Mostly Cloudy

Well, I have been fighting with my laptop here recently.  Posting via phone is just a pain in the tush and I can't do it well with my Kindle either.

Today we met with our adoption attorney.  I like him a lot.  We signed up to start the petition to adopt process.  He said even with appeals he expects we will have the adoption completed before Thanksgiving.  That would be amazing.

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Wow, were things going downhill here.  Remember I was taking the Sam-E and it was helping?  I ran out for over a month, but I didn't feel that big of a difference.  Last week and early this week it was all back.  The constant feeling of being overwhelmed, outnumbered, and emotionally exhausted.  I began once again toying with the idea that maybe I should not be a mom to so many.  Cy noticed me crying in the kitchen.  You can't get away with much when you homeschool.  Little eyes see everything.  Cy said, "Mom what about your happy pills?" 

Yes, I call them happy pills.   I sort of had a "duh" moment.  When you are that far down and crying over stupid things and getting angry with people over silly things the idea that I can take a vitamin to feel better just seems like it will never work.  So I went to the drug store and picked up the generic double strength Sam-E. I started feeling better later that very same day.  Today, I am feeling a ton better.  I went and bought 80 pills which will last me 80 days.  The box says to take them twice a day, but I only need to do it once a day to feel better.

To be honest, I feel like its some kind of weakness in me that I can't regulate myself when I get down that low.  I can't pray myself out of it, or sing myself out of it, or just focus on the good things to feel better.  I can have flashes of sunshine, but life seems like its mostly cloudy.  I think this may have existed for a long while back, but before I had so much on my plate I could regulate better.  I would go shopping, or plan a field trip, or just take a walk.  I had more freedom to focus on me.

Being a foster parent or an adoptive parent to a sibling group is so much more than a full time job.  If one child is having a trauma day then the day's spotlight goes to that child.  Sometimes everyone has the same bad day, and some times they swap days, but what happens is that I can end up dealing with someone's bad day 5 of 7 days a week. No, I don't actively give them tons of attention for negative behaviors, but it takes a lot of energy NOT to give the attention to the wrong stuff and to protect the others while the negativity is happening, and then to also help that child come back from their dark place.  When the negativity happens it can start to get really big in my mind.  Instead of being one small part of a big beautiful world, it becomes nearly the whole part of a small and ugly world.

I should correct myself... ONE child with trauma can dominate a house.  I would never want to minimize what foster and adoptive parents do for any child who has come from hard places.

I had to write all of that for myself.  This is a lot like my therapy.  And now I want to say this to me...  It's okay to need a break.  It's okay to have to take something to feel better.  Its okay to pray through it, sing through it, or cry through it.  Just get through it.  Don't give up and keep going because when you get your happy pill or you find something else that works then you can really SEE their beautiful little faces and hear their beautiful little giggles, it is all so very, very worth it.