New shoes

This was an interesting day. Before 10 am I had already had a different child than the usual troubling one go into breakdown. I wasn't in a sensitive mood and I didn't help matters any. I heard lots of junk that I knew would come out sooner or later. It was still hurtful, you can never be prepared for a child turning on you. All the hurts of the past were all my fault of course, along with every other child's problems in the family. In this child's opinion, everything bad in life was my fault. I knew this was coming. I saw the water bubbling around the edges of the water for a while. I saw it coming 5 years ago at the orphanage. I tried reasoning but it was no use. I retreated to my room and cried and prayed and did the only thing there was to do, brush it off and get up and go again. I know that I'll have to work twice as hard now to prove that I do care, that I am fair and that ,no matter what, I am mom and will continue to love and be there no matter how I'm treated.
But this train doesn't stop and we had to be in Commerce to meet a family that wanted to buy all of the kids new shoes. The older kids were not very excited, embarassed to be put on display as" the poor orphans"as one of them put it. The couple who invited us are very sweet, although we don't know them very well. They were not really the ones that the kids were worried about. Some friends of theirs were coming also and everyone was afraid that it would be uncomfortable. A total of 8 people showed up, 6 of them strangers. I was afraid of what the kids might do or say. I needn't have worried. The babies were charming and kept everyone's attention in the restaurant and the rest were ladies and gentlemen. We had a nice lunch and then went to the Reebok outlet for shoes. It was almost one kid per adult, so I just backed away and let them take over. No one was picky or demanding and everyone got a nice pair of shoes. The strangers became friends and the wife of the couple that we know told me that she had called about a child on the adoptuskids website and was getting the paperwork to start a home study to adopt an 11 year old boy she had seen on there, in part because of getting to know me and my children. Part of me wanted to jump and shout for joy that another child in the fostercare system would get out and part of me wanted to tell her that her heart might be broken one day when he told her all his hurt before he met her was her fault. The truth is, birth children may do the same thing, your wife or husband might do the same thing. Relationships are risky. But nothing else makes life worth living. I would do all this over again, as these grow up and leave, I plan on making room for more if the Lord leads. I'll take on the meanest teenagers they can send me. If the Lord doesn't come, I should be pretty good at teenagers in about 10 more years.