This weekend did not have the same high emotional intensity for all of us as the first weekend, but the bonds created with the other couples have only deepened through more sharing. It's really such an amazing environment that we surround ourselves in for two days at a time.
The first weekend of training was about us, the adoptive couples. We shared our stories, tears and hopes. It was a way to open our hearts to understanding the grief of others and feeling compassion for them as their journey takes them over bumps in the road. It was to prepare us for our trainings of week two.
We now have the beginnings of the capacity to understand the place from which our kids' experience began. The weekend began with a beautiful ceremony that symbolized the "brokenness" we all feel from traumatic life events.
Consider a broken ceramic plate. We've broken a treasured keepsake from Niger, a necklace from Tanzania, a tiny little doll from Ukraine among countless other special tokens of our memories together. Josh has been successful at gluing them back together so that their general shape is again intact. However, if you look closely, you can still see those cracks. You can still see the thickness of the glue trying to keep the memory together. You still feel the pang of remorse at having it broken in the first place.
Now consider a major life event that changed your make up forever. Something that will sit with you always, though you'll move through it and beyond the daily suffering from it. There's no denying it's impact on your character, though you're pretty well glued back together and making it through this crazy lifetime. When our children are relinquished by their birth mothers to live their lives with us, there's likely to be a part of them that is broken in some way. It might not surface for some, it might be a driving force in how others establish relationships in their lives. But somehow, all of our kids will begin life with this significant event of being adopted.
Saturday we witnessed the breaking of a lovely ceramic plate. When the plate hit the stone, I felt it reverberate through me to the core. It represented every step of grief that I've experienced so far and I recognized myself in the pattern that the plate took when the pieces were again placed roughly back together. We then began the process of surrounding that brokenness with love. We each placed rose petals on a crack. We sent the rose around and around our circle until you couldn't really even see the plate for all the "love" covering it.
Taking the time to truly reflect on the affect of our babies' beginnings feels like the most responsible way to begin our relationship with them. They've already had quite a journey by the time our love pours over them. We can't erase that journey, or the potential hurt resulting from it, but we can surround them with love and a safe place to move through the emotions.
