Sweet little-girl arms wrap tightly around my neck, her head buried into my shoulder. A perfect fit. I breathe into her and feel little legs clinging to my waist, core muscles holding their own weight.
It’s taken a long time to get here. This little one was slack when she first came. Arms hung loose, heavy as a sack of potatoes when I picked her up.
“Why is she so hard to carry?” I used to think to myself.
Out loud I had said say, “Hold on. Put your legs here so I can get you”.
It had taken a bit of awkward maneuvering and a lot of verbal direction from me, but eventually I had always hoisted her into my arms. It wasn’t until a friend observed one of those moments that I understood.
“She was never carried before.” My friend had commented.
My foster daughter had never been carried.
My emotional response had been immediate. My heart hadn’t broken, hadn’t mourned, those came later. No, it had been tazered still. The simplicity of that statement had been disarming.
Realizing Emptiness
It was a realization of emptiness that had stilled my heart, not shock. The idea that my foster daughter had never been carried fell right in line with what I knew to be true. But I couldn’t picture it. It was the absence of something and the realization that I had no idea what not being carried would have been like.
Think about it, if you grew up in a home with healthy relationships you have all these subconscious images of family- of parents caring for children. Then, you become a foster parent and you’re faced with a new reality. It’s one you knew existed; you’ve read articles, watched the news, and at times rubbed shoulders with families in turmoil, but now you are to parent a child who’s had a tumultuous life. You find yourself bumping up against thousands of daily differences and you start to realize there is no way to imagine the full reality of their previous normal.
Missing Pieces
For my foster daughter, there was a great big picture of her life – a puzzle box lid – that I hadn’t been given. The day she’d arrived, I’d been handed clothes, a daughter, and a handful of puzzle pieces, but no lid.
Pieces, just pieces.
And so, we had learned together. I how to interpret her, and she how to be carried.
And now, years later, my heart is no longer frozen. We still don’t have all the pieces. We never will. And the puzzle box lid? It’s still lost. But, today I happily snuggle down into the young ones head on my shoulder. We fit together like our own two puzzle pieces. I squeeze her just a little tighter- sharing the happy-joy because today she is being carried.
And today she squeezes me back tightly on her own.
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