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Journeys To Mother Love

~ Encouragement and healing in mother/child relationships

Journeys To Mother Love

Category Archives: Adopted children

Not Forsaken

12 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Adopted children, childhood memories, emotional needs, God as our parent, grief and loss, losing mom too soon, Remembering Mother, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

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Abandonment, Adoption, Grief Loss and Bereavement, Mother

Imogene-just-adopted

I watched an Irish movie that brought tears to my eyes and reminded me of my mother’s story. The movie was based on a true story of an impoverished family where the mother dies and the father runs off and doesn’t care of the children, who are taken into custody by the state and placed in orphanages.

The same thing happened to my mother and her siblings, only it wasn’t in Ireland. It was in Colorado. She was the age my littlest granddaughter is now—almost two years old—when she and her siblings were taken into custody by the Otero County Court. The judge declared them “neglected children” and wards of the state until age 21. Mother’s one sister and two brothers were sent to the Denver Children’s Home, but just in time a childless couple adopted her. And though she never saw her siblings again, she was raised by loving Christian parents and grew up to be a self-sacrificing, loving pastor’s wife. This is an old photo of her the day she was adopted. Her adoptive parents found her dirty and frightened.

Some things have come full circle. Since I moved back to Colorado, I have found Mother’s birth family.  Our son, who is a lawyer, has done pro bono work representing neglected children who have no legal representation.

Though Mother has been gone from us over 38 years now, I never want to forget how God rescued a sad little girl whose mother had died of TB and whose father had run off to find work or something in that dust bowl era. I never want to take for granted the way God rescues us, provides for us, gives us people to love and be loved by.

I remember Mother smiling through tears of blessing as she sang, “A tent or a cottage, why should I care? They’re building a mansion for me over there. Though exiled from home, yet still I will sing, All glory to God, I’m a child of the King.”

~Catherine Lawton

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Anonymous Graveside Flowers and the Eternal Now

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Adopted children, childhood memories, encouraging each other, grief and loss, Influence of Grandparents, reach out and touch, the healing journey

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Adoption, Family, future hope, Grief Loss and Bereavement, life and death, relationships

Inskeep-graveside

My sister (right) and me at our grandparents’ grave

My sister, Beverly, visited me this month and we took a trip to the town where our grandparents lived. We searched the cemetery until we found their grave sites. Grandpa died about the time I got married. Grandma died just before I gave birth to my daughter. As I was moving forward in my own life, their earthly lives were ending. So the generations go. Walter and Edith Inskeep adopted our mother as a small child. They provided a loving and secure upbringing for her; and they gave my sister and me unmatched affection as the grandparents of our youth.

For Beverly and me, finding our grandparents’ graves and their tiny, now-rundown house, was a pilgrimage. These humble, hard-working, faithful people poured unconditional love and encouragement into our early lives. Since Mother was raised an only child then died quite young (in 1977), we lost contact with the extended family of Inskeeps.

Maybe that’s why it meant so much to see that someone, after all these years, had placed flowers on their graves.

Every Inskeep grave we found had flowers. Seeing those flowers after almost 40 years, did something for my heart. Those flowers made me feel:

  • Comforted. When I am too far away to show honor to the memory of those who loved and prayed for and cared for me, someone nearby is doing just that.
  • Connected, somehow, with the living as well as the dead.
  • Concrete Immediacy. I cherish the memories and the photos of long-ago departed, dear loved ones; but the memories grow more and more distant and far away. Those flowers carefully placed by human hands at the graveside gave me a sense of Now.

I wished for a way to say thank-you to the anonymous flower tender. I pray that every time the anonymous person tends those flowers, God will fill their heart with hope and a sense of the eternal now and eternal connectedness for honoring the memory of such good people.

~Catherine Lawton

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Adopted Siblings ~ A Special Closeness

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by kyleen228 in Adopted children, challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, emotional needs, encouraging each other, importance of prayer, Parenting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adoption, Children, Courage to be honest, Family, Fostering Family Closeness, Mothering, Parenting, Siblings

From this picture, you'd never know they get sideways with each other!

