The wind is strong and I am compelled to go down to the river. It is dusk, when the blue light left by a departing sun is the most like the color of heaven and the girls come with me.
Em imitates Elijah, repeating his litany of praise to the God who rescues us.
She is a survivor, improbable survivor, traveling across from river to river
State to state
Improbable spitfire
Proving her life matters.
We saw Sound of Freedom yesterday and it sparked a day-long conversation.
My adopted daughter was “trafficked” by her own biological mother, who gave her drugs and sold her for sex.
She died of a drug overdose in 2021 at the hands of her abusive boyfriend who bought her for sex.
We are now raising her daughters who were also exposed to abuse.
Child pornography is real and devastating. Trafficking is real and devastating. The movie is worth seeing for that reason, but I have profound questions about this narrative and this organization—which seems to have claims which are hard to verify or even possibly not helpful in terms of de-incentivizing human trafficking.
I began to question the OUR narrative when I read Katherine Ballard’s gloss on their adopted children. I have fostered and adopted a number of trafficked children and none of them have showed me “pure love” (nor do they need to). They have had deep wounds and have needed structure, love, and constancy from my family.
Do I “adore” any of them? I don’t think I should adore anyone but Jesus. But I have stayed in the trenches with them and I have learned that real love is just doing the best and wanting the best for someone, especially when their behavior reflects their trauma.
Christians may be willing to accept any Christian-adjacent narrative when we need to ask the hard questions even as we acknowledge that many of the stories of the predations of children happen inside the economy of poverty and addiction and maybe Ballard’s methods and efficacy need to be questioned by all of us.
OUR promises that they can, do and will go into the darkest corners of the world to rescue children. I hope they do. But we all need to be rescuers and often that is less flak vests and cameras and more quotidian commitments and truth-telling.
Jesus leaves the 99 for us. He expects all of us to be the hands and feet of his love.
All of the below round up is just for others to have more information about a flawed but ultimately valuable movie.
I am not advocating for anything but the Truth.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/sound-of-freedom/
I hope mommy is sleeping in heaven, she says
No. I say, she is dancing and singing in heaven
People don’t sleep in heaven
I wish I were in heaven she says
We have work here for now, I say. That is why we have God time–sing and dance
So we are ready for heaven
When it comes
When Mary talks now on the Fisher-Price phone of loss, she speaks with a five year old’s falsetto. She is breezy, upbeat even, and we exchange pleasantries through the medium of her daughter’s voice.
Mary, the girls have your laugh, I try to tell her before the line cuts off. Mary, I always wanted to be your real mom, I tell her before the line clicks off. Mary, that last day haunts me. The girls talk as though you still have the giant carnival unicorn, as though you tucked it under your arm and carried it right through
The earth will soon dissolve like snow/The sun forebear to shine/But God who called me here below/will be forever mine
Little One says
Is mommy sleeping in heaven?
No, I say
She is wide awake
Dancing and singing
I wish I were in heaven
Little One says
No, not yet dear
Let us sing and dance together as though this were the porch and the lights from the house were burning bright
Stay with me here on the porch for awhile
We will dance and sing out
grief and hope together until
These ancient gates open wide
We discuss names.
Her name was Shriver, then Lee, then Baker.
But that is not what her name is anymore, everyone in Heaven has a new last name,
I tell her oldest daughter
What is it? she asks
Beloved, I say
In Heaven everyone’s last name is the same–beloved
Over the years Mary would come and go. Often when she was gone for months I would worry she was dead. The time I worried about her the least was when she was in prison.
I counted how many numbers I had for her–eight, not counting the times she used her boyfriends’ or family’s phones, or the borrowed phones of the carceral state.
This time I decided to change my contact information for her from Mary the Beautiful or Mary the Precious to
The thinking was that this way I could keep track of how current the number was. This was a decision of pragmatism, acknowledging the ephemeral nature of my relationship to my daughter’s phones.
Now it just seems so darn hopeful. How could I have known it would be her last?
The truth be told I felt I lost you when you were twelve. That was when I had to reckon with my desire to make you like me and your desire to not-be-that
I let something die to get us through. It was hard. I wanted you to be my girl, the way that people would tell us we looked alike, despite no genetic overlay to speak of.
We got through that
Survived
For years my prayer was just let her be alive, God, please just let her be alive
Come to think of it,
Still is
If I am honest, you were often a pain in the ass. Your attachment disorder meant that I was the primary target of your anger when you were growing up, which was not fun, but good for me.
I remember you when you were little, I remember the stress, chaos and exhaustion. We would look at you and Charles when you were asleep and say, they are cute when they are asleep.
find myself trying to construct an old play fort out of this gray day, the sky folded into the quilted tent
This is heaven, I tell myself, this is Mary, she was college-aged, after all. She could be here, Heaven could be this, the thin line between the realms could be as gossamer as time itself–
Yesterday you were among the living
And now I return to the prayers I prayed when I held you as a child, fierce ball of anger
Oh, God,
Make us real
Make us vivid
Wipe away the tears, the past, the unbearable
All things made new
I don’t have time to write this blog. My house is chaos, I am behind in my “day job,” and my adopted granddaughters live with us now.
Both girls have been through fires, literally and figuratively.
As I see headlines about the Texas heartbeat law, I cannot stop thinking about what an appalling loss to me and the world entire it would be if they were not here.
They, like all my kids, light up my world. If one were missing, the loss would be unbearable.
That is what the rhetoric hides–each child saved from abortion is a
Little girl twirling in a princess dress
A little boy looking for spiny lizards
A child who knows grownup words long before they should
An irreplaceable light in the darkness.
Carrying Light 