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What is Love?
Edited: Jasmine and I worked on this blog together. She told me what she was okay with me sharing and her main thought throughout this post was that we, as parents, can not assume we know what our child is feeling.
We’ve been having some interesting conversations with the middles lately about love. Jasmine recently asked, “How do you know if you love someone? What is love?” I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this one. It seems like it should be easy enough to describe what love is but it was harder than I thought it would be. How do you describe love? How can you put it into words that a child from an orphanage can understand? How can you adequately put into words that overwhelming feeling that you feel in your heart?
Jasmine questions everything about how she feels. We have had a hard couple years with her coming to terms with never being able to walk. You wouldn’t think that would be an issue with a child who has never walked and has slowly lost more and more bodily control, but it is. The China doctors said if she wasn’t so lazy she would be able to walk so she believed if only she worked harder she could walk. She was left at the orphanage at the age of 8 by her grandma who could no longer care for her so she believed if only she wasn’t so heavy she would have been worthy of staying with her grandma. She was told by the orphanage director and the nannies that coming to America would allow her the medical help she needed to walk so she believed if only she held on just a little bit longer and a family came, then all of her dreams would come true. This HOPE is what has kept her going for years.
When she had her surgery over two years ago, she realized there was nothing that could be done. She was never going to walk. She was depressed and it was understandable. She raged a lot. She would be angry for days. Just recently she shared that the driving force behind her wanting to stay with our family was that she was going to get treatment and be able to walk back into the orphanage and her grandmother’s house and prove that she was worthy of their love. She wanted to prove them wrong.
So while we thought she was adjusting well to our family, because she was happy and never complained, the truth was even though she acted like she was doing well, she was just waiting for the opportunity to walk so she could go back to China and show them all what a mistake they had made. She was NOT vested in growing connections with our family because she already had a family in China. Her HOPE was to one day go back to China where her grandma would welcome her back with open arms, tell Jasmine how much she missed her, and Jasmine would live happily ever after. Jasmine liked us well enough but she wasn’t going to be staying so why attach?
After her surgery she was so mad that she was never going to walk that she still wasn’t vested in working on relationships. Her dreams had died. Her HOPE was gone. We were the people who had let her down and she was mad. Everything that she had been planning was never going to happen. Everything everyone had told her was a lie.
It’s amazing how much you can miss when someone is quiet and pretends very, very well. Jasmine is a sweet, sweet soul who has been through so many horrible things and has spent lots and lots of time alone. As a very little girl her grandmother often left her sitting on the sidewalk for the whole day or she would leave her alone at home. No one else in the home was very connected to her. Jasmine remembers one uncle/brother (The terms used in China are loose so I am unsure of his actual relationship to her.) who took care of her once when she had a horrible fever. Outside of that she can’t remember anyone holding her hand or hugging her or tucking her in at night. For the most part she was left alone and had a very lonely existence.
When she went to the orphanage, she was unable to go to school because it was on another floor. She was unable to eat with all the other children because the dining room was on another floor. She was unable to go out to play because she couldn’t get down the stairs. She was left alone in a room with her Chinese soap operas for days on end.
It’s no wonder she doesn’t understand love because she was never shown love at least not in the way our family shows it. We often talk about how love is “action”. We love by how we care for others. We hug and say “I love you” often. We help each other. My love language is doing things for others so I show them by doing. I have explained that to Jasmine on many occasions. I love you so I fix your favorite foods. I love you so I am happy to take care of you. I love you so I teach you. I love you so I make sure you have your Chinese shows and music. I love you so I hug you good night. I love you so I make sure you take your medicine. I can explain those things to her but the concept is foreign to her. She can see how excited I am to see each of the children in the morning, how I care for them through out the day, and how I hug them and put them to bed, but it doesn’t resonate because it wasn’t her life until she was 14. She sees these things and she knows I do it because I love them, but it still doesn’t make sense.
