make it so. Or how despite my young and rather naive conviction that I knew how my life was supposed to go, adoption would teach me that there are multiple paths to happiness and I only had to let go of my preconceived notions for those paths to be revealed. And how understanding all of this would free me from the constraints of trying to be the person I thought I was "supposed" to be and allow me to be the person I was meant to be.

And they didn't tell me how many people I would meet along the journey of adoption and how those people would go from strangers to fast friends in the blink of an eye because they understood. And how, looking back, I would marvel at the idea that these amazing friendships would have been missed had life gone another way.

But mostly, they didn't tell me how much I would learn about love. They didn't tell me how my Joseph would teach me that love doesn't come from blood, that blood is not thicker than water, that nothing could be further from the truth. They didn't tell me that I would see my mom in my son, even though the two have never met and share no genes. They didn't tell me how it would bring tears to my eyes to watch deep love develop between siblings who were not born to the same mom.

And they didn't tell me how, despite anything we face along the way, our adoption journey would be full of more beauty than I could have ever imagined.

Adoption is beautiful. Pass it on.