Something happened tonight that has prompted me to consider a lot of unexpected thoughts and questions.
I recently met someone through a website… a friend, a workout buddy. We meet a couple times a week and walk together, and recently she actually invited me out for a night with some of her other friends. I was so happy to feel like there was a possibility for this relationship to develop into something more than just someone I go walking with; I was thrilled to discover that it might have potential to turn into a real friendship.
I don’t have a lot of friends in my local area. We moved down here eight years ago, and I haven’t managed to form any real, solid relationships, and I was starting to feel a bit isolated from the world around me.
Don’t worry; I’ll tie this all together in the end…
Tonight I found out that she knows one of the few families in this area that I have any connection to. Unfortunately, my connection to these people is not a good one. Our history is rocky, we no longer speak, and our friendship didn’t end very well. I know things about them and their past, and they know things about us and our past, things I would rather leave in the past…
So, we were walking, and we were talking, and after finding out this interesting piece of information, and spending some time talking about how strange it is that we are connected in this way… we spent much of the rest of the walk talking about these people. Our opinions of these people, our relationships with these people… good and bad, it’s all out there.
So, here I am almost ready to head to bed, and I find myself now worried about what my new friend thinks of what I had to say about these other people. Has she labeled me as a gossip? When she agreed with me, was she just being nice? Or did she mean it? I find myself worrying that the fact that she knows me might come up in conversation with them, and I start to wonder what they would have to say about me, and, most importantly, what sort of affect that could have on my new friend’s opinion of me.
I haven’t done anything drastic, and I won’t… but the thought has crossed my mind that I should cut ties with this person before the friendship goes far enough that doing so could potentially be devastating to me… I’ve been hurt enough times; do I want to go down that road again?
How does all of this tie into the adoption?
We are talking about taking a child into our home, into our family, who has had a really rocky past. A child who has had extremely important relationships fall apart, a child who has dealt with more trauma in her short life, mostly brought on by people who should love and protect her, than anyone should have to deal with. We are taking on a child who is going to question whether other people can be trusted, a child who will have questions regarding why she has been treated the way she has. This child will have to deal with answering questions from others about her past, about her family, about her behavior, and about her issues. She will have to address the why’s of how she ended up where she is, and through all of this we will be trying to show her that there are people who can be trusted, there are people who are worth the time and effort to build relationships with in your life.
So far, in the short amount of time I have known this new friend, I get the feeling that she is the sort of person who is worth that time and effort. She strikes me as the type of person who won’t concern herself with someone else’s opinion, the type of person I need to be able to call a friend. And, yet… here I am considering cutting ties with her because of what someone else might say about me. How stupid is that?
Once the adoption goes through, and we are faced with helping this child deal with these issues, how can I teach her how to move on, how to deal with the demons in her past and move forward into a brighter future, when I can’t seem to move beyond my own past and my own demons? How can I explain that it doesn’t matter what other people think, that it doesn’t matter what other people say, if I myself consider ending friendships for exactly that reason? How can I show her how to love and how to trust, if I can’t seem to do so myself?
How can I help her find the answers to these all important questions, if my own answer is “End the relationship, and quick!”
Maybe I’m just reeling over the shock of this discovery, and I will feel better tomorrow. Maybe I’m just tired from all the exercise I got today, and I’m just not thinking straight…
But I don’t feel any more prepared to deal with these issues than this child will be, and I’m starting to question how qualified I am to take on someone else’s problems when I am so rattled by such silly things myself.