This morning I am cooking for Thanksgiving. I retrieve my folks from the airport at 3 PM, weather willing. I have a pork roast and sauerkraut in the crock-pot for dinner tonight. As I was preparing it this morning, it occurred to me it might not be the best choice for my stomach, which is highly disturbed with me as I ingest my third round of antibiotics—and a kills-everything one at that. However, I’m making it because my mom is one of the few people who will eat the sauerkraut with me, although Beth will eat some. I highly doubt Dora will touch it with a ten-foot pole. The men don’t like it, either. But guess what else I was thinking as I prepared the roast this morning? I was thinking about how Amy likes it. From there my mind returned to this recent discussion, the bawling-out comment from “fearless”, and my thoughts on the whole big picture.


One thing “fearless” wrote, perhaps in a previous comment, was how I brought these kids from another country to add them to my family. (The rest of the message was ... therefore I should treat them better.) True, I did remove them from their original culture. Tommy used to tell me he would be dead if he had stayed in the orphanage. Who knows what Amy would be doing in Thailand … I don’t think staying with birth family was an option at all. Had she stayed in Thailand, I suspect her life would be pretty grim. True, another family in the US could have adopted her… but I have been down this road before. Another family with more “couch-potato” expectations would have been a better fit, but I seriously doubt any family would have embraced her nasty attitude. Who knows. "Fearless" would like me to believe she wouldn't have had her nasty attitude in another family. If that is true, she should blossom now that she is free from our horrible environment, right?


What I do know is that I brought all my kids into this family with the intent of having them be my sons and daughters. Not sour-faced residents, ghosts in the periphery, or vacuums of need. Sons and daughters. I gave, and gave, and gave (starting with all the time, energy, money and preparation required to get them here), and I did expect something positive back in return. I received that something positive from three of the five kids, but not the other two. (Dora's still considering her options.) So what conclusions shall I draw? “Fearless’s” conclusion is clearly that it was all because of me that the other two can’t/won’t return much in the way of positives. Because if it isn’t me, it might be their issues.


If they have happy, long-term successful relationships with lots of other people in their lives, I truly am thrilled for them. Perhaps it simply is that I am too demanding, too wacko, too something for them to have a relationship with me. Presumably, they could find at least one or two other people in my family to relate to … but I don’t see any deep, strong relationships forming with anyone else, either. Amy never called Steph all summer. If the problem is just me, why don't I see real relationships with other family members?


As I reread what I wrote, this isn’t the direction I intended to go with this post. What I intended to emphasize was how enthusiastically I embraced the idea of being a mom to two more kids, enveloping them with the love and nurturing that is abundant in this family, only to have them reject it at every turn. It is still a source of deep pain for me to prepare a meal that reminds me of Amy, only to have the sadness wash over me once again … Not anger, not resentment (although there was plenty of that in the past) … sadness. Dreams that never were.


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