An interesting blog

Hi all,
I follow a bunch of blogs, I have found it to be very addictive and very informative, and came across this posting in one of my favorite bloggers:
Painfull parenting....when you don't 'feel' love for a child.

We face many times when we are asked if we met our children before we adopted them, and what if we decided we didn't like them. It is a question that makes sense and yet doesn't. I get what people are asking. I really do. But, I never met my bio kids before I birthed them and no, I don't always like them. I ALWAYS love them, but I don't always like what we are struggling through, or one has a habit that particularly annoys me some times. Anyway, you get my point. It is the same with our adopted children. God put them in our family. We truly believe that God orchestrated the constellation of our family. And if He did that, well, then, who really cares if I like them. Now, to tell you the truth, I do like them, every last child in my home. Not every minute of every day. Not tonight when two of my sons (I will leave it to you to guess which two - the advantage of having more than two, they get some anonymity) were discovered to be spraying silly string in their bedroom. Did you know that a mother's hearing can correctly identify the sound of spraying silly string from one floor below, even though she had forgotten that there was even any in the house? You have to understand, we have a rule about silly string. It is not allowed to be sprayed in the house. I am not a clean freak, not even close (but for heaven's sake, the house was just absolutely spotless for the homestudy adoption agency to visit us today - let it last more than five hours!!!), but one rule I stick by is that silly string is an outside toy. I have visions of cats, dogs, guinea pigs and siblings covered in the crazy stuff. No thank you, it is easier to clean up outside, thank you very much. A great outside toy, definitely not an inside toy. So, needless to say, Mom was not thrilled with two of her sons. Now, on a positive note, they seem to have learned that honesty goes a long way towards appeasing Mom in any situation - score one! But, ugh. So, I guess Mom is off dish duty for the week - I had better cook a ton and take advantage of it, and my floors will be washed one room at a time for the week. But, there was no yelling, no upset, just stern discussion about the rules (which were known and repeated to us - guess boys just didn't figure in supersonic "mom" hearing) and then some consequences for bad choices (still they maintain that this isn't how the nice brown curtain got silly string on it, but we all know better than that).

So, no, we don't have to like our children all the time, no matter how they came to us. But regardless of how we like them, we always love them. Love is unconditional and it is a verb. No one ever said you had to feel like it! Maybe that is something we are missing in our culture's relationship with love. It is based on feelings rather than doing. How I feel about things is quite often simply irrelevant. What I do is never irrelevant. And many times it is simply a conscious choice.

So, as we prepare to add two more boys to our family constellation, it is good to be reminded that this is a choice. Love is a choice. Because God first loved us, we must love others. Doesn't mean we have to like them. It does mean we have to act on it. I wonder how I will feel about these boys? Right now I have to admit that at times I am scared to death, but what prospective parent isn't, whether through birth or adoption? And I know that this too will pass. I will get to know these wonderful children, children that God made, and is seeing fit to place within our family. What an honor that He would entrust them to us. I hope I can live up to it, but I know that I can do nothing without Him. With Him, I can do anything He has called me to!