The lie I need to believe

For the last four+ years our family has been in a state of transition. We've been wandering the desert looking for our promised land. And I think it's finally happening.

A little over four years ago, our three foster sons moved back to bio mom's and Cory was offered the preaching position at Crosswalk. We put our Houston house on the market and signed a lease for an adorable 1920's rental house in the Heights of Little Rock. It's two bedrooms and 1 bath would be a squeeze with our 3 boys, but we were excited. It  came with a huge front porch, good schools, and Ms Jamie- the best neighbor ever.

And then....

And then we got the call that our foster sons were coming back home. I moved back into the Houston house with 4 of the boys so that we could keep our Texas residency until the adoption finalized. People from church brought beds and a refrigerator to our empty house because everything we owned was in Arkansas. Pretty quickly my younger sister April and her family moved in with me. It ended up being a blessing for both of us. It kept our family from paying for two houses and bearing the full financial pain of our situation, and she eventually got the perfect husband out of it. That's a long crazy story for another time:)  All the while, though, Cory was living in Little Rock with the two older boys and for the next 8 months, we kept Highway 59 well traveled trying to make our long distance marriage and long distance family connected until the adoption was done.

We lived in that Heights house for two years and somewhere along the way decided we could handle two more kids. We found a new rental house that we could tweak to meet the DHS space requirements for foster care and moved in two years ago. It has been a good house for us. It's the house were Gertie our dog lived and the house where our plan to hunt down and add two elementary aged boys was overtaken and improved on by the 1 year old girl and 2 year old brother sitting at our table.

And now....

And now, our little two's adoption will be final next month and two weeks after that we move into another house. It will be OUR house this time, not a temporary rental, it's big enough to be our forever house and I hope it is. I have dreams of it being the house our four million grand babies come to for Christmas. I can't believe it. It's all coming together. I can't believe we will have a permanent home where I can hang pictures on the wall because I know we're staying put. I can't believe we won't have 4 boys sharing one closet because we are doubling our square footage.  I can't believe we will close as a foster home and there will be no caseworkers that come to this house. I can't believe my family is finished and full, and that I can gather all my little chicks up under my wing like Momma's do. I can't believe we can look to the future and know that we are all here now, that this is us. I've been waiting for a long time to reach this chapter in my story, the one that shows my whole family.

I can picture it all in my mind so perfectly. Me standing in the kitchen by my new apron sink, which is not actually a part of the new house just my fantasy updated version of the house that has no financial limitations. Still, there I am making a from scratch dinner and talking in a cooing voice to the little ones who are not coloring with markers on the table, while the older boys are all in the family room nearby voluntarily reading instead of asking for media time and are also definitely not asking for something to eat while I am in the middle of preparing dinner. The image in my mind is so crisp and so real that I can even smell the vanilla candle that's aflame sitting atop our new farmhouse table in the dining room with it's brand new laminate flooring, while our new golden doodle puppy soaks up snuggles and praises from Cory for being the only puppy in the history of animal civility to never chew or pee on anything.

And this point is were Cory likes to snap me out of my promise land visions and remind me that it is indeed our family, as is, that will be transferring to the new house and not my fantasy version. It is our current family. The one still trying to merge two oldest brothers into one cohesive sibling group. The one that passes out ADHD meds every morning and counts down the hour until they kick in. The one that has 10 people, yet owns only 7 spoons, so that every time we eat soup or cereal there are three unlucky people who have to use a ladle or measuring spoon since what should be an easy fix of simply buying more spoons from the store hasn't happened in the last two years because we just can't get it together enough.

The truth is I often suffer from something called family amnesia. It happened to me just the other day when a friend was talking about a co-worker that came from a family of 8 kids and I spontaneously gasped in reacting to the news, as in- "Wow you just told me something crazy," forgetting for a moment that eight is the exact number of children I have.  You could say that family amnesia is a close cousin to labor pain amnesia that causes women to keep voluntarily populating the earth. It works the same way, because it makes you forget the hard things of a situation, only remembering the good, so that when the opportunity arises to repeat the situation you readily say yes, even though you should definitely say no.

It happened to us just this past week when we thought it would be a good idea to teach our kids the importance of serving others and took them to a high rise nursing home to deliver meals on wheels for our new Thanksgiving tradition. At one point we were crammed in a stairwell, locked out of the fourth floor, and trusting our 8 years olds to balance 18 styrofoam food containers.  I was explaining for the 50th time to our screaming 2 year old that "Mommy is not holding you right now, I am only holding myself," when Cory noticed that Silas was not with us and was either further up the stairwell or maybe in the lobby still,  but surely not alone in the parking lot.  It was also this same moment that our stroller started rolling backwards down the stairs to the third floor as if to get away from our chaos when I looked at Cory and said "I bet this is exactly how you pictured it."

But even as I write that down highlighting the terribleness in specific play by play format, I already know we will sign up to do it again next year because family amnesia.

I'm aware of my condition. I'm aware of the family amnesia. But I don't care. Somedays I need to believe the lie. Sometimes I need to forget the difficult so that we will persevere with the hard things like signing the kids up for soccer every year, hosting small group at our house, traveling to see family for the holidays, or simply going to church every Sunday. Because for our family, and I think it's true for most families- hard things and good things are often the same things.

And who knows, maybe someday it will all come true. Maybe some day it won't be a lie anymore. Maybe the extra space from our new house and the finality of our family structure is just what we need to morph us into my fantasy family. Maybe it will finally get us out of our wondering years of and into the promise land.

At any rate, I just took it upon myself to order new spoons from amazon. After two years of utensil famine-  in two days, with free shipping, we will be in the land of spoon aplenty. Plus here is a picture of my for real HUGE new laundry room with no pricey update needs. Land of Canaan here I come.