Staying Strong without Good Support

I have written a lot here about my struggles with keeping a positive attitude without firm external support. That has been the hardest part of my journey down the adoption path. This direction didn't bother me when I started, I wasn't all that concerned how children came into my life. Being rejected by all 4 of them was the hardest pill to swallow though. While it is not surprising, it has really shaken me to my core.

While I maintain many of my core beliefs, doing so alone has been a tremendous challenge.

I would say that everyone just starting down this path should find some solid support first, but I am not sure that is easy to find. I may work on some solutions to this in the future, at least for those in my area, but finding support that isn't talked out of it can be incredibly difficult.

Even my own wife got swayed at times by our children because of my firm stance against many bad things. It sometimes seemed like I was just being hard, but in reality, I was seeing what was coming and desperately trying to stop it. Being someone who sees things that are coming is good and bad.

Knowing they are coming leads me to prepare for them, but it also causes me to face them before others are willing to deal with the issues being raised. Many times it seems easier for others to pretend things really aren't going the way I see. While I am not always exactly right, I believe I have been right enough to have validated that I did indeed identify the exact right issue.

Some of that has been validated after the fact, but that still makes for a bumpy ride emotionally.

I will be working through some thoughts on how to do this successfully. I am not sure I did everything exactly right (though I did correctly identify most things ahead of time), but thinking through it here may help someone else work through their own struggle, so it is worth doing.

These children really do need a family, but many will reject it (at least for a while). You are not a saint for doing things (nor was I), but you do need a lot more coming in than you may realize when you are going through the rapids.

Brad