She isn’t able to do much for anyone. The truth is she is barely able to move. She can brush her teeth and feed herself. She can play on her Ipad and she can fold her origami birds, BUT she isn’t able to do all those things she sees me do for others, so she assumes she isn’t able to love. She assumes there must be something wrong with her. We tell her over and over again that when she hugs the littles or reads to them that is showing love. When her heart hurts because they hurt, that is love. But she still questions. She still believes maybe she isn’t able to love. She has been on the outside so long that she doesn’t know how to join the dance.
Jasmine loves and cares for others but she hasn’t been able to put it into words. She keeps saying she doesn’t understand or she doesn’t get it. We know she loves in the way she cares about the kids, in the way she cares so deeply for all the orphans left in orphanages around the world, and in the way she cares for others that she sees hurting.
So imagine my thrill when she said to me, “I think I got it Mom. Remember when we had to share the bed in China? Remember how you pulled me close and held me? I don’t have the words for it. I never had anybody hold me close before. I never had anyone really hug me before. I can’t tell you how I felt. My heart was warm. Do you know that mom? My heart was warm and happy. How many kids will never never never know how that feels mama? That makes me sad.”
She said she finally understood what love was. She could put it in terms that she understood. That was a HUGE moment for her. But that moment was followed up by the words “Last night was the first night I no longer wanted to go back to China.”
I will admit that I just stood there staring back at her. Why would she want to go back to the place that caused her so much pain? Why would she want to go back to the place where she was tortured? Believe me when I say that I don’t use that word lightly. She has never been treated with the kind of dignity and care that she deserved. Why would she want to go back to the place where she just sat in a corner all day long? America has power wheelchairs and opportunities. America has a family that adores her. Why would she want to go back to the place where they dropped her down stairs and left her alone? But that’s just it, even when I think I know what she’s thinking, I don’t. I am so far off because I don’t think the way she does. This is what she said, “I want to go back because I want them to tell me that they made a mistake. I am worthy. I AM NOT WORTHLESS! I want them to pay for the horrible things that they did to me and I want to make sure nothing bad every happens to another child.”
I’ve tried hard to explain that as much as we want others to do things, we can’t make them. They are not going to make any of the past ok. They are not going to take back what they did. There is no way she can protect every child in China, no matter how noble the wish is. If there was a way to make this happen, we would travel with her and happily help in making this dream come true.
We tell her she is worthy. We remind her that her family has viewed her as worthy from day one. We remind her that since she accepted Jesus Christ into her heart, she is the daughter of the King. She is kind and beautiful and smart. She is beyond brave. She is resilient. She is so much more than the person China deemed “worthless”. We remind her again and again that walking doesn’t make you a worthy person, but in the end she has to believe this fact herself.
We called this summer “The Summer of Healing” because we were working on healing our family after dealing with some pretty rough patches with Jasmine and her rages. When someone is so unhappy the whole family ends up feeling it too. As parents, you can try and protect the others as much as you can, but there’s hurt feelings no matter how hard you try.
We turned a corner in her healing when she finally shared how she was feeling and how much anger she had toward those who hurt her. Had I known any of what she was planning, cause we knew she had anger but not what she wanted to do because of that anger, we could have talked through it. I was relieved that she finally shared so we could move forward. And the question that started her healing was “Then what?”. She hadn’t given any thought to what she would do after she went back or what would happen to her then. She was stuck.
So we worked on our Summer of Healing and now we are off to work on the Fall of Forgiveness.
Forgiveness doesn’t make it all okay, but to truly heal you need to be able to forgive and let things go. Forgiveness of ourselves is a must too. I’ve been there. It’s a hard road sometimes to forgive ourselves and to forgive those that have hurt us so deeply, especially when we carry the physical scars inflicted by them. It makes it almost impossible to forget, but to heal we need to forgive and move forward.
“Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.” – Marianne Williamson
I think Jasmine has taken a huge step forward in deciding that she has to let go of her dream that she can some how make them all pay for what they’ve done. Jasmine has taken giant healing steps forward this summer and we are praying that the “Fall of Forgiveness” will bring her heart the peace that it needs.