I have the best mom in the world and Tommy and Silas have the best grandma in the world! My mom is by no means perfect but she is extremely selfless and tries very hard to be perfect for us. I have always been close to my mom, sometimes probably too close b/c I wasn't always respectful to her b/c she was such a good friend to me that I didn't treat her as my mother. And now that I am a mom I hate to think about the many ways I have disrespected, ignored, and blatantly disobeyed my parents when I was growing up, and the sad thing was I thought I was a really good kid.
My mom and her siblings had a very rough childhood. And as I think about the things my mom had to go through, going in and out of the orphanage, having parents who loved her but weren't completely capable of showing it, and all the hardships she's endured it breaks my heart. She's my mom, but before she was my mom she was a newlywed, and a teenager, and a little kid. You don't always think about that when you think about your parents, especially before you are a parent. It seriously wasn't until after I had Tommy that I realized my mom is human! Ha! How insane is that? I had this high expectation for my mom that she was never supposed to mess up, never supposed to hurt my feelings, God forbid she be a sinner! AAAH! Thankfully after 24 years of life a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, why am I allowed to mess up but mom's not?! Well she is. And I hope that now I have much more grace in my relationship with my mom than I did as a child and a teenager.
Anyhow I wish that I could go back in time and love my mom as a little kid. I wish that I could swoop in and take her out of her past and provide her with a whole new one where she felt secure and loved and safe at every moment. But the Lord has done a great work in her life. While I know she can't forget or escape her past I know the Lord has used it for good. She is such a great mom and grandma to me and my kids and it has given me a huge desire to adopt some day.
When you have good parents you take them for granted. You may not do it intentionally b/c it is all you know. You have good parents so you don't know what it's like to have bad parents. It wasn't until Kyle worked at a local boy's home which is an "orphanage" but really it's an in between place for foster care and juvie. But when he worked there we saw first hand the vital role a single parent or even both parents play in a child's life. Isn't it crazy to think how one boy who ends up in jail could have had a whole different life if he would have had a mother or father to show him what it means to be a Godly man? The Lord used that job in a great way in our lives b/c it gave us a stronger burden for orphans here in the U.S. when a growing trend, which is a great growing trend by the way, is people focusing on orphans overseas. Kyle and I had been focused on doing overseas missions, which we still hope to do in some capacity, but this job really showed us that our country needs a lot of help in this area.
While I know I can't go back in time and take care of my mom, before she was my mom haha, it does make me appreciate all that she has gone through to become such a wonderful woman.
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