The Shack

I had been told about this book for a long time before I finally decided to take the plunge. Many who know my pain encouraged me to read the book. I kept saying it is too early, I can’t do it. Finally, I was at a retreat sitting with a small group of new friends who were talking about the book. I again told them that I was not ready: The wound was still too raw. I was in tears. I could not even think about our loss without crying. This wonderful new friend assured me that the book, though very difficult to read, was also very healing.

OMG, what an amazing book. It Is a difficult read, especially for anyone who has experience a great loss. In our case, the story hits VERY close to home. The little girl in the story was abducted from the place where Miranda and I spent our last vacation, the last week she was with me, the day before I sent her back to her birth family. When we left Willowa, I knew I was driving back to a very different world: a world without my Miranda. Granted I did see her a few times over the next 18 months, but after that weekend, I grieved the loss of her being in my home. 

There are so many parallels between the story in The Shack and my story.  Beyond the geographical location, there is the more obvious, abduction by a serial killer, missing child, no closure, no answers and the multitude of emotions that go with all that.

Oh, did I forget to tell you. The Shack opens just 5 days before the 15th anniversary of Miranda's murder.

I am looking forward to the movie with mixed emotions. I feel much like I did when I first read the book:   I am afraid to go but at the same time knowing I MUST go.

I will download the book tonight and start re-reading. Again, with anticipation and anxiety.

#TheShack #MirandaGaddis

 

Trying to do Christmas for the first time in 14 years

The last time I really participated in  Christmas was in 2001. I was totally pumped. I had all my girls with me. Miranda had come "home" for Christmas break and I had my newest additions, Amber and Ashley with me for their first Christmas in my home. I was in heaven. As in my previous post, The Promise, I was indeed the "joyful mother of children."

My girls all bonded immediately and truly became sisters. Amber and Ashely both grew to love Miranda within the first few minutes of meeting her. Of course this is how everyone felt about Miranda. Miranda loved Amber and Ashely and wanted to protect them from all the pain of being removed from their parents. She talked to me at length about how she wanted to force the State to make a quick decision on behalf of Amber and Ashley. She wanted them to KNOW where their home was going to be. She talked about how hard it was for her when her future was unknown. She told me that she would have been fine going home or remaining with me.

Christmas that year was amazing. We had family Christmas at my house that year. My life was full. My heart nearly exploded with joy. Life was good. Christmas decorations, Christmas crafts, Family, Love, Reggie, our first Sharp Family dog, too much Christmas shopping and too much money spent. It was an amazing Christmas. I cherished every minute.

I truly felt that my THREE girls and I had become a unified family. Over the next two months, I talked to Miranda many times. Amber and Ashley talked about her often. I hoped that we would spend time together as a family on special occasions for years to come.

When Miranda disappeared, my heart was shattered. Were it not for Amber and Ashley, I do not think I would have survived. I love them with all my heart, but for a very long time, I was so shattered by the loss of Miranda, that I could barely get up in  the morning, put one foot in front of the other or even breath. I will always feel bad for the times that I could not provide the emotional support to my girls because I was so broken.

In the years since, Amber and Ashley have decorated each year, and I went through the motions, but my heart has not been in it. This year I am diving in. I am going to do my best at putting up decorations, making home made Christmas gifts, maybe even send out Christmas cards.... It is time to reclaim life, reclaim, joy. It will not be easy, but it is time!

Joy: That is yet another post.

#MirandaGaddis

The Promise

I wanted to give you a little background into why I became a foster parent.

The story starts with a hysterectomy at age 26. I had always wanted to have children. I was devastated. I had many other abdominal surgeries as a child, and this one, physically, was not that much different. Abdominal incision, the same recovery time, only this time my life would be forever changed.

Shortly after the surgery, the man I would eventually marry, told me that he wanted to adopt children. This was likely one of the reasons I married him. (Okay, I know it was a bad reason.) We spoke of adoption many times and a couple years into the marriage we started looking into the adoption process. We went to one pre-adoption class and then things started falling apart. I still tried to pursue adoption while he kept coming up with one excuse after the other. Finally, after a couple years, it became obvious that we were never going to adopt and I would never be a mother.