You’d never know they get sideways with each other from this picture!

At age ten and seven, my sweet children have just begun to bicker. You know, incessant arguments about nothing. I guess I should feel grateful that it took them this long (some kids begin way before this), but maybe that’s why this behavior hurts my heart so much. Growing up as an only child, I always longed for a brother or sister and felt so lonely without a built-in playmate. My husband, on the other hand, can’t remember a time when his only brother ever wanted to play with him. My husband was always just the annoying little bother. Sadly, he and his brother never really outgrew this dynamic. Worse yet, their relationship potential was tragically stopped short when my husband’s brother passed away before his time. Now he will never have a chance to feel what it is like to have a close sibling. While I know my husband’s scenario is unfortunate and hopefully not the norm, it still lingers in the back of my mind each time my kids argue with each other. I am certain my husband’s parents tried to foster a good sibling relationship between the boys. Somehow, though, it never worked. I don’t want this for my kids. I want them to stay close throughout their lives and to value each other.

I think it is especially important since they are both adopted. My ten-year-old daughter is just now beginning to ask deeper questions about her adoption, about her birth parents, and about her birth. I work really hard to answer every question as honestly as possible, letting her know there are no “off limit” questions. I am under no illusions, however, that both my children will always feel secure enough to discuss the things they wonder about. I am hoping there will come a time when my daughter and son can talk together through these types of adoption-related issues. I’m hoping they can be traveling companions on the road to reconciling their birth stories and their adoptions. Perhaps this deep hope in my heart makes it even harder for me to hear them argue. I know they will need each other in ways that perhaps biological siblings don’t.

Hanging out together in the snow

Hanging out together in the snow

As “Love and Logic” parents, my husband and I usually handle their bickering with a “get along together or play apart” type of approach. So far they always choose the “get along together” option. That is comforting. And they still have lots of fun together and most times can put aside their differences. I’ve heard many different tactics for handling conflict between siblings, from the “get along shirt” to having them hold each other’s hands and tell five things they love about one another after a fight. I haven’t adopted any of these. For now, I just talk to them about how lucky they are to have each other and about protecting each other’s hearts. And I pray—a lot.

~Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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Mediocre is for Sissys ?

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by kyleen228 in Adopted children, challenges of motherhood, expectations, frustration to freedom, Parenting, the healing journey

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letting go, mother and daughter, Parenting

mother watching kids board school bus

So this has been the year when I have had to face the fact that my daughter might never be “academic.” I always told myself that a “C” grade was okay, as it meant my child was average, and average means, well, normal. However, being an overachiever myself, I have struggled with making that sentiment a reality in my attitudes. The truth is, I don’t want my child to be “average.” I want her to be extraordinary.

This year, during parent and teacher conferences her teacher presented my daughter’s rank in the class. 17 out of 20. Ouch, that stung. First I got angry. Then, I felt embarrassed. I had trouble concentrating through the remainder of the conference. “17 out of 20?” I kept repeating it over and over in my brain. Then a slow but definite dislike for her teacher started to swell within me. “What a horrible thing to show a parent,” I thought. “What kind of a teacher are you?”

Truth is, the problem was mine and not her teacher’s. I was having the issue with my daughter’s ranking. My daughter quite happily goes to school and thinks her teacher is wonderful. If she is aware of her academic struggles, she doesn’t seem to notice. She is certainly not hung up on her class ranking. Should I be?

~Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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Orphaned or Adopted? ~ Reflections on Easter Sunday

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by ardisanelson in Adopted children, encouraging each other, God as our parent, Jesus on the cross

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Adoption, Emotional and spiritual healing, Finding our identity, future hope, God the Father, God's promises, life and death

cross

We all have parents, whether we physically knew them or not. In my case, I knew both of my parents, growing up in a home where they both lived until I was nine. It was at that point that they divorced. My mother, my two brothers and me moved 2,000 miles away so we could be near my mother’s relatives.

