Writer's Block

Sometimes I have no words. The last few weeks have been one of those times. Life – parenting, homeschooling, adoption – have been very, very full and very, very busy, but the busyness has been the round and round, mundane kind. Cook meals, do dishes, do laundry, fill out paperwork, fundraise, pay bills, do more laundry and dishes, teach fractions, correct spelling, correct manners, referee squabbles, fundraise again, more dishes, more laundry and more squabbles and on and on and round and round.

I am not the author of most of the words in this post, but instead these are the words that have on my mind as I go about my daily round.

Around the time we were first considering adoption, my older sons and I read an essay about Lenny Skutnik, the man who jumped into the partially frozen Potomac river to save a floundering young woman after Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th street bridge in Washington, DC, on January 13, 1982. Skutnik does not consider himself a hero, in his mind he simply did what anyone would have done. "No one else was doing anything," he is quoted as saying, "It was the only way." I feel the same way about special needs adoption.

Before us is a little child, with only a short time left before he is devoured by the post-soviet mental health system – a little child about to fall into a frozen river from which he will likely never escape. How could we stand by and watch? Ours is a river of paperwork, homestudy interviews, health and fire department inspections, medical exam after medical exam after medical exam (one of them a eight doctor physical in Eastern Europe), psychiatric evaluations and fundraising (Did I mention the fundraising? I do not love fundraising.)

Is there danger? Oh yes, there is danger. There is fear. There is criticism. There are questions to which I have no answers.

Is his life worth the cost? Worth the risk? We think so.

My older daughter and I have been reading C. S. Lewis's The Silver Chair and the Narnian Marshwiggle, Puddleglum, offers some very good advice. The characters in the story have been sent on a quest and given certain signs by the Christ figure in the series which will guide them in their quest. They received four signs, but have badly mishandled the first three and when they encounter the fourth they are faced with a terrible choice.

"Oh if only we knew!" says one of the young, human adventurers.
"I think we do know." says Puddleglum the marshwiggle
"Do you mean you think everything will come right if we [obey the sign]?" asks the other young human.
"I don't know about that" says Puddleglum, "You see Aslan [the Christ figure] didn't tell [us] what would happen. He only told [us] what to do. [This] will be the death of us . . . I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the sign."

There is also a saying, attributed to Plato, of which someone remided me recently, "Be kind; Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

And there is nothing mundane about that.