Month: October 2016

Posted in Adoption, Election 2016, Hillary, Trauma, Trump

An Open Letter to the America My Children Have to Grow up In

Posted on by soshewritesweb

I’m done!

Enough is enough!

Are we not ashamed of ourselves yet?

This has been the worst of all election years I can remember. I have never in my life had to sit through and endure the ignorance that is the media today. I never as a child heard the crazy that came with the private lives of those in office, why? Because the private lives of those around us are just that, PRIVATE. What are they going to do for us as Americans, should’t that be the question? What are their policies, where do they stand on the important issues, will they be able to stand up to those that would hurt us as a people? These should be what the topic of conversations are, but instead it is “locker room” talk, laws broken and dismissed, and all the ugly that comes with this world as a whole. Let me first say that I am over the excuses that both sides of the tantrum throwing parties have been throwing out there. My son does not need to hear, from all those that are praying Trump gets it, that his speaking as disgusting and vile as he was is excusable because that is just how guys talk. Now, while I am on this topic let me just tell you that if you read ’50 Shades of Gray’ I don’t wanna hear any “Amen sister!” out of you. I don’t want my daughters thinking it is ok that men see them as a good time and a means to an enjoyable end. Now if you listen to Howard Stern then keep your “That a girl” to yourselves as well.

We are a nation of hypocrites!

We watch shows and movies that are pretty much soft core porn and then we attack the moral standing of a candidate that has had the hard knock of being recorded for all to see him in one of his darkest moments as a human. Heck, some of you that are so vocal and upset actually watch the real deal porn and then call others dirty dogs! The music the youth of our country are listening to is full of hate, disrespect of woman, and an all around lack of moral lives. They sing of killing not just cops but anyone that disagrees with them, they sing of cheating on your spouse or with someone else’s spouse because it’s fun and you only live once. Our daughters dress with as little fabric as possible stretched as tight as it can and we call the boys that can’t peel their eyes away perverts. Our sons have their butts hanging out of their pants and wear shirts that promote drugs, sex, and killing and we tell them if someone doesn’t wanna hire them it isn’t their fault. We have forgotten how to teach respect and we no longer expect it. Children are being stolen off the streets and sold into a life of sex trade and we are talking about being offended by a man speaking vile things to another excuse for a man. Haiti has had over 500 people killed by a hurricane and we wanna see more leaked emails to prove even further that the woman running for president of this morally corrupt country shouldn’t even be allowed to run. Our cops are being slaughtered and there is a  conversation among some that say “well, its been coming for a while now.” We have a people of  our nation that have mothers fearing if their sons will come home because of their skin tone and we are still pointing fingers. We are a mess and there is no hope of getting straightened out if we don’t open our eyes to the trash that we have become used to and therefore comfortable with until someone we don’t like comes along and wades in our pool of filth causing us to point out the nasty that is dripping off them when they try to get out. Seriously!?

The people of this country go about their business for three years, laughing at coarse jokes, singing along with trash lyrics, following the nude Instagram of the latest hot mess, ignoring those that are in need, and fearing what tomorrow will bring in the world of terrorism. Then magically  about the fourth year we all became moral compasses pointing out the impurities in the candidates lives that we have been living ourselves. It is madness! We have two of the most morally corrupt people in history running for the most powerful position in the world and it is the fault of the people. We have been poisoned with the kool aid we are now angry they are offering but we won’t stop drinking it. We have become a nation of hateful ME monsters and in our wake we are leaving children at the doorstep of trauma.

Is it really a surprise our nation is on the brink of disaster? Look at what we are ok with, babies murdered in the womb with conversations that maybe it is ok to go ahead and kill them after birth. Rome did that. We are showing more and more sexual explicit actions on prime time TV with our children sitting right beside us watching it happen. Rome did that. Our men are becoming women and our women becoming men. Rome did that. The churches are no longer a place to run to heal but rather a place of persecution. Rome did that. We have made our leaders, actors, and famous our gods. Rome did that. Christians are being called hateful and too set in their old-fashioned ways and they need to change their beliefs. Germany did that. Our guns are being threatened to be taken. Germany did that. Every empire has fallen after they stop living the lives of moral people, as they have taken their eyes off what is good and right and turned to lives of pleasure at all costs, the dictators step into control without notice, and then it is too late.

Is it too late for us?

How can we turn this around?