Saying goodbye that day to my father on the plane was a very painful experience. It was back in the day when non-ticketed friends and family could go beyond the security check-point at the airport. My father walked us all onto the plane and paid special attention to me. Through my tears I could hear him reassuringly say, “Everything is going to be ok. You need to be a big girl now and take care of your mother.”

That was not my first taste of abandonment, but it’s the one I remember most. My previous taste of abandonment was when my mother had her nervous breakdown when I was six years old. She didn’t choose to abandon me, but the effects of that event led me to never really knowing my mother as a person.

Those two abandonments early on in my life left me seeking to fill the void in my heart in unhealthy ways. I tried throughout my teens and into adulthood to win my father’s approval—to feel important in his eyes. Worse than that were the choices I made to rebel against God. Thankfully God has redeemed the pain of my youth and beyond.

When I grew up—I mean really grew up emotionally on the inside—not my physical age, I started to recognize and label these abandonments for what they were and the affects they had on me. Now that both of my parents are gone (going on two years), a friend who recently lost the second of her parents asked me if I feel (or felt) like an orphan after they passed.

Her question gave me an opportunity to reflect on that very point. We talked about it a bit. My response was ‘no’. I can certainly understand how one would feel that way. However, for me, I led the life of an orphan most of my adult life. As I actively turned to Christ in the last decade or so, I learned more about my significance to God and the role the Body of Christ was intended to play in my life. I built relationships with other women who were also hungry for God and seeking to become the women He designed them to be.

I was no longer orphaned; I was adopted. I was adopted into the Body of Christ and was now part of His family.  Romans 8:14-16 tells us:  For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.  The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba,Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

With that adoption comes a responsibility to live life as God designed. Easter Sunday is a marker of that adoption for all who accept Christ as their Savior. Our adoption certificates are signed with his blood. Let us not take that for granted.

Regardless of the relationship you had or didn’t have with your parents, may you embrace the love of our Heavenly Father and His physical representatives on earth as your family.

~ Ardis A. Nelson

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Filling the Mother-Loss with Tangible Grace

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Adopted children, emotional needs, encouraging each other, generations coming together, God's healing love, grief and loss, losing mom too soon, the healing journey

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Adoption, caverns of the heart, Emotional and spiritual healing, future hope, Healing love, life and death, life stages

CG1girl

When your mother dies, especially if she is still quite young, you can feel forsaken and forlorn. And even when your heart embraces the mercy of these true words: “When my mother and father forsake me, the Lord will take me up” — there remains a mother-shaped cavern in your heart that reminds you every day of your loss.

But the Lord has shown me that He wants to fill that hole in my life with the most unexpected, beautiful gifts. I have been wanting to tell my readers about the wondrous gifts that have been coming to me. And I think it is time now. So, with a sense of Heaven’s nearness, a smile of awe, and a few tears, I’ll share the rest of the story….

This week my pastor concluded his sermon with the words, “Filling our imagination with Jesus, we increasingly live in touch with reality, while the whole world is out of touch with reality.” I know this is true. I’ve experienced Jesus working through my imagination to enter and heal the losses and wounds of my life. Our minds can believe all sorts of lies, and our hearts can be oppressed by darkness; but when Jesus steps in to fill a mind and a heart, light shines out the darkness, and loving truth dispels crippling falsehood.

You can read my story — of how Jesus “took me up” and healed my heart — in Journeys to Mother Love. Part of that story is that for many years I have lived with a mother-cavern in my heart since my mother died when I was in my twenties. Since Mother was adopted as a young child out of a large family fallen on hard times (during the Great Depression, her mother died of TB and her father left to find work) … and then, adopted, she was raised as an only child … I have had no relatives on my mother’s side.

