We hear of love-at-first-sight with parents meeting their newborns. But we don't have access to the instantaneous love a newborn has for their parents. As someone who grew up without a mother, I considered that such a blessing. She left when I was a little over a year old. I don’t remember wondering if she was coming back. I don’t know if I asked for her. I thought it a mercy that she left before I became too attached and damaged. I considered myself lucky that I didn’t remember.

Mila came into my world 29 years later and disrupted everything I thought I knew about the love of a mother and child. I knew I loved my girls from the very first moment, but I didn’t know how they loved me. I didn’t know that I loved my mother so organically.

Thanks to research, we now know that in the womb I knew the sound of her voice and could sense when she was stressed. After birth, I knew her scent and the feeling of her skin against mine. By 4 months, I would recognize her face. At 6 months, I would be calling her “Mama.” By 9 months, I would crawl around her feet waiting to be picked up. And at 30 years old, I was learning that no matter how much time has passed, even though I’ve forgiven her, that trauma still affects me.

I could write a book on the well-meaning quotes that people cling to that make me cringe! But there is one that I have been hearing more since the dumpster fire that is 2020-2021. “Kids are so resilient.”

The definition of resilient is “able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.” The definition of withstand is “remain undamaged or unaffected by.” The definition of recover is “to bring back to normal position or condition.”

So in saying the phrase “kids are so resilient”, we’re saying kids are unchanged by the hard things they experience. We have billions of adults still bound by their childhood traumas to prove this is simply not true. But more importantly friends, it’s not Biblical.

I cannot imagine some of the traumas others have experienced. Imagine me taking your hands in mine and looking you in the eye to tell you “God didn’t do this to you, love. He didn’t want the world to be this way.” But thankfully, through His great mercy, your grief does not need to be in vain. I imagine the only thing harder than God watching His children go through trials in their lives would be that they would remain unchanged by them. James 1:2-4 says: “Considering it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

God wants to use those trials to bring us closer to Him and to make us more like Jesus. But perseverance is an option...we can “let perseverance” work in us, or we can refuse it. We can allow God to work all things for good, but we don’t have to.

I have found that recovering from trauma comes in seasons. I didn’t realize until my children started asking for my husband and I to tell them stories from our childhoods that my memories are very slim. My mind was in self-preservation mode for so long to keep me from the pain of abandonment, it just never knew when it was safe to stop. What I once thought was a blessing, is now a burden. I pray for the Lord to heal the hurts that my mind still feels the need to protect me from and allow me more access to my memories. Perseverance just isn’t finished working yet.

I have wanted to adopt a baby since I was a child myself, a planting of the Lord, no doubt. As my husband and I work through the process of bringing a baby into our family through adoption I already feel my heart preparing for the day that I’ll hold my child’s hands and look them in the eyes and say “God didn’t do this to you, love. He didn’t want the world to be this way.” And I’ll validate that although they don’t remember life with just their birth Mama, it is still a huge loss and their pain matters. I’ll tell them how I leaned into our good Father and how He made beauty from ashes by gifting them to me. And I’ll pray they choose perseverance.