Return of the Mom

 

If you had told me 18 years ago that I would be a mother of five, working full time and living to advocate for children with additional needs, I would have laughed.

In fact, years before I became a mom, a friend, an educator, told me that she believed that one day she'd serve the world by parenting a child with additional needs.

Not me. 

In fact, as I worked through college, in education, I thought special needs were well beyond anything I could handle.

Yet here I sit, working in the field of autism, working to support families and realizing I wouldn't be here. Tonight I woke, recounting the conversation I had with a family I serve. I tossed and turned and after a moment or five, I decided to go downstairs and read. 

I grabbed a book by Matthew Kelly, Holy Moments. As I read, I realized all these moments I have fought on being a mom, not walking in the path I intended were really opportunities to live and collaborate with God. I'm not the mom who will let someone say, "you were chosen for this" or that "God chose special people to be parents of special needs children", because honestly MY God is GOOD, HOLY and TRUE and he would never once want a child to suffer and struggle but MY GOD also is giving us opportunity to collaborate, to walk with him to serve a purpose.

For years, I believed that my purpose was to live a life sharing with others about my adoption--won't lie, it happens, more than I expect it to but perhaps that was just a chapter in my story. 

In the last 18 years, I have learned more about myself and my life through my children. Each of them however I have also learned I cannot parent them, be there for them and raise them without faith and the belief that this life is one we can choose to serve. Our children, our family, our friends and of course God.

Years ago, a dear friend told me to offer up our service in home as prayer for our husbands and children. My more immature mind struggled as I shook out underwear that was wadded up in pantlegs or stain sticked my husband's work shirt for the 50th time and WISHED I too had been out to a fancy lunch with cocktails and beer but that wasn't my journey. My purpose at that time was at home and perhaps if I had done my work with a purpose to serve, that frustration inside would have eased and perhaps even subsided.

A couple years ago, I put my pen down. Not because I didn't have something or because I didn't want to connect with others but the season I was in, raising five children and mourning the loss of my expectation of what parenthood would be, what our future would look like and the struggles my child would face didn't lend well to a blog or really any writing. I also was too carefree in sharing the moments that perhaps one day my own children will share, about their journey.

That said, today a mom told me she too wrote and while she struggled raising a child with autism, she saw beauty in it, and I told her I did too.

And so tonight, in the wee hours of the morning, I am at my keyboard beginning to share once again my journey with life, raising a large family that lives with a child who has autism. As I always say, if her journey makes another family's life easier, then God's purpose for her life has been fulfilled and how lucky I am to be chosen to walk this journey by her side.