I sank into a long and significant depression. My brother became a father, and he and his wife were expecting their second child. I remember that Christmas, when my sister-in-law was pregnant with her second child.  It was the first Christmas with a new baby, my parent’s first grandchild, and the excitement of a second on the way. That Christmas seemed, at least to me, to be all about the babies. Rightfully so. But I was in extreme emotional pain and my life seemed so empty. As an aside, my aunt was all about giving inexpensive, and sometimes recycled gifts. I had commented on her dish-towels a few months before and she “thoughtfully” gave me a dish-towel for Christmas. It was clearly second hand. My brother and his growing family walked out with lots of gifts for the baby, the one on the way, and the new mommy  (I truly am NOT resentful of that) and I walked out with a used dish-towel. A FREAKING USED dish-towel. It seemed to symbolize my life at that moment.

My depression continued on a downward spiral. My marriage had never been “good” and it was falling apart at the seams. At the same time, I began to feel an intense need to talk to my sister. I had a very strong feeling that she would be announcing a pregnancy soon and needed to make sure that she did not announce it in a public setting. I knew that I would fall apart. My need to talk to her became increasingly intense until I tracked her down and met with her at a business meeting she was attending. We went out for coffee afterward where she announced her pregnancy. I burst into tears. I told her that I really was happy for her, but could not stay because I was so sad for me.

I went home and had a very long cry. Then I dried my tears and decided that, since I was never going to be a mother, I was going to be the most involved aunt that I could be. I packed up the baby things I had packed away for the child I had once hoped to adopt, and took them to my sister the next morning.

I did become a very involved aunt. My world revolved around my niece. I dropped by my sister’s house on a regular basis to play in the pop up tent in her room, take her on walks, to the zoo, and anything else we could do together. When I was taking a photography class, I used her as my foreground for whatever the assignment was for the week. Ali and wheels, Ali and statues, Ali and water…. I took her to the children’s museum and took a series of picture with her playing grocery cashier and wearing a fireman’s hat on a play fire truck. Pictures of her were among the best I ever took. Oh wait, she was the focus of nearly all my photos.

I also had a another niece and two nephews, but did not have the opportunity to see them nearly as often. I greatly enjoyed the time I did get to spend with them. I did get to watch them a few times when my brother and sister-in-law went on job related travel. I so enjoyed watching them and taking them on day trips to parks, children’s museum, and other outings.

I truly loved spending time with all my nieces and nephews. I frequently said that I loved them as much as if they were my own. I really felt like being an aunt was enough for me. I had successfully, I thought, put my desire to be a parent behind me.

Several years later, after ten years in a much less than successfully marriage, we finally divorced. I was nearly 40, divorced and alone. My desire to adopt resurfaced but I kept trying to put in aside.  I spent the next few years living in rented rooms, or at best, a studio apartment. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that, but between age and not being able to support myself in more than a single room, there was no way I would ever be able to adopt. Many times the loneliness was overwhelming. I tried to cover it by spending time with friends, and drinking a bit too much.

In the mid 1990’s, my parents and I purchased a home together and I was able to spend a lot of quality time with my father during the last few months of his life. Shortly after that, my nephews came to stay with my mom and I for a few months. I was amazed at how incredible it was to have them in our home. I would rush home every day just to be able to spend time with them. It felt so good to walk into the house and have these two wonderful boys run up to give me a hug and greet me.  Oh my goodness, my desire to have children went from zero to sixty in no time flat.

When mom and I sold the house, I moved into my own apartment in Lake Oswego.  At one point, I felt an overwhelming awareness that God had a scripture for me. I would know it when I heard it but I was not to go looking for it. I truly felt that this scripture would bless my socks off. I did not know what it was, but was willing to wait.

