Laundry

For those of you that know me well, you know that I HATE laundry. Having many kids causes my laundry to pile up unceasingly. If I do not do laundry every day, it becomes the Mt. Everest of clothes and I end up feeling helpless and powerless and will undoubtedly spend the whole weekend washing and folding until the cows come home (whatever that means). But today the laundry slightly redeemed itself. I was taking my 6yo son's laundry out of the dryer and lo and behold there was a name tag sticker on his shirt that somehow made it through the wash cycle AND dry cycle. Of course it was crusted on the shirt, stuck there for eternity. My first thought was to throw it away. Yes, I know, the easy way out. But something within my heart spoke to me. I had been asking God to show me how to love my kids...especially one of my adopted kids who hurts me constantly with words and actions. I have been so mad at myself because what is needed for this child is far beyond a mother's love. It is the love of Christ that is essential for this child to heal. But what do I do when I'm being yelled at? I want to run. I want to get angry. And I want to protect my heart. I know these feelings are normal and need to be felt. But I have a hard time getting over the hurt and rejection. I know I have the love of Christ in me and He can love this child through me. But there is an obstruction keeping the overwhelming flood of love from gushing all over this child. It is more like a trickle. So what does this have to do with laundry? As I looked at my son's shirt, I thought to myself. I can take the time to pick off these tiny pieces of paper and glue. This shirt is worth it and my son loves wearing it. So as I was picking off the gunk, it was if God were speaking to my heart. He said, you are worth it to me. I am willing to pick away at the tiniest pieces of gunk so that you will be free to love. But it will take time. It will take patience on your part. Just like it is taking patience to pick off this sticker (God knows me so well) on Caleb's shirt. So allow me to pick away at these stickers that are keeping you from experiencing the tsunami of my love. You will receive it. You will be free to receive my love. How do I know this was from God? First of all, I felt this peace come over me (which NEVER happens doing laundry). Second, I felt reassurance that I'm not this loser mom who cannot love a tough child. I am in the "picking phase" in God's gentle, but firm hands. I am being washed by the master dry cleaner. All the stains and tears are being healed and repaired. I am so glad that God jut doesn't throw us away when we have gunk stuck all over us. He loves us and we are worth saving to Him. Who knew laundry could be so healing.

My Story Part 1

I stood there in front of the house with the keys in my hand. Was I really doing this? How was I going to do this? Was I crazy? I am just a 43yo house wife with six kids. I didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t have a lot of time. I didn’t have a lot of experience. But still, there I stood wondering if I should even open the front door. I was scared. I had never taken such a big leap of faith before. All I could see was how this would all fail. But I knew that God had called me to do this. I had to believe that He would come through even with all my weaknesses. I knew in my heart that if this succeeded, it would be 100% Him! I didn’t set out to have a passion for women who are recovering addicts. I was never an addict, nor did I know many growing up. But here I stood, in front of a house that I was planning on filling with women in recovery and their children. I was hoping that if these women and children could experience being loved, feeling worthy and be given dignity, they would change. Not only would they change for themselves, but become the moms they wanted to be, have healthy relationships and contribute to society. Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The problem was that I did not have the money to sustain a home like this. To pay rent, utilities and household items seemed overwhelming. And where would I find these women? I knew a few social workers, but who in their right mind would trust their clients to me? I am just a mom. But when God calls you to an insurmountable task, He truly is our strength. He meets ALL our needs. But I am getting ahead of myself. I didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to open a home for recovering addicts. So let me go back a bit. Actually, to give you the background to this tale, I need to go WAY back…to a little girl in a hospital bed.

