Freedom Is Wild - Chapter One

A Serialized Memoir of Life and Death

This is the next installment in the memoir I wrote sometime back about our life with our late daughter.

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The pain then is part of the happiness now. – Shadowlands

I doubt whether our family was much different than any other family for which faith is a central part of that family’s life. When your faith represents the defining point of view for life, it touches and impacts every nook and cranny of your existence. Nothing is unaffected. Your job, your choice of spouse, your relationship with your neighbors – everything is affected. Nowhere is this more true than in regard to your children.

For parents who love their children and believe intensely that the image of God is imprinted on every human being, preparing for an eternal existence takes precedence over all other considerations. If the life we live in the physical world is “a momentary vapor”, then preparing for the more permanent aspect of our lives is a central pursuit. This is not to say that believing parents don’t prepare their children to live in the world as it is. Indeed that is a critical part of preparing for eternity. But it is the character and moral fiber of a child that most concerns a believing parent. The development of a child’s character, and a moral antenna that is closely attuned to God’s frequency, is the central goal of a believer’s parenthood.

This inevitably leads a believing parent to take an approach to parenting that is intentional. What I mean is that we spent a lot of time actively thinking about raising children and how to instill faith and understanding into their little hearts and minds. We didn’t just flow along with the current, reacting to things as they occurred. We had a purpose and agenda for our family and especially our children’s lives.

I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here. We were far from perfect parents on any basis, not least as people of faith. We were a mixed bag of failures and successes in terms of how we chose to deal with things that came along. But this is entirely my point: we were an ordinary believing family. We worked hard, played together and prayed together. When the kids were young, I coached their sports teams (they played soccer, basketball, football, and volleyball) and when they were older, we cheered like maniacs from the sidelines.

We married early (I was 19 and my wife was 20) and she got pregnant right away. We quickly had 2 boys and then, after our second son was born, we took a 6 year pause in adding more mouths to feed. During that time we were working hard, thinking a lot about parenting, and devoting ourselves to each other and to our kids. After a 6 year run of hard work and education, we found ourselves in a position where the thought of having more children seemed doable. Having “made” two boys, we wanted girls but weren’t sure we knew how to “make” little women. In the past, we had very often discussed the idea of adopting and this turned out to be an ideal solution to the challenge of making little girls. So together, along with our boys, we decided that we would try to adopt two girls: daughters for us and sisters for the boys.

Whenever a husband and wife decide to adopt, there are a million questions they have to answer and as many decisions they have to make. The questions cover a huge variety of subjects ranging from your willingness to accept physically disabled children to questions about your reaction to one of the birth parents having a prior criminal background. The list can be somewhat daunting just from the sheer size of it, to say nothing of the thorny issues that must be discussed.

Most of these questions are by now irrelevant to our story. But our answer to one of those questions lingers as something that has been, I think, a more significant influence on our oldest daughter than we knew at the time. This has to do with the issue of race.

As my wife and I worked our way through the never-ending list of questions on the adoption agency forms, we came to the question of whether we were going to establish any boundaries around our willingness to adopt based on race. In other words, was there some desire on our parts to constrain which kind of babies we were willing to adopt based on their race? For us, it was not a difficult decision. We believed (and still do) that race is a cosmetic issue and that people are different colors for the same reason that flowers are different colors: the God who created both flowers and people is a God of profusion. In the joy of creating and in His delight at what’s beautiful, God created many variations on a theme in nearly every aspect of his creation. The surprise to me is not so much that people are varying colors, but that God limited himself as to color and that we don’t find checkered, striped, and spotted people wandering around. At any rate, my wife and I immediately agreed that restrictions as to skin color were not for us and we would not place any constraints along those lines.

This turned out to be a fortuitous decision because, unknown to us at the time, a newborn bi-racial baby was secretly waiting in the wings for an adoptive family. A short 2 ½ months after dropping our adoption application in the mailbox, we brought home our first adopted daughter. 2 ½ years after that, we brought our second daughter home. Our second, and youngest adopted daughter is also bi-racial. Having two girls added to our nest made our family now seem complete.