I had a good job, a nice place to live, and for the first time, I felt that I was financially stable enough to adopt. So I began to research. Could a forty something, single woman, who worked full-time, really adopt? Internationally, no: Too old. Domestic adoption? Too expensive. What about adopting through foster care? I really did not know that much about foster care or the process of adopting though foster care. So I placed a call to the local county foster care agency. I talked to a woman named Maureen. That conversation would change my life.

Maureen and I talked for an hour. Adoption she assured me, was a very real possibility, as was being a foster parent. I would not likely be able to adopt a baby, but after having my nephews living with us for a short time, I think I had really warmed up to the idea of a little bit older children. Maureen encouraged me to attend the foster parent training classes. Was I really going to be able to do this? I was on cloud nine.

I eagerly attended each and every training session. I devoured the information. However, I, like too many adoptive parents, was wearing my special pair of filtered glasses. I would be able to state my preferences for what issues I could and could not accept in an adoptive child. If I felt that I could not handle developmental disability, stealing, lying, or any number of physical or emotional disabilities, I would simply state those preferences and they would be respected. So when I was in training  for those issues, I might not have listened as intently as I did in other training sessions. Little did I realize that most frequently, the foster care agency has little information about emotional issues in the children entering care. Even if they do know about issues, they are likely to paint a rosy picture. After all, they are trying to place the child, not talk the prospective foster or adoptive parent out of taking the child. The prospective parent is also listening with eyes blinded by love for this child. All too often, children are  placed in homes that are not equipped to handle the issues that will surface.

As I traveled through life as a foster and adoptive parent, I looked back on the conversations with Maureen and lessons in her classes and other classes I attended and wished I had paid more attention.

The 2 x 4.

Near the end of the foster parent training I was filling out my paperwork for fingerprinting and background check. It was time to decide; Foster parenting only or Foster to Adopt. I had to check one box OR the other.

That Sunday, I visited a new church in my ongoing search for a new home church. I had been searching for many weeks but had not yet attend this church right down the hill from my apartment.  The pastor was on week two of a series on Samuel.  That week, he was teaching from 1 Samuel 2. The topic was Hannah, the barren woman who had prayed for a child and her prayer had been answered. I was struck by the irony and moved by the message.

Hannah’s Prayer

Then Hannah prayed and said:

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn^[a] is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my enemies,
    for I delight in your deliverance.

² “There is no one holy like the Lord;
    there is no one besides you;
    there is no Rock like our God.

³ “Do not keep talking so proudly
    or let your mouth speak such arrogance,
for the Lord is a God who knows,
    and by him deeds are weighed.

⁴ “The bows of the warriors are broken,
    but those who stumbled are armed with strength.
⁵ Those who were full hire themselves out for food,
    but those who were hungry are hungry no more.
She who was barren has borne seven children,
    but she who has had many sons pines away.

⁶ “The Lord brings death and makes alive;
    he brings down to the grave and raises up.
⁷ The Lord sends poverty and wealth;
    he humbles and he exalts.
⁸ He raises the poor from the dust
    and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
he seats them with princes
    and has them inherit a throne of honor.

“For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s;
    on them he has set the world.
⁹ He will guard the feet of his faithful servants,
    but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness.

“It is not by strength that one prevails;
¹⁰     those who oppose the Lord will be broken.
The Most High will thunder from heaven;
    the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.

“He will give strength to his king
    and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

I was moved by the message.  The pastor taught in depth about Hannah, her desire to have children, her LONG wait, and finally, the granting if the desires of her heart. Additionally the words of verse eight really spoke to me. Though I don’t see it as much today, I really felt that those words, were talking about me doing foster to adopt and not strictly adoption only. The following week, I attended that church again and the pastor again focused on Hannah from a different perspective.

So that week, when I turned in the paperwork and checked the “FOSTER/ADOPT” box. On the way home, my prayer was this. “Lord, you know how much I want this. I need to know that this is YOUR will and not mine alone. I need to know that you have placed this desire in my heart and that this is YOUR will. I want this so much that I really need you to hit me upside the head with a 2x4 so I will know for sure.

