I Told You So.

It is a warm summer evening, and we are sitting on the back porch of their 3700 sq. ft. home in the West Hills of Portland, OR. It was all three of us a moment earlier, and now there are just two. Mom is busily washing dishes to avoid the tension that could be cut with a butter knife, and maybe even a spoon. “It is not going to work, Darling. And I need you to hear me on this. You are going to end up living in the worst part of town, scraping by to provide for him. I love you too much to not tell you that a single mother, on her own with a black child, will have few options.  This is not the right path for your life.  Do not adopt this child. You will not be able to live the life that you want to live if you do.

Tey has been in foster care with me for almost two years now and I am the only mom he has ever known.  The courts had recently cleared him for adoption, and I am to be “his adoptive resource.” My father is my father, and I know he is telling me these things because he believes in his heart that they are true.

I hear him. There are tears in my eyes. I know that he is right. All of what he says could, and probably will, be true. I gather myself and I stand up. I take a deep and certain breath. And I go on. And I adopt Tey anyway.

It is a frigid Saturday morning, and I am ten years old when I see the commercial on the tv while watching one of my favorite morning shows. This commercial tells me that there are starving children in Guatemala, and I learn for the first time that these children and their families do not have money and they cannot go to school, and that for just $20/month one of us could change that. For $20/month this child would have money and she will not be starving, and she will go to school and I will know her name and This. Is. Perfect. Because I MAKE $20/month on my allowance and I have money and I have food and I go to school simply fine (even on the days that I don’t want to). So duh. I tell them I am going to sign up and I hear them tell me that most kids my age want a cool new shirt or what about a Calico Critter to add to my collection? Summer is coming up, Sweetie, so what about ice cream on pool days or trips to the mall? I knowingly tell them I don’t care what most kids my age choose to do with their $20/month income, as this is what I will be doing with mine. Mom and Dad, with a firm yet gentle knowing, remind me one last time of the simple fact that I will actually need my money one day for things in my own life, and that is indeed, why I have it. Am I sure that I don’t want to reconsider?

 I don’t want to reconsider. And they are right. What they are saying is true. And I go on, and  I send my first payment to Compassion International, committing to a year-long child sponsorship, that very same day. I do it anyway.

It is a lovely Spring day. The sun is shining, but the air is crisp. I am getting myself and my now adopted 4 year-old son ready for my nephew’s birthday party when I get the call. We are re-opened as a foster home and there and two children who have been removed from their apartment and have no place to go. I tell them we are leaving for a party now, and that I am really only ready for a single child, as I am a single mama to a very-high needs (at the time) little man, so please keep calling around. I hesitantly offer that the woman on the line can call me back in a few hours if she hasn’t found anyone. I am sipping red wine in my sister’s beautiful home, surrounded by beautiful people, including my handsome police officer boyfriend, a few hours later, when I get the call. They haven’t found anyone and so yes, I will go. This time I don’t even hesitate. It is getting dark, and I will take the kids for the weekend.  I leave the party to meet the DHS worker transfer the little ones into my car, and together we return to the party to collect Tey. Mom is the only one brave enough to come out to the car and meet the kids, and she brings me Tey, along with heaps of anxiety and the fear in her eyes. She sees the three car seats shoved in and lined up in the back seat of my one row Subaru and shakes her head. “Angie” she says “This is crazy. You cannot do this. Please don’t do this.” She is visibly upset and still nobody else has even walked outside to acknowledge the happenings in the driveway. I suddenly realize that they don’t plan to. This is the first silent disapproval from my family and even the handsome police officer (who I know is decidedly in love with me) doesn’t come out.

And so, the four of us drive away. I am flooded instantly with the guilt of knowing that I had somehow just turned my nephew’s birthday party into a funeral, and am left only to imagine what was being said about me inside the thick and heavy wooden doors that I had just walked out of. I can’t help but feel as if I had just been found out to be using again after a life-long battle with a cocaine addiction, and they are all heartbroken, betrayed and confused. “Angie has done it again”.

It is not even an hour later when I hear a loud knock on my own front door, and I answer to see my mother standing in front of me and she has tears in her eyes. She is visibly trembling and can hardly look at me.  Intervention; Stage 2. Hold nothing back. Show up, whatever it takes. I must be stopped. “Angie” she says “You will lose him. He cannot believe you are doing this and he is devastated. You will lose him if you do this Angie, I promise you. You are going to lose the love of your life.”