I was five years old and found myself waking up out of anesthesia with tubes coming out of my abdomen and bladder. You see I had a congenital defect where my bladder was deformed and did not work the way it should. Also, both of my kidneys were not working 100%. My mom found out about this while trying to potty train me. It just wasn’t working and when my mom took me to the doctor, she found out about my illness. I had one other surgery when I was 3 years old and it did not work. My mom took me to UCLA hospital and the Urologist wanted to do a new surgery on me that would fix my bladder. All I knew then was the intense pain! The surgery was a bladder reconstruction, which may or may not, the doctor told my mom, fix me. So here I was, a small child, connected to so many tubes and machines that I could not move. They tried to prop pillows all around me so I would stay put. It is difficult for an adult to have to lie still, but for a five year old? Impossible. I was in the hospital for 3 months. I remember being in pain all day, every day. All I wanted was my Morphine. Once I was medicated, I was going to be OK. But much more trauma was to come for this little girl while residing in her luxury suite at UCLA. Because it was a teaching hospital, I was poked and prodded all day and woken up many nights with five interns standing in front of me (in my 5yo mind there were 20 interns, but realistically there were five). My mom was a single mom, so she had to work during the day and had my little brother to take care of at night. She would stop by my hospital room after work each day to find that some days I had been mistreated. She found me one day with all 10 of my fingers pricked for a blood sample. On another day I didn’t get a lunch so I would be hungry. I can remember one time when the nurse wanted to give me my medicine, but I knew it wasn’t the right time for me to take them and the pills were not the right color. I told the nurse they were not my pills and she fought with me. We struggled as she tried to get them down my throat. She finally relented and checked my chart. It was the wrong medicine. I also remember a girl that was in the bed next to me. She had been burned by a vaporizer. Remember this was 40 years ago when they had those boiling water vaporizers for when you had a cough. Well, her and her brother were fighting over changing the TV channel (there were also no remotes back then either) and the vaporizer fell and burned most of her body. I can’t remember ever talking to her. I just remember her screaming in the middle of the night in pain. She was there for many weeks. I did not get much sleep. On top of that the nurses would wake me up every 4 hours. I would get so mad at them. Just when I was comfortable enough to sleep, the nurse would come in and wake me up to take my temperature and blood pressure. What? My little 5yo mind could not comprehend it! If I haven’t had a fever in week, why would I suddenly get one at 2:00am? No stupid nurse was going to wake me up. So the fighting began. The nurse would wake me up and I would not give her my arm to take my blood pressure. After a while I would give in. There were countless times when they would whisk me away for another X-ray or test. I never knew where I was going or when I’d be back in my safe little bed. I remember fighting the hospital staff and X-ray technicians to stop touching me. After a while I stopped fighting all together, stopped eating and fell into a deep depression. I had enough. I was done. Defeated. How does this kind of life affect a child’s heart and mind? What does this little girl think about herself? Where does she go for relief? I shut down. I don’t remember much of that time. Only that my mom and doctor would plead with me to eat. They brought me all kinds of delectable foods to tempt my appetite. Nothing worked. They tried rolling my bed out with other children, but it only made me worse. Many thoughts went through my little brain as I contemplated my life. Two of them stick out in my mind. One, you must have done something really bad to be stuck in this bed. Two, you must be worthless because others kids can play and run and have friends, but you can’t!

After a while, the fight for survival kicked in and when the doctor came in and told me he would bring me anything I wanted to eat I requested green olives. You would think a small child would crave ice cream, candy or pizza. No, not me. It was green olives. Please don’t ask me to explain to you my odd choice of cuisine. I can’t understand it 40 years later! But the jars of green olives came…and came….and came! The whole room was filled with jars of olives. Small jars filled with big olives and large jars filled with small olives. Some of them had bows on them. And I ate them like I would open a present on Christmas morning. I would eat not one or two, but half a jar at a time. And then I would drink the juice! Gross! After a while I was able to go home. But those two thoughts stuck with me and would end up defining me.

I would have many more chances to suffer in that hospital bed again….too many times to count. I would spike a fever and my mom would rush me to my all familiar bed of pain. Many times my fever would be so high they would lay me on a bed of ice naked (thank God they don’t do that anymore!). I remember hallucinating that there were spiders all over the walls and ceiling. I began getting chronic kidney infections and couldn’t wait to get my morphine. This happened over and over just confirming my belief that I was worthless. When I was at home, I had to wear a catheter and bag strapped around my leg because I couldn’t urinate on my own with my new bladder. Kids would see me and stare at me, not want to play with me or make fun of me. This caused a very powerful, insidious, paralyzing chain to wrap itself around my heart…shame!

I believed myself to be ugly and bad. If fact, I thought I was the ugliest child that ever walked the earth. Anyone who was sick all the time, could never have friends over and had a bag strapped to her leg? The only conclusion is….I am bad. And not just bad, but a horrible person who was worth nothing. So this tightly wrapped chain adhered itself to my heart for 35 years. What does trauma do to a five year old brain? How can this little one process what is happening to her? She cannot. So what this little five year old did was to cut off the pain permanently. I emotionally cut this traumatic part of my life out of my conscious mind. I decided to survive the only way a small child could. I would take the pain. I would reject the trauma. And a part of me would slowly fade away.