When I arrived home that day, I had a message on my answering machine. It had been left just about the same time as I had been praying that prayer on my way home from turning in the paperwork. It was from someone who was the least likely person on the planet to be one of my supporters, especially in the area of adoption. She said that in her daily Bible reading the night before she had come across a scripture, that when she read it, she knew it was meant for me.

She read, Psalms 113:

Psalm 113

¹ Praise the Lord.^[a]

Praise the Lord, you his servants;
    praise the name of the Lord.
² Let the name of the Lord be praised,
    both now and forevermore.
³ From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,
    the name of the Lord is to be praised.

⁴ The Lord is exalted over all the nations,
    his glory above the heavens.
⁵ Who is like the Lord our God,
    the One who sits enthroned on high,
⁶ who stoops down to look
    on the heavens and the earth?

⁷ He raises the poor from the dust
    and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
⁸ he seats them with princes,
    with the princes of his people.
⁹ He settles the childless woman in her home
    as a happy mother of children.

Praise the Lord

This was the passage that I had been promised. It was the third time in two weeks that I had been given this passage. The third time it was indeed a 2x4.  I felt that the Lord was saying, “you will be a mother of more than on child.” I knew that the desire to be a mother was a God given desire and he would give me the desire of my heart and would bless my socks off.

Steven Curtis Chapman

I was thrilled to learn that Steven Curtis Chapman was going to have a concert in Portland  on Sept 30. I have wanted to connect with him to let him know how important his lyrics from "With Hope" had been to me and to my family.

I do give him full credit for use of his lyrics, so I don't know if I legally needed his permission or not. But it was important to me. It was important to know that if I ever do compile the posts from this blog into a more formal format, I would have his permission to use Through the Cloud of Tears since for me this is the only possible working title.

I had a whole 30 seconds to talk to him. But in that short time I was able to VERY briefly tell him about reading his lyrics at Miranda's public memorial, finally finding my voice in this blog, and using his words as the title. He not only gave his permission, but his blessing also.

Thank you Steven Curtis Chapman for all you do to support adoption, for your songs and lyrics that have meant so much to so many, and finally, for your blessing in use of your lyrics.

#MirandaGaddis
#StevenCurtisChapman #throughthecloudoftears

summer events

Sorry for the lack of posts over the summer.

My world has been busy.

I decided to create a butterfly/humming bird

memorial garden

in my front yard.  

In order to do that, we had to excavate the river rock front yard, put down pavers, and then crate the garden. 

A few bumps along the way made the project much longer than planned, but with the help of my sister, two daughters and the youngest’s boyfriend, we got it done.  My niece made a plaque for the garden which gave it the finishing touch.

I still hope to put in a couple nice outdoor chairs, table and umbrella.

We had a Celebration of Life BBQ on Aug 28^th (just a few days after the 14 year anniversary of finding her body). The purpose was to NORMALIZE talking about her and to share memories. It was a small group but very successful.

The thing I like about having the garden is not only that it is quiet relaxing place but it will also take some care in early spring and late fall. Since the anniversary dates are Mar 8 (the day she vanished) 8/25 (the day they announced finding her body) and Nov 18 (her birthday) these become the times that I care for the garden and fondly remember her.

#MirandaGaddis

Additionally, my computer crashed so the only Internet I have is at work on my breaks and my cell phone. I am old and don’t text so writing via the phone is just not gonna happen.

I will post more once my PC situation is resolved.

 

Would you still die for me?

Miranda spent Christmas Break 2001 with us. We had many long, and sometimes intense, conversations. One such conversation began as we were driving. She turned to me and said, “Do you remember when you said you loved me so much you would die for me?” I told her that I did, and she asked me if I still felt that way.

The back story here is that Miranda was always full of vim and vinegar. She was full of life and one never had to wonder what she was feeling. When she was happy she was jubilant. When she was angry she was equally dramatic. It was not that she was a drama queen, but simply that she was passionate.

