It’s 2019 and I find myself staring at this place. The field where Jamie learned to fly a kite and where we picnicked in the summer. The basketball court where Eliza learned to ride a bike. The path they’ve circled again and again on their scooters racing to see how fast they could make it around. The playground they’ve spent almost every afternoon for the past year creating games with strangers, playing with classmates, working out their differences with friends and strangers alike.  

This is the place we stumbled upon on that first full day in New York years before and it became our resting place for that first lonely summer as we tried to figure it all out. I’ve made polite conversations with other parents, developed friendships with moms and dads, and have learned the rhythms and rules of this unique space. 

It felt like ours. 

Except, on that day in 2019, it wasn’t anymore. Sure we got to keep it for a little while longer while Eliza finished the school year across the street. But, after that, we began to come here less and less because that’s what you do when you live in different neighborhoods. 

The truth is, we liked our new playground better. Objectively, it is better…bigger, cleaner, cooler. It’s attached to a beautiful park that goes on forever. It’s in close proximity to other playgrounds. It has so much potential and will soon become the type of home we’re leaving. 

Of course, it also had different rules and rhythms that we hadn’t yet learned. There are general rules that apply to all city playgrounds, but you only learn the specific ones by settling and staying and paying attention. This new playground became a kind of sacred that we needed and became a healing ground with an abundance of new community and friendships.

Looking back, as much as we had loved this first playground and as many happy memories as we have there, it was also a bittersweet place for me. Because it’s there, in that neighborhood, in that playground that we began to wrestle with big feelings and started the arduous process of learning new realities. It’s there that we came in the middle of the day when we began our homeschool journey. It’s lonely there in the middle of the day. 

It’s 2024, almost exactly 5 years later and I am struck by how little we knew about where the next several years would take us. Into a new school where we made life-long (i.e. still talking regularly) friends, into a global pandemic, a move across the country, new ministry opportunities, new diagnoses (for several of us), new traumas, new injustices and another move, but this time back to something familiar. But so much of what we were learning then, still applies now.

Because once again, we are on the precipice of a new journey. Our family is changing and shifting. We won’t return to what we were before, and, yes, there’s loss there, but there’s so much beauty ahead. 

Back then I couldn’t quite imagine the new. It was easy to go kicking and screaming into this new change because some days I just wanted the old rhythms back. I wanted the sweetness and innocence that used to mark our young children days back. It’s easy to romanticize those young years, isn’t it?

But I think to keep that would only be possible at the expense of both our son and our daughter. I think what we are doing is processing both J’s story and E’s story with them in real time. It’s work they have to do and it’s work that many adopted children don’t do until they are much, much older. But they have both chosen to hold these sacred things with us, to process them aloud in our home. Goodness, what a gift.

But it’s an immense privilege just as it is a painful learning process. As an avid conflict-avoider, it can be easy for me to think that hard equals bad. But I think this was always going to be painful. Because when your family is formed out of the pain of a family breaking…it would be dishonest to work it all out in bliss. 

(For more on this, read All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung. Seriously, it’s a beautiful memoir by an adult adoptee. Adoptive parent or not, her story is worth your time.) 

There is this beautiful scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis where a young boy named Eustace has been turned into a dragon on account of his own selfishness and greed. As a boy, Eustace was annoying to everyone, but he undergoes a profound change in this dragon state. When it comes time for him to strip away the dragon skin to return to his boyhood, try as he might, he can’t do it alone. Aslan must help. This is how Eustace recounts the story (I weep every time I read it): 

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt – and there it was lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on — and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again. . . .”

But I guess at the end of the day, what I’m learning to recognize is that these days, mess and all, are also good.

We’ve spent much of our time post-pandemic in the middle of that painful last tearing away of the old, but in recent months we have felt the deliciousness of the water. It hurts but yet feels healing all at once.

Friends, it’s not a perfect process. As we all learn new skills and ways of functioning and processing together, our days are messy. They’re loud and full of high emotions.