Was I Not Worth Saving?

She was three days old when we brought her home. Small enough for me to hold in one hand, barely over five pounds when we picked her up from the DHS office. A premature baby, placed with us to be loved and kept safe until her family could become safe enough to take her back.

And she made me angry in a way I could not explain.

Why does this little girl get to be saved? What is different about her that she was able to make it out of her childhood unscathed? Why didn’t God send someone to rescue and love me? Was I not worth being saved?

These questions began to surface once I slowed down and looked at the anger. It was not consistent with the reality of the situation. Bringing a helpless little girl into our home had stirred up a deeply wounded part of my childhood I had long suppressed.

While I was a completely functional adult, mostly in control of myself, I had unresolved complex trauma lying dormant in my body. Something that once ravaged your whole body, now out of sight and out of mind, can come raging back unannounced.

This is one of the hardest chapters in my book, and it sits right before the collapse of my faith. Read straight, you might think that rescuing a little girl from a life that would most likely have looked like mine, maybe worse, should have sealed my love of the faith. It didn’t. That confusion is part of the point, because it did the same thing to me when it happened.

So how does a deeply therapeutic and emotionally beautiful event cause the reaction it did in me?

We intentionally chose to open our home and foster children. We did it with the explicit hope of changing the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in America. So why would bringing this helpless baby into our house to receive love bring up such explosive anger? None of it makes sense, until you understand the reasons under the anger. The louder the anger, the deeper the wound underneath that it is protecting.

By the time she entered our home, I had begun therapy for the first time in my adult life. My father had just died, and our second biological daughter had been born after my wife almost died from an ectopic pregnancy. The year before had been a deeply tumultuous one, and my need to be in therapy was driven by the anger that kept bubbling up in my daily home life.

A couple of months before my father passed, I would feel anger I couldn’t explain, and it would spill out in simple frustrations at my wife and my daughter. Nothing in my day could account for why I felt this way. My wife, being the wise woman she is and a trauma therapist, knew more about the reasons than I did, and she was kind in how she approached me about them.

She insisted I begin therapy, because the anger, while not abusive like my father’s, was still destructive and unhealthy. It had an echo of my childhood I did not want to hear, and it was not something my wife was willing to let our family live inside. So I agreed. I was resistant at first. I thought, what good would talking about my emotions do, and how could that change the past and what happened to me? I also saw emotions as untrustworthy, something to be mastered rather than expressed. Expression was a weakness in my eyes.

What I didn’t expect was how much therapy would open up my body’s ability to feel again. It wasn’t that I felt nothing before. I couldn’t feel the softest ones, the most vulnerable and sensitive ones. How could I, when no one had ever been able to hold those emotions for me safely?

As I began therapy, I became able to access the deep emotions my trauma self had buried. It let me touch something I never could before.

The grief underneath the anger.

I began to see the anger as a protector, shielding me from the more vulnerable emotion beneath it. I saw for the first time how dangerous grief is to a young, vulnerable child, and how the anger had protected me. I also saw how it had become maladaptive. It had never been safe to touch that grief as a child. Now, as an adult, I had the resources and the attachment figures to begin to do it, so the anger was no longer necessary as a guard.

When the anger stood down, the wound could fully surface. The wound of why I wasn’t rescued when I so badly wanted to be. On top of it sat another fear. What if she went back to her mother, and that home wasn’t safe? What does it mean for a little girl to taste safety and have it ripped out of her grasp? What does that say about how the world works, about God’s priorities and human agency? None of it could be resolved cleanly.

There is an irony in the role of a foster parent. You are the one on the front lines, and in many ways the one with the least say in the child’s future. Your role is to house and love a child with the expectation that you will hand her back, in hopes that the home she left has done the work to become safe enough for her to return to.

As a child of a broken home, I understood its mechanics in ways people raised by loving parents don’t. So as we stayed in communication with the biological mother and grandmother, we could see the ways she wasn’t truly safe and was deliberately hiding things from the courts. My old childhood wound, needing to speak up and not being able to be heard, resurfaced. Here I was as an adult, watching this helpless little girl possibly return to the destruction I had lived, and I couldn’t change it.

It wasn’t until my therapist asked me whether I could speak up in any way that might change the outcome for our daughter. Her situation did not look hopeful for reunification. I knew with every fiber of my being that if she went back, she would be back in the system in no time. Had I kept quiet, still believing no one was going to listen to me, she might have been sent back to a mother who clearly wasn’t safe.

So I began to speak up, in court and to the DHS caseworkers, and I changed the trajectory of her story. I had processed the childhood wound that said I can’t speak up because no one is there to listen, and I realized it was a version of myself I was still carrying. It wasn’t that I never spoke up about injustice. I had spent much of my adult life angry about it, and aggressive about it. But that wouldn’t work here. If I lost my temper in court or with the caseworker, I would only hurt her chances. I needed to speak up, but I needed to do it vulnerably.

So I resolved to call DHS and be vulnerable. I wanted to ask them the way that small boy asked the question under the rage, the one who held the deep wound and wanted so badly to say, “Can someone save me?” As I told the caseworker my concerns, I began to cry, and I asked her why we were reunifying our daughter when I had sent documented evidence of the mother lying and hiding it from her. The caseworker listened and told me she would speak with her supervisor.

I hung up, thankful the tears had come during the call, and that I had quieted the rage inside me. A week or so later, she called back. They had reviewed the concerns and decided to change the goal from reunification to adoption. My excitement could barely be contained. Then came the next question. “Would you two be willing to adopt her?” Before she finished the sentence, I let out a soft, audible sob and answered, “Yes, we would.”

How this related to God was more complicated. In my mind, this was God orchestrating the events, allowing me to suffer as a child so that I could become a father who would open his home to a helpless child and love her in a way that was unique because I had known the pain of a broken family.

But that was painful in its own way. It still required God to have allowed me to suffer and be abused in order to become this father to her. If that was his “plan,” I didn’t get a choice in it, and he allowed a small boy to be abused for the future potential of being a good father. As poetic and beautiful as that idea can appear on the surface, it is paid for by the suffering my body had to hold to get there.

For the first time since my childhood, my body experienced what it meant to speak up and be rescued. The rescuing came through my own need to know that speaking up against injustice, vulnerably, could change the world around me. So while it saved my daughter from a life I had once lived, it also showed my body, for the first time, that my vulnerability had a place in this world.

I remember sobbing in the shower about this. Sobbing because, for the first time, that small child felt seen and listened to, and had tasted a small measure of the love he so deeply wanted. It had come through my own actions. I had been the rescuer of my daughter, and at the same time of my childhood self. I was showing that little boy that I would have spoken up for him if I could. I would have brought him into my home and loved him like he was my own son. I would have fought for him in the courts and with a DHS worker. I was answering my own question in real time.

Yes, you were worth saving.