I take a deep breath. It is as if my mom finally remembers that there are indeed three previously homeless black children in our presence, two of whom were in dirty diapers alone in their apartment with a kicked in door less than 24 hours ago, and we together turn our gaze towards the angels among us.  We see the three of them, freshly showered and fed and cuddled together underneath just one shared black and white striped blanket. There is relaxing piano music playing and they are nestled up like they have been doing it their whole lives, already looking like the three musketeers on our overstuffed gray living room couch. Tey is proudly in the middle. My heart is on fire.

So, I thank my mom for her concern, offer an annoyed, and yet understanding, hug and gently close the door behind her. And in that moment, I know that she is right. I could lose him. I make the decision to love these kids and for the next year and a half they live with us and they call me mommy and I love them as fiercely as if they are my own.  I am questioned and doubted at every decision point along the way for that year and a half. And at each point of questioning, I take a deep breath. And I go on, and I love the hell out of them, anyway.

It is an unusually warm day in July when Tey and I return from a month-long trip to Costa Rica, where I had decided to take him as an introduction to my world there, which I have long loved and held close to my heart, many years before I had met Tey. My mom picks us up from the airport and she returns us to our condo in SW Portland, and the “Little Ts” as we had come to call them, are no longer there. What was there was a 49-page IEP packet outlying the support plan that would be put in place for my 5 year old son who would be starting kindergarten at the local elementary school in the fall. At this kindergarten, he would be the only black child in his class. He would also be struggling to manage a little mind that had spent the previous almost two years in and out of Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.  Tey has been battling an aggressive autoimmune encephalitis which was causing him to lose significant parts of his ability to stay him and to process what was happening in the world around him as safe.  He has recovered, for the most part, and the decision has been made to stop the regularly scheduled inpatient IVIG treatments and to “wait and see” from here.

I walk into my condo, drop our suitcases, and feel the weight of the little T’s absence,  and the presence of the thick plan that is in place for my child’s kindergarten year. This will be the foundation for his childhood, and to this day I remember it as an audible whisper; “Not this.”

I know we need a different plan We need something not in a 49 page IEP, or an aid to help him sit on a hard chair for 6 hours a day. He needs a rainforest.  And as it just so happens, we have just returned from a pretty-great one. As it turns out, Tey came to life there.  The day after arriving in Monteverde, I forgot to give Tey his cocktail of pills to keep him okay, and then I never did again. As it turns out, he found the rainforest and somehow managed to stay exactly who he is, the whole damn time.  Just him and his wild and free.

I call my family and I let them know that we are moving back to Costa Rica and that Tey will start school there next month. I call my amazing boss and tell her the plan and that I will be leaving, effective immediately. She takes a deep breath. “Angie, but your clients. Your whole world all that you have here. You make good money, and you are such a valued therapist here. You will lose your relationships with clients at the clinic, and it won’t be easy to just pick up where you left off, just walking away from all you have built.  This is risking it all.”  And I take a deep breath. And I know that she is right. And I go on. And I buy the plane tickets and sell most of what we own and a month later, we go anyway.

I believe that one of the greatest fears behind doing the things that we know in our soul are right for us, when not fully understood by those who love us and care about, is the possibility of further down-the-road hearing these four words: I told you so.

And what if when we hear these words, they are true?

The truth is that even though I wanted to know that I could provide for Tey and do it all as a single mama on my parent’s back deck that summer evening, I did not. I did not know that I would be okay without the Calico Critters or extra ice cream on pool days as a young girl, and I did not know if the handsome police officer could have been my knight in shining armor, if I hadn’t kept the little Ts for as long as I did.

I did not know that Tey would thrive and heal and grow into a beautiful and brave and bilingual-bicultural young man who is 10 years-old today and lives and loves and learns in the rainforests of Costa Rica surrounded by the love of this beautiful community.   I did not know that we would both maintain the love with these two foster children far after they were returned to their birth family, and that although living across the world from them now, when Tey is asked if he has siblings, he without pause smiles and says that he does and that they live in Portland and are named Tt and Taqi.  That they would call me Mama-Angie still today.

I have not known that we would be okay. And how could I have?  

