Reflecting on our Second Year

A couple of nights ago I was looking back through my journal entries of the past couple of years. It hit me that, unlike what I would have expected, the second year of our adoption was much harder than the first. In fact, I think that's probably why I blogged so much less. The first was plenty hard, as you all know. But it was a different hard, and somehow one that was easier talk about and in many ways easier to bear. It was a hard full of giardia, poop samples, medical frustrations, language frustrations, legendary tantrums, and constant adjustment. But I felt like a superhuman mom-archaeologist on the dig of a lifetime, who just had to keep pushing through to discover something wonderful.

This second year, it was like I was still on the same dig, swollen with bug bites, tired, slogging through mud, mud and more mud, and still not reaching the buried treasure. And I was no longer high on the excitement of my big dig. I needed results to keep my going--and I wasn't getting them. Last year the hard wasn't about intestinal bugs. The hard was feeling frustrated all the time--losing patience, losing hope some days, and losing my cool a lot. It was about feeling like a bad mom--feeling guilty all the time--and wondering why the good feelings weren't coming along to balance out the bad as fast as they needed to.

This is something hard to talk about, or blog about. It's something, frankly, that most people don't want to hear about. They don't want to believe it.

But now that we've begun year three, I'm optimistic. I feel like we're close to discovering the good stuff. It's just hard to hang in there for so long. But we are hanging in, and we will keep hanging in.