As you might know, my wife and I are pretty big privacy advocates. As such, we try to limit the amount of personal information that gets posted on the internet. I know that as soon as something is public, it can never be brought back. The words and pictures you post are cigar smoke, under your control till they are exhaled. No amount of grasping after the fact will change that reality. Archive.org and google are waiting to take snapshots of everything and file them away for posterity, warts and all.
That said, we post the things here that are either so trivial as to not matter if they are preserved forever or so real and serious that we are willing to allow them to be preserved forever. I want to take advantage of that vulnerability and commit something to the record that I want to continue to exist 25 years from now, a letter to my youngest daughter.
Precious JuneBug-
Last night, as I picked your sleeping body up to carry you to your bed, I tripped and fell. Your tiny body was in my arms the way you hold a baby, with your head and neck in the crook of my right elbow and your legs draped over my left arm. You were sound asleep, with your duck and blankie gripped tightly in your little hands and your mouth slightly agape. The room was dark, and I didn’t guess the height of the gate that I was trying to step over properly and from there everything just rushed. I managed to turn my body so I landed on my shoulder instead of my arm. It wasn’t until after I got up that I realized that, had I landed on my arm, you could have been killed.
I got up, steadied myself, and put you (still asleep) in your bed. I checked your pulse and lightly tickled your toes to make sure they still wiggled, and then left.
When I got to my bed, I lost it. You are my precious little girl. The one who wakes up every morning and puts on her shoes, regardless of the presence of any other clothes. You are the one who always escorts me to the door for work and shots out “Haff a good day, daddee!” You are the one who needs a good, solid 45 minutes of cuddle time whenever you wake up from a 10 minute nap.
The thought of having caused you any harm paralyzed me. I got up and checked your pulse again. You kicked me. I can only assume that you intended the kick to communicate your gratefulness for my concern and that yes, you were both fine and alive.
When you first came to our home, we didn’t think we would get to keep you. Your bio mom seemed sincere in her desire to straighten her life out and get you back. We told ourselves that we needed to not get too attached to you and that we were just there to help you get healthy and get caught up developmentally. We never signed on to foster parenting to the end of adopting kids.
We talked about you constantly, especially as you grew chubbier and pinker and your socks finally started staying on your tiny ankles. As your bio mom started to slip back into her habits and addictions, we talked about how maybe our role in your life was not just to take care of you for someone else. How presumptuous it sounds, to believe honestly that you are the best parent for a child when there are so many people out there who are smarter or richer or more organized or better looking. We believed it though, and still do.
A lot of the time, God’s will for us is not as clean and simple as we might like. We have always said that foster parenting is always the result of a tragedy, of something being badly broken within a family. Our welcoming of you and your sister into our family came at a great cost, the dissolution of your ties from the mothers that bore you. We know that and are humbled by that. The sweetness of you as a baby, a “little thing of honey and softness, to wrap up in a bundle and sing to and snoodle with and hug to bits” came with the bitterness of knowing what happened to bring you to us. God’s design for us is not always easy or painless or simple, but it is always good.
I was shaken last night because I remembered that life is fragile, especially the life of a child. In a moment, we could have lost you. At any moment, I could lose you. I have no guarantee of time on Earth with you but the moments that have already passed. In case I say it one too few times in the course of a day or in the course of your life, I love you my sweetheart.
-daddee
Posted on July 17th, 2007 by Dad
Filed under: Fostering/Adoption, Kids, Learning
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