Then, 18 months ago, after years of searching, I found my mother’s birth family — living within an hour’s drive of my husband and me! I found a cousin the same age as my mother who had been a toddler in the same home with Mother and always wondered what happened to little Imogene. At 83 she was the last of the generation that remembered my mother, Imogene. So I found her in the nick of time.

This new-found cousin, Mary Lou, was as thrilled to find me as I was to find her. We felt a bond immediately, and the mother-cavern in my heart didn’t feel so empty. And gradually I learned that she was a person of faith who loved the Lord and prayed for her family.

I treasure the times we spent together: visits in my home and in her apartment, sharing lunches together, looking through photo albums, finding so many ways our paths have intersected unbeknown to us, feeling her strong grasp of my hands, her kisses on my cheeks, hearing her heartfelt, “I love you!”

Then this winter she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Long vigils in the hospital brought my husband and me together with her children and grandchildren. And the heart-cavern of impending loss filled with cousins who enfolded me and I have found myself surrounded by family I never expected to have.

Last Friday night my husband and I stood with 16 of Mary Lou’s family members around her ICU bed as she lay at death’s door. We had each had opportunity to sit with her, express our love, and say good-bye. But the grief and sadness were creating a huge cavern of grief in the room, felt by everyone present.

Then this family, with tears, each at various stages of belief and doubt, gathered round the beloved mother and grandmother who had been their strong, caring, faithful hub and, instead of calling the hospital chaplain, asked one of her sons, who had been a steady church attender, to pray. I doubt the family had ever done that before. But as gentle, simple, real, heartfelt words poured from that brother (one of my new-found cousins, who has had much suffering in his life) grace like rain poured sweetness into the gaping cavern of sadness. Surely every heart, no matter how unaccustomed to praying, was touched. … How can sadness be so sweet?!

Soon after that I read my friend Jasona’s blog in which she writes, “I see loss, difficulty, and uncertainty as cavernous places, and I have hope that when we open them to Jesus he fills them with grace so they can become … like settings for diamonds.” (You can read her entire blog post here.) Jasona’s post came to me as another gracious gift that helped me fill my imagination with Jesus, helped me deal with the grief in a way that was in touch with reality — the realities of Life in the midst of death, Light in the midst of darkness, Heaven in the midst of our earthy lives, and the Wonders of God’s ways.

~ Catherine Lawton

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Sometimes I Still Wonder

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by kyleen228 in Adopted children, challenges of motherhood, encouraging each other, Parenting, the healing journey

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adoption, Children, Family, Finding our identity, Home, Parenting

Children dancing in a circle

I can’t help but wonder sometimes how my experience as an adoptive mom might differ from the one I would have had as a biological mom. I think my biggest curiosity is what it would be like to see my face in my child’s face or my personality traits within theirs.

Interestingly, God chose to make my daughter resemble me. From early on, people would look at her dark hair and eyes, compliment her and say to me, “I see where she gets it.” I would smile and say, “Thank you, but God gets all the credit.” This usually led to a confused frown and a great discussion about adoption.

In one such conversation, an adoptive mom told me I should enjoy the similarities now because when my children became adolescents, their “biology” would suddenly show up. She lamented that during the teen years, she would look at her adopted children in amazement because they seemed so different to her—as they exhibited traits she had never seen in them before.

To be honest this still scares me a bit. So far my children are my children. They have their own personalities, but I can see the power of their environment shaping them. They like the things we like, value the things we value, and live according to the rules of our house. What would it be like to one day look at my son or daughter and wonder, who does he or she get that from? Would I feel somehow emotionally separated from them?

And yet, I am reminded of the many biological parents who feel they don’t know their children as teenagers. Perhaps this mom assumed the change she saw in her adoptive children was a consequence of adoption when it was really just a consequence of adolescence.

For now, I am enjoying the similarities. God in his infinite goodness chose to bless our children with talents that fit right into our family, as if they were our biological children. My daughter likes to read and write and is very athletic. My husband and I enjoy many sports and both have graduate degrees in English. My son loves music and art, talents that are also shared by both my husband and myself.