Mixed race children are very often given an unfair allotment of “cute”, and our girls were no exception. They were beautiful and sweet and full of joy. In hindsight, their mixed black/white ancestry combined with us as white parents and their white older brothers to make us a noticeable family in a crowd. In all the years of the girls growing up we never had a negative racial experience. There were a number of incidents, though, that were hilarious. On one occasion, a black cashier at the nearby Wal-Mart pointedly inquired as to where we got our girls. When my wife explained that the girls were adopted, the cashier became suddenly conspiratorial, leaned in close, and quietly suggested that we “shouldn’t tell these girls they’re adopted”. My wife whispered back in response “I think they’re going to notice.”

On another occasion, I found myself sitting next to a black woman in a doctor’s waiting room with Mary on my lap. When the nurse came out to call us back to an examining room, she assumed the woman I was sitting next to was my wife. Much hilarity ensued as I tried to explain to the confused nurse, and the surprised woman next to me, that we were not married, or even connected.

It is hard to find words to describe how deliriously happy we were at this time in our lives. I look at old family pictures from the younger years of our children’s lives and I remember just how full of love and joy our home was. 

When we adopted the girls, we made a conscious decision to give ourselves fully to them as parents. We determined that we were not going to view them as some kind of project or ministry but that we would devote ourselves to them no differently than our genetically related children. Because of the racial diversity of our family, well-meaning people would periodically comment about how they “admired what we were doing” or how they “appreciated our ministry”. While we understood the innocent motivation behind these kinds of comments, we were very uncomfortable with such sentiments because we didn’t view any of our children as a “project” or some kind of “ministry”. Having given ourselves wholeheartedly as parents to all of our children, I think the joyful times we experienced were the natural outgrowth of a commitment that’s born out of love.

There’s an old movie called Shadowlands that tells about the late-in-life marriage of Christian author C.S. Lewis. He married a woman who was struggling with bone cancer but whose cancer was, only temporarily it turned out, in remission. They had a too-short marriage because her bone cancer returned and proved ultimately fatal. During a particularly poignant scene in the movie, Lewis and his wife are caught in a rain shower while walking through a field during a honeymoon of sorts. She wants to talk about her inevitable passing and Lewis resists, preferring not to mar their honeymoon with thoughts about their dark future. But she insists, telling him that “the pain then is part of the happiness now”.

I have come to believe that the suffering that emerged later in our family, when our oldest daughter went completely off the rails, was made more painful by our early decision to give our hearts fully to our adopted children. That decision, which yielded such joy in the beginning, made the loss and suffering later an intensely painful corollary to the joy of her childhood. But had we not loved her as we do, we would never have been able to endure for her, be for her, or intervene for her the way we have.

Only love enables you to survive the crucible of suffering that ensues when your child is being ravaged by the world. 

Only love empowers you to act when your own suffering threatens to overwhelm your ability to think or even move.

As I read back over what I’ve written, I realize all of this might sound awfully spiritual and noble. Some really smart person once observed that, “evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find the bread”. That’s certainly true in my case. This entire book is an effort to point other people like myself toward where I found the bread crumbs that sustained me. So as you read these words, please understand that I don't see myself as one who "knows" or has any kind of authority. I’m merely a witness. A staggering, half-starved man who is only now wobbling on unsteady legs out of the wilderness of suffering. Having nearly been overwhelmed by our own suffering, my wife and I hope to use our experience to minimize the suffering of others. I offer these words only as a personal reflection on our own experience of trying to help a child who found it hard to accept what we had to offer. Our perspective is very much a work-in-progress and we are still reflecting on our understanding of these events. Much like Whittaker Chambers explained in a letter to his children, “I am an involuntary witness to God’s grace, and to the fortifying power of faith.”

Through the years, we worked hard and consciously at being good parents and invested a great deal of mind space in that. I know we are not unique in this because an entire publishing industry has grown up around the “Christian Family” genre and millions of copies of books on Christian parenting have been sold. 

