Friends, family, fellow travelers:
Yes, I am as surprised as you are that two of these here emails made it out in a month’s time. Maybe mossiness comes in seasons. And June itself could be a season all to itself. If you’ve been following along, you know that, for us, there’s a certain weightiness that June brings to the table of our lives. The weight contains multitudes. Sometimes it’s a beautiful, life-giving, glimpses-of-glory kind of weight. Other times, it’s a longing-for-resolve, burdensome kind of weight. I’ve learned that’s it not always easy to tell the difference between the two.
That may not make much sense. Let me sum up: June is full. It’s full of possibility, daylight, and reminders of a longing for something better that, depending on the day, we’re not sure will come.
A couple weeks ago, we celebrated our older daughter’s fifth birthday. It was a perfect June day for a birthday pool party. Clear, brittle-blue skies. Temperatures in the upper 70s to low 80s. The air was filled with the chattering of lilacs and honey locusts. There were lots of presents and minimal sunburns. And the unique and utter exhaustion that arrives at the end of a child’s birthday day, just as the thunderstorms start rumbling across the evening.
This birthday meant more to our daughter than Christmas. Her birthday has been her primary topic of conversation for almost as long as she’s been with us. Through the long winter she kept asking when it would be June and when, oh when would it be her birthday? She flipped through all possible themes like she was picking clothes out of her closet (before eventually landing on mermaids, hence the pool party). She was quick to tell relatives or new acquaintances when her birthday was and what was going to take place on her birthday. Near the end of May, when we told her that June was almost here, she mistook that day as her actual birthday.
It’s a strange thing celebrating your child’s fifth birthday when it’s the first birthday you’ve ever celebrated with her. For us, it was more like her first birthday. And now that I think about it, maybe it was more like a first birthday to her, too.
There’s a lot of our girls’ history I can’t get into here because of confidentiality and #legalstuff. But as that history goes, it was right around the end of May and the first part of June of 2018 when they were placed in the home of a wonderful family that had every intention of adopting them. Not long after placement, though, the couple learned they were pregnant with twins and decided to give up the girls – which is how they became our girls. They were with this family for three months before they were placed with us last September.
But the home they were in before this other family was a disaster. Adjectives fail me here. Again, I can’t get into details, but they lived in a toxic environment – so toxic that our older daughter has never talked about those caregivers. Ever.
Imagine this almost-4-year-old girl, living in a nightmare at the end of May and awakening in June to the dream of a loving home… just in time for her birthday.
You tell me: what effect do you think that had on her attachment to the family she lived with before coming to our home? How close to Heaven itself did the concept of birthday climb in her little heart? How full of meaning and possibility did her special day offer?
So it was that less than a week before her fifth birthday, in the middle of evening prayer in our living room, without a prompt from me or Lindsey or the Bible reading from that night, that she asked us if she would see her previous foster parents in heaven.
In our foster training, Lindsey and I have heard that foster kids can remember or be triggered by past traumas at or around the “anniversary” date of those traumas. They know. Deep down in their bones, the seasons and the calendar leave their marks. It’s as if the elemental realities of life stamp their hearts with the time and date of a major trauma or transition. And when the anniversary rolls around, sometimes their moods can shift. They aren’t quite themselves. They revert to past coping mechanisms, those vestigial organs of survival. We experienced it with James at the one- and two-year anniversaries of his placement in our home – irregular sleeping patterns punctuated by persistent feelings of fear and loneliness.
And I think we saw the same thing happen with our older daughter as the calendar crept closer and closer to her big day. The biggest day of the year. The most monumental day of her existence. Think Joshua and the 12 stones in the middle of the Jordan. Monumental. How else can I explain her asking about the eternal destiny of her previous foster family within one week of her fifth birthday?
Reflecting on that sequence now, I think our daughter was hoping in both directions. As educator and poet Christine Perrin put it, hope is a memory of the future. The future Jesus promises us. The “further up, further in” future of joy. That line from Chesterton comes to mind: “Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory. . . . we are all kings in exile.”
Our daughter celebrated her fourth birthday last June without us. But it was so full of hope that it gave her a memory, as it were, of what she wanted her next one to be, a memory that mapped the way to future hope.
Now she is home. She was born to us in September, and we celebrated her “first" birthday nine months later.
June is for healing. It is a memory of a future that’s filled with “a holy rest, and peace at the last,” as an old prayer says. But the healing in this life is always incomplete. The rest never quite fully obtained. June is also a reminder of that incompleteness. Life is not all pool parties and mermaid cakes.
There were brief stretches over the last half of June that reminded us of how difficult it is being a blended family. Particularly with our older daughter, there are still many challenges from her past that we face on a daily basis. It can be hard to approach these challenges and dynamics with patience and grace on a day-in, day-out basis. We can get tired of traveling this path. Our muscles tighten with fear’s lactic acid. Some days we’re tempted to believe a certain vision of our daughter's future that’s full of despair.
This weariness doesn’t plague us on most days or even most weeks, but when it does, it can threaten to blot out the memories of the birthday party, or the memories of a walk through shortgrass prairie at sunset.
“Despair,” Gandalf says in The Fellowship of the Ring, “is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.”
And, then, suddenly, God poked his head through the calendar and said, “I’ve got you. I know the end.” June 27, 2018. James’s adoption day. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but we almost forgot the one-year anniversary. It quite literally snuck up on us. And, because this email is place of honesty, Lindsey and I didn’t realize it until one day after the date had passed. But God provided. We celebrated the next day with French toast, a couple of presents we had been waiting to give him, an afternoon at Nana’s HOA pool, and dinner at his favorite pizza place.
A day like that is a gift – a despair-numbing, memory-shaping gift.
I’d like to close with a poem I wrote sometime in June. Like this email, I don’t know if this poem makes any sense to anyone but me. But June has come and gone, and I want to remember. The light is now trending toward darkness again. One day it won’t. And I need to tell myself that. Every day.
Thanks for remembering, and hoping, with me.
In June the honey locusts begin to breathe,
and their breath smells like June should smell,
a multitude of scented, contented sighs,
the air infused with the perfume of their pollen.But once in Moab in mid May, the honey locusts
there were so talkative that at first I thought
the rocks themselves were speaking,
sweating this fragrance of sound.Then I looked along the banks of the Colorado
and overheard the gathered canopy whisper
motes of wisdom to the desert air,
but they floated beyond senses and understanding.What I’m saying is that June is more a memory
than a month, and you can recall it anywhere,
– in the desert of your past
or even in the future as you standon the bank of an irrigation ditch
watching the grass wimple in the nut-brown current
like a school of glowing, yellow-green fish
that, even while underwater, can see how the air must taste.– “IN JUNE THE HONEY LOCUSTS"