A sign of the times.  Another one:  our girl is struggling so much that for the first time in 8 years, we are looking at a change in meds to try to help her.  We have had to stop and ask, again, if we should reconsider the decision to move her to Tallahassee.  We are trying to get some more information together.  Maria’s behavior is very much like what we saw in the days leading up to her move to BARC.  Without a way to conceptualize, to distance herself from or examine all the emotions that this move must represent for her, there is little left for her to do but act out.  Her care team and we are worried.

Sherod and I are also painfully aware that this woman-child of ours has been snatched out of one place and put in the next so many times now, had to start over.  When we moved her from the hospice where she was living when she found us and we found her, she was 3 years old and stopped talking for days and days.  I had a trip scheduled for soon after that.  Fortunately, I had taken a whole bunch of pictures from Casa de la Sal, the hospice, and made a little laminated book for her.  The sheer and absolute joy in that little girl’s face when I went to the orphanage where we had to place her while her adoption was completed.  She kept taking the picture book up to her face over and over again, naming everyone she recognized, giving them little kisses.

There are a long list of reasons for our move and an equally long list why we have considered that having her closer to us was the wise and best decision.  But as it always is with our children, I believe:  loving this young woman like I do means being willing to make the very best decision possible for her no matter what the cost or sadness for us.  I don’t want to be 14 hours away from her but if that is what it takes for her to keep making progress, that is what we will do.

Tomorrow in the Revised Common Lectionary, we start moving into what someone else has described as that ‘exquisite ambiguity’ that comes as the Eastertide ebbs into the growing season after Pentecost. In John, as Jesus prepares his disciples for loss, he keeps promising that he will send an Advocate who will abide with them.  I love that the Greek word for Advocate has more than one meaning.  Yes, it has the meaning of legal counsel.  And it also denotes one who walks alongside another.  No matter how close or how far away she is from me or I from her, as long as there is breath in my body, I will be walking alongside my daughter.  Praying for gentler days, asking for mercy and goodness and blessings upon our Luz, our little light…