Our 12-Year Attachment Journey.. .a story still unfolding

It was Christmas morning when I arrived to pick her up at the Salt Lake International Airport. We wished each other a Merry Christmas as we hugged and she climbed into the car on that unusually snowless day. She’s a resident advisor at her university this year and when the RA’s literally drew toothpicks to determine who would need to take the final shift before Christmas, she drew the short stick. So she arrived on Christmas morning.

As we drove away from the airport toward my parents’ home, I asked her about her life. Over the last two years, I have experienced her offering me windows into her heart to which I have ached for access the previous ten years. Each invitation to her heart is like acquiring Willy Wonka’s golden ticket--the power and privilege to enter the holy ground of her life and heart. The privilege of knowing her, connecting to her, loving her, and being loved by her. 

Having enjoyed the precious gift of securely attaching to our three biological children before we adopted our beautiful daughters made the sting of our detachment throughout the years viscerally acute. We knew what we were missing as we waded through the waters of life, and culture, and story that made it so challenging to find our way toward one another’s hearts. 

During the first years post-adoption, people would say to me, “You must understand the heart of God so well as an adoptive mom.” 

I would respond, “No, if anything being an adoptive mom has exposed how completely I don’t understand the heart of God. What I see vividly is that my capacity to love is so far from His capacity to love His adopted children.” 

The limitations of my love were ever before me as I encountered our daughters’ strategies for survival. Though I had done extensive emotional work and spiritual formation before we brought them into our family, many days I found myself living bereft of the growth in love I had worked so hard to get into me. There was a part of me that simply thrashed at the disconnection and my failure to forge bonds of attachment. Over the years, there have been plenty of days, hours, minutes to surrender and re-surrender myself to the mystery of this journey. There have been endless opportunities to invite God to shape me more into the loving image bearer He created me to be. 

Surrender and Hope

I have confronted my darkness, held space for all of our brokenness, and surrendered my strategies for survival that were exposed in the light of unmet longing. I learned to hold in tension surrender and hope. This is a delicate tension requiring an artful grip. As days turned into years, it felt relieving to hold surrender and let go of hope. Or let go of both and thrash out my ache to God. Eventually, the lovingkindness of God brought me into His embrace and steadied the arms of my soul into this artful embrace of surrender and hope.

As hard as I have fought for love and attachment, I see our daughters fighting for love as well. This gritty, mysterious path makes warriors out of its pilgrims. 

Our daughters’ circumstances in their lives before us provided them with tremendous freedom and  power for girls their age. Such freedom can also come with the cost of too little protection. Thus, coming under our “protection” felt more like imprisonment. It’s difficult for us to see another’s face when our vision is clouded by entitlements. I longed for them to see me as I am rather than who they saw me to be in their hunger for what they thought would bring freedom. And, for a handful of years, I longed to be a different mom out of the shame of who I wished I could be for them. 

This journey of walking toward attachment to our daughters has shown me how I so often struggle to see God’s face clearly, especially when my circumstances seem to impinge on my entitlements. It has shown me how intent God is as a lover determined to tear off the masks I have unknowingly laid over His face which distort my vision of His face. 

What I absolutely have come to understand about God is how He aches for us to attach to Him and weeps over the self-protective strategies we employ to keep Him at arms length. I have felt in my bones how He aches for us to move toward Him and offer Him our hearts, our thoughts, our frustrations—offer Him any thread that would interweave our hearts with His. It has pulsed through my veins how He aches for us to invite Him into our inner world with even a small offering. It pulses through my heart how He went to the ends of the earth to sacrifice for us so that we could see His face more clearly in His beloved Son, behold His lovingkindness, and more freely enter into His embrace. 

As I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ home on Christmas day, she opened her heart to me in the way I had ached for 12 years. As she shared her deep sadness, her grief morphed into tears and she leapt into my embrace. I held her tightly over the console as her broken heart evoked my tears and together, holding one another with wet cheeks, we tasted the sweet fruit of attachment for which we have fought over the past 12 years.

How might God be inviting you to attach more securely to Him? Or others?

So next time you look up at the sun, moon and stars and wonder, remember: they are there because God loves, because the Father’s love for the Son burst out that it might be enjoyed by many. And they remain there only because God does not stop loving. He is an attentive Father who numbers every hair on our heads, for whom the fall of every sparrow matters; and out of love he upholds all things through his Son, and breathes out natural life on all through his Spirit.
― Michael Reeves