Acceptance and Forgiveness

My daughter is always writing me letters.  Both of my kids do, actually.  Taylor’s letters, however, often carry one common theme – The need for acceptance.  Because I get these kinds of letters from her on a weekly basis, I usually give them a quick read, answer whatever questions she asked on the paper, and move on with our day.

However, this note stood out to me as a bit different.  Here is a copy of the letter, which she agreed to let me post.

 In case you have a hard time reading 2nd grade writing (as anyone without a 2nd grader would), here is the translation:

 “Taylor Costa – I love you, Mom, so much.  The red stands for love.  I want to be good from now on, and I am sorry for all my sins I have done, and I will never do them again ever, ever, ever again.  I’ve been trying to fix my behavior up.  I hope it works good.  I just want you to forgive my sins.  Do you believe that I will fix my behavior up?  Yes or No”

This letter really struck me.  First of all, I had no idea what inspired the letter, leaving me to wonder if there’s a confession coming in the near future!  It surprised me because, if anyone should’ve been remorseful this weekend, it should have been my son.  After all, he’s the one that caused us to leave his school’s Mother-Son Dance early, due to discriminatory language towards a child in front of the child’s mother!  The woman was rightfully upset that her son was in tears on the dance floor, and she addressed me with the amount of emotion that one would expect, given the situation. 

It never ceases to amaze me that I can still feel embarrassed by my children’s behaviors.  Just when I think we’ve rounded a corner or that I couldn’t possibly be mortified any more in public than I already have been, that’s when another round of humiliation tends to occur.

I let the woman give my son a verbal lashing – partly because I was so angry that I didn’t trust my own words, and partly because she needed that outlet.  She recognized during our conversation that I am a mother of action – I won’t sit idly by and allow my child to disparage another.  So, I allowed her the words she needed to say to him, and then we left the dance.

And trust me, there were many more words to be had that night.

But back to Taylor’s letter.  What had she done that required my forgiveness?  And why was she asking me to forgive her sins, knowing full well that Jesus is the one that cleanses hearts, not I.

I decided we’d chat about her letter so I could have a better understanding of where she was coming from.  Taylor assured me there was no new confession coming (Phew!) but that Sunday’s church service had made her start thinking about her actions.  And that day, she had been praying (at school, nonetheless… let’s hear it for prayer in a public school by an 8-year-old!) and she felt that she wanted to change her life.  She wanted me to forgive her for all her past behaviors and she wanted that acceptance from me – she wanted to know that I didn’t hold a grudge, and that I believed in her and that she was capable of changing.

I don’t know about you, but as a parent, I’ve held grudges.  I know it’s wrong.  I know it’s childish.  I also know it’s human.  And I’ve fallen prey to my humanity many times with these children of mine!  They came to us with issues that were far beyond what we ever could have imagined, yet when we chose to adopt them, we chose to take them as they were – sins and all.  Because isn’t that how God took us when we were adopted into His family?

Yet God doesn’t hold grudges, and I had.  Worst of all, my daughter was aware of that fact.  Her letter was a peace offering.  It wasn’t the normal overly-decorated card she’d hand me each week, donned with new vocabulary words she’d learned that day in school.  This was different. 

My daughter had prayed.  She found conviction.  And she wanted forgiveness.  She wanted to mend our relationship, and she needed to know that I was all in… that I believed in her.

It was a very emotional letter from a little girl to her Mom.  And in that moment, I felt convicted of my own sins – the grudges I’d held onto, knowing that the previous apologies always led back to the same behaviors time and time again.  But this time, this time she was asking for me to have faith in her.  More so, she was asking me to have faith that God was altering her heart and that she was honestly trying to change.

Without another word, I took my pen and circled the word ‘Yes’ that she had written at the bottom of her letter.  The smile that came across her face was beautiful.  Grudges were dismissed and “sins were forgiven”… not because I could cleanse her heart, but because I realized that God had already done so.

Even in those days that are difficult and we find ourselves being chewed out by angry parents, God always seems to provide a loophole in the defeat.  Through the simple letter of my daughter, God renewed my faith that He was indeed doing a work in our family – each and every one of us.

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"Garbage Bag Suitcase: A Memoir" Book Review

          It took me less than 1 day to read this remarkably written memoir, not because it’s what I would consider an “easy read” but because I was captivated to the point of not being able to put the book down.

            Written by Shenandoah Chefalo, Garbage bag Suitcase offers a personal look into the life of one child – one small girl who faced abuse and neglect in her daily life – a life that was worth saving even though no one was there to step in and be a savior. In her memoir, Chefalo describes the intense trauma she suffered at the hands of those ordered to care for her by the people that she was supposed to love and trust most in this world.

