I brought my children home through sheer determination, but it was not enough.
For about ten years, adopting children was my part-time job. During some years in Tanzania, I drove downtown two or three times a week, fighting an hour or more of epic Dar es Salaam traffic each way. The social welfare office was located in a large warehouse-type building divided into cubicles. Birds circled in the rafters above my head while I sat and waited (sometimes for hours) on a hard wooden bench outside my social worker’s office. She shared it with two other people, their three desks crammed so close together that there was barely space for anything else. She kept my files in a plastic grocery bag.
I never called in advance, because I learned that my social worker would always tell me not to come. So I never called; I just showed up. She was there only about half the time, so I wasted half of those long trips.
Ninety percent of the time, even if she was there, there was no movement on the adoption process. But I took the chance and made the drive again and again because I wanted her to see my face. My strategy was this: to make an overworked, underpaid social worker so sick of me that she eventually did what I asked. It worked.
The whole process took years. And then it took more years to go through the American immigration process (which was its own special nightmare). But I did it four times, and nothing was going to stop me. There’s a reason why Dobson’s techniques in The Strong-Willed Child failed on me when I was five years old. Determination has always been my strength. I wanted to adopt four children, and I got them.
I took that same determination into parenting.
I was going to be the mother that these children needed. If love and grit could do it, I was going to do it. They would be happy. They would be healthy. They would be motivated and responsible. They would appreciate books and cooking and serving others. They would be trustworthy and kind. They would have a secure identity in being adopted, being both American and Tanzanian, and being Third-Culture Kids. They would love each other, their childhood, and learning new things.
I had a strategy to accomplish each of these goals. I was determined: I would find a method, a chart, a book, a list, a boundary, a consequence.
But what I discovered is that bringing them home, as challenging as it was, was the easy part. Raising them is much harder. And I’ve slowly, incrementally, had to accept this hard truth: Determination is not enough. I am not enough for my kids.