I’ll have more to say about this later. But I do think some of this Christian publishing on parenting preys on parental insecurity and, at times, offers false hope about the outcomes you will experience by applying the principles found in such books. It would be much better if they would clearly say, “individual results may vary”. I think the mistake some of these writers make is in expressing the value of their parenting ideas in terms of expected outcomes rather than in terms of parental faithfulness. What I mean is that believing parents, who love their children, want desperately to know that their children will turn out all right. We’d like to know that, as parents, there’s something we can do to guarantee a happy outcome. And I think some people in the publishing industry prey on that concern and perhaps overstate the beneficial effects of their writing. This is not to say there’s nothing of value in books on Christian parenting. There’s a great deal of value there. I only mean to offer myself as a cautionary tale in this regard. We have come to realize, through painful experience, that the goal of intentional Christian parenting is more related to faithfulness than to outcomes. We should be thoughtful, intentional believing parents not because doing so guarantees certain desirable results, but because in being thoughtful and intentional we are being faithful to our calling and our God-given responsibility.

The point of all of this is that our family life was normal and unexceptional in every respect. We live in a psycho-therapeutic society that reflexively assumes that troubled children inevitably come from troubled homes. That what appear to be pathological choices on the part of adolescents are necessarily the product of some kind of traumatic emotional or physical event in their lives. There are many things wrong with this view, not least that it is often held unconsciously, without any real rigorous examination of what it might mean and how it relates, if at all, to a biblical understanding of the world.  

There will be more to say on this later, but for now it's worth noting that this assumption, that our choices are primarily the product of our environment, carries with it the seeds of social ostracism within the community of faith. I doubt that anyone engages in more ferocious introspection than a parent whose child seems to be drifting away on the wind. Every single moment of every single day you live with that sick feeling of someone watching something irreplaceable floating away beyond your reach. Such a parent constantly questions himself and agonizes, looking for clues to the "cause" of his child's choices in the vain effort to find a tidy comprehensive solution. Believe me when I say that nothing happy comes from being in a church community where people routinely believe that the very public moral failures of your child are inescapably the product of her upbringing.

Let me repeat that we were not a perfect family. No family is and we were certainly no exception. Sometimes we yelled at our kids. Sometimes we failed to yell at our kids. Sometimes we disciplined them. At other times we were too tired to discipline them for things that needed it. We wish we were more consistent. We wish we were wiser.

Actually, we were ordinary.

And maybe this is one of the first big learnings that came about from our experience with Mary: that deeply troubled kids may come from ordinary families. Now, you may be tempted to think that there's something entirely self-serving about the insight that you don't have to be Daddy-dearest to have a troubled child. But actually, it would have been much easier to be able to point to some monstrous failure or deficiency on our part. It would have offered hope that there was some "fix" for our daughter on the theory that if bad environments produce bad kids, fixing the environment might make them good kids.

The ancient prophet Ezekiel had some politically incorrect things to say about this same subject.

"What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: the fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge? As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me - the father as well as the son, both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die." Ezekiel 18:2-4

Now I am no Old Testament scholar, but at a minimum these verses suggest that our moral choices are our own and can't be blamed on our upbringing. They also seem to say that God takes a dim view of our saying otherwise. I'm afraid these ancient ideas are wildly out of step with our psychologized culture and can be somewhat jarring to modern sensibilities.

In none of this do I mean to imply that as parents we have no influence on how our children turn out. For good or ill we have significant influence. But a feverish reliance on parental influence alone can blind us to a sobering reality: we cannot really control the outcome. Can we influence? Definitely. We can teach, plead, persuade and, even, beg. But every child is born with both a will and an extremely important choice to make. And no matter how many parenting books we read, prayers we offer, nor how much teaching we do, we will never undo the hard truth that our children possess the power to choose. This is the way the world works: every child must eventually choose her own course. And the thing is, that course may or may not reflect the things she has been taught. Freedom is real, and the choices a child makes are not just some kind of illusory pseudo “choices” masking the fact that they are just living out their parental programming.

No. A child's choices are real, un-programmed, and fraught with risk.

And sometimes, to the shock and dismay of everyone who loves her, a child will choose darkness instead of light.

Chapter 2 is here.