            And after living in chaos and instability for 13 years, transferring her few belongings from place to place in a garbage bag that came to be known as her suitcase, she found the immense courage to make a choice – instead of remaining under the parental umbrella of addiction, abuse, and mental illness, Chefalo chose herself.

            Sadly, making life-altering choices usually come with a consequence or two. And in Chefalo’s case, she wound up in the foster care system. Lost and struggling with her identity, she writes of facing each new school, each new home with an underlying drive to make a way through her struggles, to become one of the 3% of foster children to go to college, and one of the 1% to graduate.

            In her memoir, Chefalo relays even more staggering statistics about the foster care system. She shares the mental and physical complexities that are common among children who have aged out of their foster homes with nowhere to go, no one to turn to as support. She reflects on her own struggles with lying , food, and relationship – how they weren’t just behaviors that needed to be “fixed” as our society proclaims, but how they were a way to stay alive and a way to reinvent herself, especially since her family and a broken system left her wondering who she even was.

            The inside glimpses she vulnerably shares in Garbage Bag Suitcase challenged me to look at my own children through a different lens. To understand the helplessness and fear that can still grip a child that has been through such trauma, who has been taken away from all that they’d known, as dysfunctional as it was, and placed with strangers – to see how one can walk away from the wreckage of it all and to make yet another choice, one of forgiveness… well, there aren’t words to describe the miracle of it all.

            In the second section of her book, Chefalo tackles her ideas of how to reform our current foster care system, changing it in ways that promise hope and success for many more children than the current statistics show. Personally, I have always felt that vigorous and constant early intervention services would be the best preventative measure for keeping children out of foster care, helping parents learn to parent in their own homes, bridging that gap and averting the formative years from being overlooked in our young children. Because, once a child gets to school, even if a teacher or administrator notice that something just “isn’t right” with a child, will they report it? Will anything be done? Will the child just be taken and traumatized further? Instead, Chefalo offers brilliant suggestions that are currently being tested and used in our country, offering children a better chance at life.

            And if one child is able to make the choice for themselves, and the choice for forgiveness, then this little girl’s story, with her garbage bag suitcase, will not have been in vain.

            To purchase this story for yourself, click here and follow Shenandoah's blog at http://garbagebagsuitcase.blogspot.com/

"My Favorite Person"

Recently, Cameron has been getting into writing. Naturally, I encourage this as much as possible. I love to see him get excited about something that he and I can do together. Don’t get me wrong, his love for all things John Deere, constructing things out of random scraps, and building intricate Lego creations are wonderful in their own way. I know that his level of creativity has grown exponentially because of each of these hobbies.

Even with Cameron being on the swim team this season was something new for me. I had never did much with swimming and couldn’t have told you the name of any stroke other than the Doggy Paddle… (PS, they don’t actually use that stroke in swimming. Apparently that’s just used for toddlers to keep themselves afloat… Well, toddlers and people like me.) So, I did rather enjoy watching him compete and cheering for him (loudly) as he raced to be his previous times in each heat.

Taylor has always been so good at gymnastics. And whereas I never excelled past a certain level in that area, it was familiar to me and I found that I could help her with many of the skills. Taylor also has a love for music. She’s no Celine Dion or anything, but she has really worked hard to improve her singing, and I can truly get behind that!

But writing…. That’s my passion. And even though Cameron cannot verbally tell a story to save his life, his words come out so much more clear and concise when he writes. I love watching how his grammar skills are developing and seeing him practice new vocabulary words in ways that are “unique” at times.

So, when Cameron came home from school a couple of weeks ago, he was pumped to show me his most recent writing project. After reading the first paragraph, I could see why he was so excited for me to read his work. He entitled it “My Favorite Person”, and he specifically asked me if I thought it was good enough to put on my blog.

You guys… the look on his face when I told him that I would most definitely “publish” his work, well, it was priceless! The look of pride and satisfaction that he had done something well, something that I would put online for all to see – I would happily post anything he wrote if it would increase his self-esteem like that again!

So, without further delay, I give you a Cameron Costa original, “My Favorite Person”.

The sweetness, am I right?!? I’m encouraging, I give advice, I have a “lovely personality” (someone’s gonna have to teach my kid that that’s code for “butt ugly”), I’m nice, and I’m generous because I allow him to eat and give him shelter. I mean, either his standards are ridiculously low, or this is the cutest writing from a 4th grade boy to his mother EVER.

  And can we just take a moment to love the last sentence?

“My mom is my role modle and personality Also, she is genaras.”

That one right there has ALL the loves written all over it! You know you’re doing something right when your kid puts it in print for the internet, right?

#GraceInParenting