Getting Started

Have you ever had a situation where you know that if you can just muster up the energy to get through the next few days or even weeks, things will calm down in the end? Then you'll have a few days of down time before the busyness begins again.

Like when all your kids have a sports banquet, a game to which you must bring snacks, a party at school that you agreed to come up with a game or activity for, and friend's birthday party, all in the same week. 

That's kind of what life feels like right now. Except there isn't an end in sight at the moment, there is no calm after the storm. I'm guessing this is partly the 'new normal' that I'll need to get used to with four children. But it's also partly figuring out how to make our new family, our new life 'work.'

All along the adoption process, we worked toward bringing the children home. It is definitely a milestone we'll celebrate in the years to come, and it's important. But until I lived it, I didn't quite grasp that it's really just the beginning. And it's huge - much bigger than I can even imagine, like one of those cut-away images of an iceberg where you think you can see it all, but there is so, so much more under the surface.

Even though we've been home for seven weeks, we are really just beginning the process of getting to know each other, of figuring out how to make this work, of how to help all four children find their 'place' in the family, adjust to each other, and know they are loved.

Don't get me wrong - we have all come a long way in the nearly two months we've been together and life looks nothing like it did the 10 days in Bulgaria or the first week at home. 

But what I've realized this week (partly in talking to other adoptive moms) is that the attachment and bonding process, and the process of essentially creating a new family dynamic, is not something to which we can assign an end date or expectations.

Really, we're just getting started.