Worth Fighting For

I had a pretty terrible dream last night.  I dreamt that I was traveling with a toddler that went around shooting people.  I was not complicit, but I witnessed his shooting sprees first hand, and tried to talk him out of it wherever we went.  He didn't listen to me, and his mean streak only seemed to get worse.  Talk about your terrible twos huh. 

I didn't know what to make of it when I woke up.  I was really disturbed, but also somewhat puzzled.  Usually in my dreams, I am the life of the party, or I can jump really high and soar.  Misty is also very friendly in my dreams.  So when I have a dream about a gun toting toddler, I am certainly going to be taken aback.

So I thought about it all day long, and I finally tied the dream to a conversation we had earlier this week.  It was with a gentleman who had a friend that recently adopted a child from Ethiopia.  It was not one of those happy stories either.  It sounded like she adopted a terror and when he said she wasn't sure if she would keep the child my heart broke.

So all week I have been convinced, that we we would be adopting the terror child.  I have had visions of our child laughing as their school burned down to the ground.  I then see all our friends with their angelic kids, and can't help but think how we will struggle to keep our marriage together when we have Rosemary's baby.

I have heard several stories like this.  It is definitely not the norm, but those stories are out there.  And quite frankly they scare the expletive out of me.  I don't know how we would handle it.  Adopting a kid isn't like buying a car (though the costs are comparable), you can't trade a child in for a better model.  One that is not as "damaged".

 I was not put in day care as a kid but one time.  But you know, I remember that one time I was dropped off pretty vividly.  I didn't cry or throw a tantrum, but I remember that anxious feeling as I tried to play with a toy, sitting on the brown shag carpet, in the brown wood paneled room.  I remember that feeling of relief when my dad and uncle finally came back to pick me up.  I could not imagine the feeling of being dropped off in that foreign place for good.  I could not imagine being dropped off by my family member because they knew what I didn't, that I was not going to survive if I stayed.

Every day in Ethiopia, kids are dropped off by parents that love them too much to try to keep them.  I cannot fathom that pain of having to make that decision.  The pain of a dieing parent to let go of the one thing that keeps them wanting to live.  The pain of abandonment that a child must feel, when they finally realize, no one is coming for me.  I really don't know how any kid can ever recover from that.

So again, I remind myself.  This is the right thing to do.  We were never promised an easy, care free life.  We aren't promised perfect and angelic kids.  It is going to be hard but I truly believe the orphan and all the pain that they  bring with them, is worth fighting for.