What I have known is that I was meant to choose the path of greater resistance, whenever that was also choosing the fiercely burning truth inside of my heart. This has carried me through turning birthday parties into funerals, and IEP packets into fire starter.  And into long lines of questioning ,all along the way.

And the thing with the questioners, is that they were all actually right. Even in these most tender moments, I knew that they were right.

And, also, they were wrong.

Because what I now understand is that the algorithm that they were using to keep me safe, was the wrong algorithm for MY ONE WILD and precious life.  The algorithm that I have always used, and will continue to apply to the rest of my life, is different than the one I was born into. My dad told me that I will not be able to provide the luxuries of the well-off life that I was born into, as a single mom.  My parents told me that I will have less ice cream than my friends. My mom told me that I will lose the man, and my boss told me that I will lose the high-paying private practice clinical job. And they were all right. I would go on to lose them all. They told me so.

And there has not been one thing lost, or not found by me that has been meant for me and then not mine.  I am exactly who I have chosen to be.

I will keep making these decisions with my life, using my algorithm for the whole damn rest of it, as I seek to make a tremendous difference in this world while being the happiest and most free version of myself that I can be.

I am sitting on my own front porch now, on a brightly painted red Adirondack chair, with a stylish blue and white print pillow tucked behind my back. I am on the side of a mountain in the glowing cloud forest community of Monteverde “The Green Mountain” of the Costa Rica. I have experienced a life so far that causes my heart to swell to previously unimaginable levels, on my way to this red Adirondack chair, and I feel it in my bones tonight.

I have had to cry and question and struggle my way through many challenging seasons and relied heavily on the love and support of many of the same ones who have questioned me and tried to warn me along the way. It is humid tonight, but there is a light breeze. The birds are chirping around me, and our adopted-boxer dog named Ollie is curled up under my feet.  Tey is in a camping tent assembled in our living room (because this is where he does his studying these days).  I know that I have found my happy place on this planet for now, and so has Tey and, and judging from the steady snores coming from below, Ollie has as well. The sun is setting over the gulf of Nicoya and the sky is lighting up into every hew of pink and orange and red and every possible thing of beauty in between. The scene takes my breath away every single night, including this one.

And I am well, and we are well, and this is the fullness of our truth for today.  The simplicity of this moment on my front porch, the happiest place I have ever found to call my own.

It is as if I had known at every crossroad and seemingly crazy and often misunderstood decision-making moment along the way, that we would be sitting here on this porch today. That I would often smile and I would think back to these pivotal moments where I had done the thing anyway, and say “Here I am guys, Isn’t it beautiful? All the messy bits and lessons learned and loss and joy and this tremendously wild life that we live? I have never needed you to believe the same. I have desperately wanted you to see it, and I have spent many tear-filled and sleepless nights just wishing that you could, but I have not, at the end of the day, needed you to know what I knew inside. I have had to just go ahead and do it anyway”.

I have great hopes for my future tonight, and I believe more than ever that I could outsmart the doubting algorithms yet, should I ever choose to do so.  I may still get the big house and find my knight in shining armor and I may even get some more ice cream and Calico Critters down the road for the one, or many children, whom I will call my own. I am making a good living with a thriving online therapy practice and I am living out my best life, for today.

And then I hear it, like a whisper in the breeze of the warm and humid night. I hear the thing I have for so long anticipated.  

And the voice is coming from within me:

“You are worthy of being trusted with your own damn life. You have somehow known, beyond what many others could see at the time, what would make you genuinely happy and how to make that just exactly who you are. You are here, and this moment is living, pulsing, sunset proof.  All that is meant for you is always out beyond the fear and the whispers of the ones telling you that you could get it wrong.  And you could still definitely get it wrong.  Which will lead you closer to what is right, and you will find yourself again and again, just where you are meant to be.

You have allowed your marching orders to come from within, and so you can rest in knowing that no matter where you are, this is your path.

So, darling, when you hear the next set, no matter the risk or sacrifice or seeming crazy-ness of it all, spend a little less time asking how they all feel. Smile at how much they all love you and want the very best for you, and go on ahead, and do it anyway.

In the afterglow of not meant to be lovers, burnt IEP paperwork, sterile and abandoned clinical offices, and melted ice cream cones, you will find yourself time and time again.

And you will be okay. You will be so much more than okay.

I told you so.