There were times when she put my love for her to the test. I told her at one point that no matter what she did, I would NEVER call the state to ask that she be removed from my home. In more than one such conversation, I told her that I loved her would die for her if needed.

Back to Christmas 2001. “Yes, I remember those conversations. And yes, I still love you and would die for you.” I went on to elaborate, “Now, that does not mean that I would step in front of a train or a bus just to prove how much I love you, but if you were in danger, I would do whatever I could, including giving my own life to save you.”

Fast forward to when it became clear that Weaver had killed her, this conversation became the focus of much of my thoughts. When I was a teen and babysitting my cousins, or later when my nieces and nephews arrived I truly believed I could not love them any more if they were my own. Now I know that I was wrong! At the same time, I know that my love for Miranda or the love of my two daughters pales in comparison to God’s love for us.

I thought about how I would have given my life without hesitation to prevent Miranda’s suffering and death. I would have done that without a moment’s thought. I would have done ANYTHING to prevent her suffering. I thought about how much more God’s love for us to not only sacrifice His son, but to plan it from the beginning of time to save us from eternity without Him.

I would die for my kids without a moment’s thought.  The idea of knowing before your child’s birth that he would die the most horrific death that man-kind could dish out, and that that death would be to provide salvation to all including those that killed him….. That is incomprehensible love.

#MirandaGaddis

I am Jonah

After Ward Weaver was arrested, I felt a strong need to write him a letter. I thought that the purpose of that letter was to let him know that there was another family, another mother, that was morning Miranda's death. I wanted him to know of our pain. But more importantly, I wanted to know WHY he had killed her.

Yet I DIDNOT want to communicate with him in any way. The pull to write this letter was strong, but my disdain was equally strong. I struggled with this for a long time. As time went on, I began to realize that it was not me, but God, who wanted me to write to Weaver.  Why would he want me to write? I really began to balk. I was no longer arguing with myself, but with GOD.

I began to feel like a Jonah. I even joked about being afraid to go near large bodies of water for fear of being swallowed by a big fish.  I knew God wanted me to write for some reason, but I was adamant that I was NOT GOING TO DO IT! I knew that I was refusing to obey but yet I was not willing to sit down and do what I knew He wanted me to do. What was the purpose? Who cares if Weaver knows I exist. He would not be moved to confess or to give me answers about WHY he had killed her. Writing to him would only feed is perverted ego.

Finally, I decided to obey. The letter did begin by my telling him who I was, and I intended to write about our pain and ask for answers. However, the letter very quickly changed tone. Before I realized it, I was writing about God's love and forgiveness. I told him how much God loved him and how God's forgiveness was available to him.

Now, I am not saying that I no longer felt disgusted by what he had done or that I felt any warm and fuzzy feelings for him. I did however realize that God loved him and that if Jesus had died for me, he had also died for Weaver. I was flooded with all sorts of conflicting emotions.

I told him about the most impactful conversation I had ever had with anyone. I will relate that to you in the next post “Would you still die for me?” This conversation with Miranda the Christmas before her death will stick with me forever. After her death it was the key thing that helped me better understand the love of God. While writing the letter to Weaver, I was suddenly overcome with the fact that if Christ had died for me, He had died for Weaver also. If that was true, how could I withhold that information from him. As I relayed how much God loved him and how much He wanted Weaver to accept him as personal savior, my heart melted. I was able to forgive him.

If I am forgiven, I must also forgive.

I never sent that letter. I printed it and had planned on sending it, but that day he got his ugly mug on TV again. Remember, forgiveness does not mean I like him! I did not want him to think that I was writing in response to his news appearance. So I waited. A few weeks later, I started to send it and, AGAIN, he was a top news story.

This is when I knew. The letter was not about him. It was about me. It was to allow me release my anger. It was about knowing that revenge is not mine.

Interestingly, I have very little feelings toward him. I do hold him responsible for Miranda’s death, but I do not harbor any anger, hate, or really any emotions toward him. His fate is between him and God.  

#MirandaGaddis

#StevenCurtisChapman 

#throughthecloudoftears

#wardweaver