So, as it has been with this entire journey, I am trusting God with the future. If that sweet adoptive mom was correct, my prayer is our family will have developed a strong enough bond to see our way through those turbulent waters. As my children discover who they really are through the process of adolescence and cope with their adoption and identity, hopefully they will know that God knit our family together not by accident but by design and our differences will become our strengths.

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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God Knows the Desires Of Your Heart

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by kyleen228 in Adopted children, challenges of motherhood, confessing our need, emotional needs, encouraging each other, expectations, feeling inadequate, God's healing love, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adoption, Mother's Day

Violets in the gardenAs an adoptive mom, Mother’s Day brings many emotions. For years before my husband and I adopted children, I dreaded Mother’s Day. It reminded me of what I wanted and did not have. Even now, 8 years since we adopted our first child, I can still remember those feelings with surprising freshness. Infertility or barrenness is a difficult road to walk. Most young women assume motherhood will be a part of their life experience. When God has other plans, the shock and despair can be overwhelming. Given this, I thought it might be helpful to share how God helped me navigate this emotional mine field.

After my cancer and hysterectomy, I considered many options and struggled with much fear. My husband and I discussed surrogacy, adoption, foster care, and remaining childless. Many well-meaning friends tried to convince me that not having kids wasn’t such a bad thing, especially my friends with teenagers. Their warnings fell on deaf ears, however. I knew that my life would simply not be complete without children.

Four years later, with considerable pain, after deciding on adoption and still being without a child, I finally had to ask the question I dreaded: “Lord, do you not want me to have children?” What if He said “yes”? How could I reframe my life into a world that didn’t include children? It seemed impossible to me. And yet, I still had to ask. What I heard that day began to change my perspectives. In a still, small voice within my heart I heard, “Wait upon me and I will give you the desires of your heart.”

Wait…..  Okay Lord, but isn’t that what I have been doing? Four years of waiting is a long time. What am I waiting for? Or better yet, what are YOU waiting for? Are you waiting on me?

Then one day God led me to 1 Samuel 1:1-20 and the story of Hannah. Barren and brokenhearted, Hannah was blinded by her grief. She had the love of her husband, his preference, in fact, over his other wife Penninnah who had given him children. Indeed, one day when Hannah was weeping, her husband asked her, “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than 10 sons?” (1 Samuel 1:8). Hannah’s  despair over being childless kept her from enjoying the blessings God had given her.

I realized I had been like Hannah, so consumed over the desire to be a mother that the sadness over what I wanted and did not have kept me from enjoying the good in my life, and there was so much good! I realized I had to surrender my will to God, believing his promise that if he chose not to make me a mother, he would fulfill the desires of my heart some other way. I started to see how God could provide spiritual children, a ministry, a career or so many other things that would fulfill my heart. I just needed to trust Him with my hopes and dreams.

Not long after that, the call finally came and a few months later we brought home a beautiful baby girl. I think God had been waiting for me to take that leap of faith and let go of my plans for my life. So if this Mother’s Day brings the pain of childlessness, let me encourage you to trust God with the desires of your heart. He may choose to bless you with children or He may choose to bless you in other ways. He made your heart and put your deepest desires there. He knows what will make you truly happy.

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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The Law of Love

09 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Adopted children, forgiving yourself, God's healing love, healing after abortion, losing mom too soon, stepmom relationship, the healing journey, when tragedy hits

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abortion, Forgiving yourself, future hope, God the Father, Great Commandment, Healing love, Miracle Baby, Post-Abortion Healing

"Death Was Cheated" - newspaper clipping

Ellen Cardwell, a “miracle” baby “born” after her mother died

Is the pre-born baby a “person” created by God with a soul that will live forever? Two of the stories in Journeys to Mother Love touch on this subject.

