I've joined a mailing group of foster adopt parents and have been enjoying reading about/corresponding with other families across the country who are also on this journey. Each and every family's story is different.

But as I always find, when I respond to questions other people ask I receive more than I give.

Several posters ask about their foster or adoptive children's behaviors. This has me cracking open the thick Pre-Adoptive Training Manual and Supplemental Readings book that we got in class and is bringing me to new levels of understanding about what our future children are and will be going through and for what we'll need to prepare.

The piece that really struck me today was about grief and loss:

We know now that even infants and toddlers grieve the loss of previous parent-figures.

Children, and adults too, may need to revisit their pasts and re-grieve their losses at various developmental stages and significant life events. Grieving is not a one -time occurence. Past pain often revisits the scarred and healing heart. Child Development Section II, Pages 11-12.

I totally get this. I've grieved over many things: for my father's death before I was born (I've grieved for his absence in my life), for pets that have passed on, for my mother's best friend who died of cancer (who was like a beloved aunt to me), the deaths of my grandparents, the loss of my two pregnancies. I've also grieved for my childhood hurts and outrages.

I just read read, in Terry Gross's book All I Did Was Ask, Mary Karr's comment, "I've often said a dysfunctional family is a family with more than one person in it." We've ALL been hurt! Maybe not by our families as much as by our schoolmates, or perhaps not as profoundly as a child who's lost their parent or family, but we have all experienced pain and loss in one form or another.

I've spoken to widows who've lost their husbands thirty and fifty years before and they still cry when they talk about it. I have witnessed the enduring grief of my friends and my own family members who've lost a loved one through suicide. The grief never "goes away." I don't believe that you ever "get over" a profound loss in your life. Over time the grief simply becomes more bearable.

Learning how to apply the experiences I've had dealing with grief and loss to the job of parenting an adoptive child is, I am finding, deeply empowering and yet challenging, in a good way. I will be challenged to reach deep inside myself for the calm and the courage it takes to meet a hurt child where they are. I am challenged to learn more about the attachment and grief process for children, and I am challenged to acknowledge my own grief and pain so that I can enter into someone else's suffering from a healthy, healing place.

And I have time to think about these things and incorporate them into my "personal tool kit" long before a child is placed with me, so I feel like I've got a huge blessing of not only personal experience, professional advice, but also time to incorporate it into my way of thinking and being, so that I can be as prepared as possible for our future children.

This journey itself is a blessing. I am so thankful to have this opportunity.

(Recommended listening: Celtic Lamentations by Aine Minogue. Aine Minogue grieves through ancient lamentations. Listening to this album makes me feel like I'm part of a continuum of souls who've sought solace and comfort from life's losses and pain. In other words, I'm not alone.)