Start living lives that we claim we believe in during election years. Get angry that the men of this country are ok with children being used for their pleasure and that the term “locker room talk” isn’t talking about sports. Show grace and mercy to those that are in need of it. Offer a kind word to those that might not deserve it. Raise children to be respectful and stop buying the trash music this world is offering them. Force Hollywood and the powers that be to stop pushing the limits of morals and shoving it down our kids throats by not buying their posion. Go on a hike with your kids, love your neighbor, be faithful to your spouse, guard your eyes and mouth, and start demanding we are offered candidates that are worthy of this great country and our trust. Our children deserve a better world and so I write…….

Posted in Adoption

The masks of the broken

Posted on by soshewritesweb

I have never known a person not broken somehow. No one that has gone their whole life without a hurt of some kind.

I have known those who wear the mask of perfection, the ones that advise those real enough to ask for help and then go home and drown their sorrow in what ever their choice of drowning might be. I can spot the hidden broken in a crowd because I was once one of them.

I am a Oklahoman with a splash of Coloradoan. I call it Colokian. I was raised to be buttoned up. To hide the hurt and the crazy that went on behind our closed-door. I was good at it. I think I could smile through a bullet wound. We never let on that our home was a scary place to be. I remember standing at my front door praying that God would let my dad be in a good mood, the nerves and the  fear threatening to surface as my friends would pass by waving and laughing. As I grew from child to a young adult I became the best I knew at keeping the mask of perfection on through anything that came my way. Those around me always seemed to have a crack  here and there, bless their hearts. It wasn’t until I got married and realized that the mask only made it hard for him to really know me and whats worse how to love me. We had way too many downs caused by my mask to keep it on. Learning how to take off that mask and allow him to see my brokenness was oddly freeing. Being broken together only made us stronger together. Just when we thought we had healed our broken, we added our shattered ones.

Our daughter came to us as a broken swan, she had been made to feel like a little duck that didn’t quite fit in. Those around her would whisper their concerns to me and look around to make sure the little duckling didn’t hear. “She is very manipulative and likes to play mom and dad against each other.” They would whisper across the table. “Why are we whispering?” I would ask. The answer, so she didn’t feel judged by them or get upset by them talking about her struggles. I never liked it. I didn’t know how to help her heal if I couldn’t talk to them about her behavior in front of her. It became obvious that I needed to do just that when we were driving home from school and out of the blue she began to brag about how good of an actress she was. I asked how so and she answered that she could make her friends feel sorry for her and make them do anything she wanted them to just by crying. “Nope, that’s called being manipulative.” We had a good talk about what that meant and how easy it is for girls especially to manipulate and how nobody really likes to be treated that way. Then she said something that made it clear to me that the only way I could help her was to be real and transparent, to help her take off the mask even if it hurt her or made her upset. After I told her she had become manipulative not a grand actress, she looked at me confused and said, “hmm, no one has ever told me that before.” It was time to learn how to get real. The journey has not been easy, she still hates to say what is really going on in her mind, but she is learning. Just when she really began to grasp the art of how to be real, and I was admitting how her behaviors struck a nerve in my own masks that I had thought I had removed, her new siblings came in all their fractured glory. Then suddenly we are seeing where we are still very broken. The truth of this journey is that it is constantly pointing out your own hurts, fears, struggles, and brokenness.

This is why it is so hard.

You have to admit you are so angered by the smallest of lies because your reality as a child was always stretched.

You finally see that you hang on to the control because it was absent in your youth.

All of these masks you have learned to wear perfectly become a heavy burden making it impossible to deal with the day-to-day behaviors of the newly broken children that come into your life. There are not very many options on this path. Throw your hands up and scream “I quit!”, fight with all  you have to help them heal dropping their mask and learn to drop yours in the process, or hide under more masks and more stress that others might see through the cracks. We chose to fight and heal as a family. Now, if I told you we have succeeded and are all better it would be a lie. I have to repeat to myself on a daily basis “WAIT, or Why Am I Talking” I have to remind myself that control is not always needed, I have seen that their behaviors are not the behaviors of the ones that have hurt me in the past, that their lies are their only way to feel safe in this world that screwed them over, and I have to give myself grace for losing it more often than I should. That’s the thing about life though, we never really have a time in it that we are not having to work on the broken that it brings. Just when we help out little ones heal from the past, their future will hand them their new masks and so I write……….