Ellen Cardwell shares the story of how her mother died suddenly while taking a Sunday afternoon stroll when she was pregnant full-term with Ellen. A popular attitude of the times was that the unborn baby should be left to die with the mother. A caring doctor, though, performed an emergency operation on the deceased mother and took the baby out, resuscitating her to life. The story appeared on the front page of the Oakland Tribune (see photo above).

For Ellen, the mother/child relational healing she experienced later, had to do with relating to and forgiving her stepmother, who had led Ellen to believe she was her birth mother.

In another memoir included in Journeys to Mother Love, Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton tells how, as a frightened, pregnant college student, she chose abortion—and then the resulting emotional pain, cancer, and barrenness she experienced when, in a loving marriage, she longed for children.

The mother/child healing aspect of Kyleen’s story had to do with her “relationship” with the unborn, aborted child who she came to think of as a person with a name; with her relationship with her stepchild; and with her own need to forgive herself.

These are both powerful stories. They show how important to God is every person he creates. And though we are called “mortal beings” because our bodies will die, there is a part of us that will not die. These stories also show that we are each individuals but tied together with bonds stronger than death.

When it comes to personhood and abortion, I believe we should vote and work for just and biblical laws. But I also believe that man’s law and God’s law are not the same. It is a worthy goal to want man’s laws to be based on God’s laws. But it is not the main goal. Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law. And he said that the greatest commandment was to love (see Matthew 22:37-39). When we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, we also love what he has created.

I’m thankful the doctor in Oakland, California honored God and the life he created when he allowed Ellen to be “born”; and I’m thankful for the love and forgiveness the Lord has given Ellen for her mother and stepmother, and for the hope she has of fellowship with them in Heaven.

I’m also thankful that God the Father welcomes into his presence the babies aborted and robbed of a life on earth. And he has shown his love for Kyleen by giving to her children to adopt and love as well as peace concerning the child conceived in her own body, whom she anticipates meeting face to face in Heaven.

The second part of Jesus’ great commandment is that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” When we live by that law of love — and see our mothers and our children as our “neighbors” — our stories are transformed.

~Catherine Lawton

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“Mother” was Only a Vague Memory

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by Catherine Lawton in Adopted children, childhood memories, emotional needs, God's healing love, leaving a legacy, losing mom too soon, when tragedy hits

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Tags

Christian novel, Christmas, Grandparent, Holidays, Modeling the faith

White-As-Snow-Cover-Kindle

For this fictional character, Charlie, a boy on the Colorado Frontier in 1862, “mother” was a vague memory. An orphan, he was raised by his grandparents on a small ranch at the foot of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. As a youth now, just coming of age, his Grandma has died and his Grandpa lies dying in their two-room cabin. Charlie feels all alone with winter approaching and no one to celebrate Christmas with. He misses Grandma and longs for the mother he never knew. He has to do the work of a man to prepare for winter; but he is not quite up to it.

He also longs to prove himself and foolishly takes Grandpa’s huge rifle out to hunt for food. Fortunately his Grandma left him a legacy of faith. And, as Charlie is tested beyond his abilities, and things look dire, divine help shows up in the form of a gigantic and mysterious mountain man.

This is the first book in a series of four Christian novels set in 1800s Colorado Frontier. White As Snow is a heartwarming Christmas story. And it is FREE in the Amazon Kindle Store this week!

~ Catherine Lawton

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Nature or Nurture?

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by kyleen228 in Adopted children, God as our parent, God's healing love, Parenting

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Adoption, Family, Finding our identity

English: Apples on an apple-tree. Ukraine. Рус...

Our home is a living laboratory. Raising adopted children makes one wonder: just how much of a child’s personality is inherited through his or her genes and how much is learned from the surrounding environment? My husband, a high school teacher, works with the tough kids. He loves them, but on more than one occasion, after meeting a parent, I have heard him say, “Well, now I know where that behavior comes from.”

