Author:
Juli Perry Briggs
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Date Posted: 14:00:29 04/03/03 Thu
Bruce, please just know that your family has come to my thoughts many times over the last several decades, and you are all remembered fondly for being great individuals, and as a collective bunch! Your folks and Lisa Black's parents were my chaperones for Pasadena, among other things!
None of us would want to have endured the pain of the loss of Brian as you did, and I'll never forget him.
I personally do not mind admitting, in one aspect of my present life, of functioning out in front of the whole world professionally as though things have been GREAT when on the private level they're a mess. My husband and I have truly not been able to accomplish much in the way of bringing about adjustment and acceptance on the part of the two Russian orphans who became our daughters at ages 8 and 9 in 1997. They were badly wounded by their past lives, and many people who are familiar with the international adoption scene are beginning to think that Romania and Russia has really "dumped" a lot of what their experts believed were the kids who just were not going to make it on unsuspecting North American families. It is not a pretty site, and God, how I wish I could more gracious towards these kids and not let them know how exhausted I am with their attitudes and denial about what they need to work through, but it's a vicious cycle. The younger one still GLORIFIES the two and half years she spent institutionalized (in an orphanage that would have been nowhere near as "nice" as it was, had many Americans not been donating resources like there was no tomorrow, but she shouldn't be expected to see that).
The girls ran away from home last Saturday night. Ran to a family that is so culturally out of it that they never even suspected that the girls were covering up that they were foreign adoptees with massive psychiatric and learning disability interventions in place, and that family did not have the decency to let us know that our children had shown up on their front doorstep at 1am. When we showed up in our massive search to locate our daughters, this other family made us stand on their doorstep for 9 minutes, only shouting through the window, "we'll wake them up, yes they are here."
The "system" in the county in which we reside is very liberal, and while we managed by the grace of God to get a wonderful 26-yr veteran of the police force to show up and ream the kids for over 45 minutes, no one is going to do anything to really scare the kids or enable that other family to see what they did was inappropriate. Well, I digress. It's just all up to us, and I don't know what more we might be able to do to help these delicate youngsters. It's embarrassing to admit that my home is a war zone, but what's the point of making it look like something it isn't? I thank God that I own a service business, in the South were folks are so "real" versus those I encountered in DC for years, and where I am working with people's pets, because that just sets human beings up to be in a genuine frame of mind, and be supportive of each other, and "relate." Many of my clients follow our home situation closely, as I do theirs, and I get steered to community resources right and left because they're aware of other families who have had difficulties and they want to help.
But, as I said, Bruce, we MHS band people really were involved with others as human beings for a long, intense number of years, and I do not think we will ever regret having known and loved each other, and I think that the barriers about who we were then and who we are now will ALWAYS be lower than the kinds of fronts that other adults who used to know each other as adolescents will be. I think we are all lucky to have been in the stew pot together and the glue that holds us together will always be strong. You will be missed, but I will be thinking about your sister-in-law as she begins this new, beautiful phase in her life.
Thanks for letting us relate to you for who you are and how you feel. Just imagine what it would be like for each of us if we had not had the experience of being Ram Banders -- I really believe we each would have had a greater likelihood of living in isolation and not having the skills to relate to society. The intense time we spent together just brought about a metamorphasis on nearly every one of us, and we're greater for it.
Juli
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