I really appreciated Cindy Bodie’s comment in response to my last blog about how much she adores her older children, even though they put her through hell. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Foster Cline a few years ago. I told him how it upset me that I was getting so cynical. He said he completely understood but he had an advantage over me … he is a couple of decades older. (That’s an advantage???) He said he had lived long enough to see kids he wouldn’t have given you any hope for who actually turned out pretty darn functional. So he had lost some of his cynicism. I never forgot that, and I look forward to the day when I see lots of kids that I didn’t think would amount to much prove me wrong and find success in life. I believe that is what Cindy has experienced …


But back to my cynicism or reality-based, here-and-now approach. I was at Wal-Mart the other day and there was a lady in line ahead of me who had a brand new baby. I said something about the child being “hot off the presses” and she said the little girl was actually 7 weeks old. From my perspective, that’s still pretty new, but this mom said it seemed much longer than 7 weeks already! I laughed and said my friend Karen, who just turned 39 and had her first baby 4 months ago, told me the same thing—it seems like forever that she has been a mom! This mom in Wal-Mart replied that she was 35 and this was her first baby too! Then I said that I had several kids in their 20’s and one 10-year-old and I was loving being an “older” mom. She said something about that big of a gap between kids and I mentioned my youngest was adopted from China. So then this mom said, “I have friends going through their last round of IVF. I told them they should just get one of those baby girls from China because they all do so well and don’t have any problems!”


Well, I set her straight, explaining that my beautiful, delightful, light-of-my-life 10-year-old was actually a disrupted placement because of attachment issues, and no, all the kids didn’t come from China completely unscathed. She looked surprised and then mentioned she was a kindergarten teacher and “all the Eastern European kids she saw were developmentally delayed, and it took them until first or second grade to catch up.” I replied they were lucky if they caught up academically by that time and many struggled well after that, and not just academically.


For some reason, this lady couldn’t wait to get out of the store! I can’t imagine why?

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