The proverbial “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is always in the back of my mind as I watch my children grow. As it turns out, my five-year-old adopted daughter is a lot like me—she’s organized, great with words, a natural teacher, and a bit bossy. As I watch these personality traits develop within her, I find myself wondering: “Did she get those traits from her biological mother or father, or is she learning them from me?” Not knowing her biological parents, though, I really can’t know the answer.

English: Nature vs. Nurture

I do recognize, however, that God in his goodness saw to all of this when he knit our family together. He chose our daughter and son for us. Psalm 139:16 tells me God’s “eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in [his] book before one of them came to be” (NIV). He knew me before I was born and he knew my children as well. He saw the map of all of our lives spread out in front of Him before we ever existed. He ordained the circumstances that brought us all together.

From this perspective, perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we are like our mom or dad, or aunt or grandfather, because God is in charge of it all. Whether our families are biological, or grafted together through adoption or remarriage, we are all in a process of becoming. Perhaps the truth is that we are a little of both: God-given nature and God-ordained nurture.

~ Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton

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  • arcecil
    • The Imperfect Job of Mothering
    • Storing Away Christmas ~ THE GOD BOX
    • Who Am I?
    • THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT
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    • What? You Can’t Stop Crying
  • ardisanelson
    • A Mother’s Day Gift to my Sons
    • Sharing our Stories in Community
    • A Grateful Lesson in Letting go of our Children
    • The Blessing of ‘Imperfect’ Children
    • “You’re Just Like Your Mother”
    • A Journey to Brother Love, Part 2
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    • What? You Can’t Stop Crying
    • Faith in the Birthing Room
  • finishingwell2
    • Mom’s Cooking
    • Always a Mother
    • Postscript to “Finishing Well”
    • Perfect Parenting
  • good2bfree
    • A Mother’s Legacy
    • Grace to Broken Mamas on Mother’s Day
  • guestmom
    • Forgiving Yourself — and Your Children
    • If Your Child is a Prodigal
    • Helicopter Mom, You’re Creating a Draft
  • Kerry Luksic
    • The Gift of Faith
  • kyleen228
    • Dreading Mother’s Day
    • “Mom-ness”
    • The Power of Sharing Your Deepest Secrets 
    • Adopted Siblings ~ A Special Closeness
    • Walking In Faith Through Adoption
    • Honesty about Our Struggles is the Best Way to Help Each Other
  • lorittaslayton
  • Christina
    • Grandma’s Apron
    • Much Ado about Nothing but Love
    • Mother Love
  • vernahsimms
    • A Letter to Mom
    • A Gift of Flowers
    • A Game of Love
    • Our Common Interests

Abortion Adoption a heart filled with love and hope Alzheimer's disease Aunt authentic relationship celebrate Child Child Jesus Children Christian novel Christian spirituality Christmas Christmastime Courage to be honest Death Dream Emotional and spiritual captivity Emotional and spiritual healing experiencing Christ Family Family traditions fathers day Finding our identity Forgiveness Forgiving yourself friendship future hope giving and receiving God's promises God the Father Grandparent Gratitude Grief Loss and Bereavement Healing love healing of memories Holidays Holy Week Home hope Jesus kids leaving home letting go life's upward path life and death life stages Mary milestones Ministry Modeling the faith Mom Factor Mother Mother's Day mother and daughter Mothering mother love motherly instincts no false guilt or shame Parenting Parenting styles Peace and joy personal discoveries Post-Abortion Healing Prayer Praying for our children relationships Sadness Sandwich generation Sewing smother love spirituality Thanksgiving unresolved hurt White Christmas Women's Issues

Adopted children challenges of motherhood childhood memories confessing our need emotional needs encouraging each other expectations family gatherings feeling inadequate forgiving mom forgiving yourself frustration to freedom generational patterns generations coming together God's healing love God as our parent Gratitude grief and loss healing after abortion importance of prayer Learning to appreciate Mom leaving a legacy letting go of anger losing mom too soon Motherhood mother wounds Parenting reach out and touch the healing journey when tragedy hits

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