Plant eating children are better than children eating plants.

I know that every parent feels a great sense of responsibility for their children.  We are burdened with the job of making sure they turn out okay.  But I sometime think that because my children are adopted, I feel an even greater sense of resposibility.  Because someone gave me the most precious gift one can imagine.  They entrusted ME to raise their kids, to give them something that they could not.  And its more than just love because I believe that their birth parents loved them very much and continue to love them to this day.  And sometime I wonder if because I think this way and feel this way if I'm harder on myself then I ought to be.   

I'm not perfect.  So I screw up sometimes and make mistakes.  And sometimes I lose my patience, and sometimes when I lose my patience I lose my temper.  And after I lose my temper I feel horrible.  So bad that sometimes it can send me into a downward spiral of guilt, and pushes me to the edge of depression.

That is when I need to remember the plant eating story.  The planting eating story was something I read randomly somewhere, I think it was a blog.  The women writting it had children that were birth and adopted.  She related a story about her first support metting with other adoptive parents and how they were all stressing about the strange habits that their kids had and worring if it was because they were adopted.  She they relates all the strange thing her children did (that were not adopted) including eating plants.  She just assumed (rightly so) that it was just strange things children did.  And as adoptive parents we need to relax and just remember that kids are kids and not to stress so much about them being adopted.  I showed it to Kent because I thought it was funny and it became a running joke with us.  "Oh that's cuz shes adopted"  No we don't do this much around the kids anymore now that they are old enough to understand us.  But sometimes its still funny.

So I need to remember that even though I'm an adoptive parent, I'm a parent first.  Which means I'm a parent that loses her patience with her kids, whose kids drive her crazy at times, who sometimes wonder if they are worth it after all, and constantly worries if she's doing the right thing.  And its just because kids are kids, and parents are parents and sometimes it seems the two are incompatible.