The Kid has these recurring doctor’s visits that require a parent to come up every three weeks and sit with the doctor to discuss treatment plans. I hate them. The doctor is so old that he must have been a contemporary of Moses. He shuffles in, limply shakes your hand, talks to a wall for about 6 minutes, and then I’m left wondering why I had to put pants for THAT on for the rest of the day.

I had one of those meetings yesterday and this was the first one with The Baby. Before the appointment, I stopped by to visit a friend and I took her lunch. Me carrying the baby plus all his stuff plus my  purse plus the food made me feel a little like this guy:

I told my friend that I was going to wear all of my accouterments to this doctor’s visits in the hopes that they would take mercy on me and say, “Oh, you don’t have to come to these silly meetings. We can do them over the phone or something.”

Well, I did and no such luck. I think actually backfired because everyone likes to look at a cute baby, even if his mother is weighed down like a Dromedary Camel in the Sahara.

I’ve been thinking alot about stamina and perseverance and grit. None of those are things that come to me naturally. Ask my husband. I just don’t have that gene that makes me want to push forward, harder, better, etc, at least not when it comes to some things (exercise and sugar fasting, I’m looking at you).

The Baby’s entrance into our lives has been very hard, emotionally and physically. Becoming a mother by adopting a nine-year-old has been very hard, emotionally and physically.

We have no idea what we’re doing. Navigating parenthood is hard enough. Navigating parenthood plus adoption, with birth families and trauma, is dang near impossible sometimes. We kind of fumble around in the dark and pray for the best.

I’ve been thinking about “how we do what we do” lately. How are we doing this, something that lots of people would say is hard?

Here is my very well-thought-out answer.

You wake up in the morning and you do the damn thing. 

There is no secret here. This is the hand God gave us and so we do it. We’re not perfect at it. Almost daily, things come up and I shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t know how to handle this.”  We are consistently thrown into situations that we don’t really know how to navigate, at least not expertly navigate, and so we muddle through it as best we can and lay in bed at the end of the day hoping that we didn’t mess up royally.

There’s no special fairy dust or foods or meditation techniques that carry us through the day and, by God’s grace, both of our children are still alive and well-functioning almost every day.

Aside from the oxygen, the Baby has a special need that will require a lifetime of care. There are so many unknowns in his future, I can hardly stand it. I can’t even plan for daycare yet, much less kindergarten, or heaven forbid, what happens after high school.

If I think about it too much, I get really anxious because I can’t plan for anything. I have very little control over what’s happening and what will happen in the future. I CONTROL NOTHING.

When I start thinking about all of the possibilities, all of the things that could happen, I start to wonder how we’re going to do this. I have lots of fears about the future. When my mind starts going like this, sometimes God will step in and remind me,

“Ahem, Beth. If that happens, then you’ll wake up in the morning and you’ll do the damn thing.”

And He’s right. We’re doing the damn thing right now and it doesn’t seem like it’s going away anytime soon, so we’re going to continue doing it.

I think that’s the point, maybe. Most people do not plan to invite tragedy and trauma and disability into their lives, but it happens ALOT anyway, and they make it. We can make it, ya’ll!

God has made us (all of us, including you, dear reader) so much more resilient than we think we are capable of.  We can withstand lots, friends.

We can wake up in the morning and do the damn thing.

Soldier on, friends.