The challenges our traumatized children brought into our home trained our other children about challenges within effective families, how life was to be lived and how to succeed against the odds.

I Guess You’ll Get What’s Coming to You

Rather than being angry, I had to smile when my great-uncle said that. In it I heard a fondly remembered voice that had been absent from my life for over a quarter of a century. It was the voice of his half-brother, my grandfather, who always said it like it was. Those men came from a different time and culture. In fact, the principle of challenges within effective families had done much to form my grandfather and his siblings. My uncle wasn’t wishing evil on us after he told me about the news story he had seen about troubled older children coming from Russian orphanages. He had shared it in response to my comments on returning to that country to adopt the teenaged siblings of my two young daughters, who had joined our family only a year before.

Challenges within effective families can do more good than harm if they are respected and handled carefully.

My great-uncle, just as my grandfather would have, wanted me to know the difficulties that would come if I decided to proceed with my plans. He wouldn’t have recommended that I continued. Even so, if I went against information that was available, I wouldn’t avoid the consequences. I was concerned but not overly so. Challenges within effective families can do more good than harm if they are respected and handled carefully. My uncle’s wife immediately shut him down after he told me he guessed that I’d get what was coming to me. It didn’t do any good. My mind still processed words my grandfather might have said after such a statement. “Ya better pack yer lunch.”

As those older children eventually joined our family, the horror stories we had read and heard about played out in our home. If challenges within effective families are a good thing, we had hit the mother-lode. A couple of years later, when Uncle Garth asked me how it was going, I told him it was difficult, but that we were making progress and that we had some success and great hopes. He just smiled and wished me well. I hadn’t fallen into the trap of complaining to him after his warning. In our family, if someone tells you you’ll break your legs if you jump off a ledge, you don’t go “running” to them when it happens.

Challenges within effective families can reach ugly levels just as they do in dysfunctional families.

We witnessed mental illness on levels we had never imagined with our oldest daughter. She retired multiple therapists. Behavioral camps were miserable failures. Challenges within effective families can reach ugly levels just as they do in dysfunctional families. Our daughter told us she hated us. She threatened us with our lives with all the seriousness and gravity that she could attach to those threats. Eventually it wasn’t safe for her or any member of our family for her to remain in the home.

As my oldest daughter entered residential treatment programs, she rightfully felt abandoned and betrayed. She told us she didn’t want a family anymore and we should go away and never come back. But we kept going back. We found that the difference between challenges within effective families and ones that are less effective are that effective ones stand by their family members only second to keeping other family members safe. It took years before our oldest daughter finally accepted the fact that we weren’t going away. Today she lives in a group home but we still see her weekly and she visits us in the home about one day a month. Now she is often heard to say: “Family most important thing.”

For challenges within effective families to do good, the work load can’t be fair.

It wasn’t just our oldest daughter. Some of our younger children had serious issues brought on by their early lives of trauma. Our oldest sons were forced to grow up before they should have. As parents, my wife and I often needed to give time and effort that should have gone to our oldest sons, to other children who were struggling and simply needed our attention more. We relied on our sons. We expected their help. They held in many of their frustrations and dealt with them with less parental involvement than they deserved because they knew that their parents already had more than they could handle. For challenges within effective families to do good, the work load can’t be fair. Stronger people have to lift more. And those older sons always did all that they could to lighten the load that they placed on parents and the family, in general, so that the family could support the rest of the load that others placed on it.

There had to have been times that my sons resented the circumstances that I placed them in. There were times when I resented it. Of course we learned that life wasn’t fair. We came to understand that good does not always beget good (at least not in the short term). My wife and I, along with our children, kept trudging forward even after we thought we couldn’t continue. Sometimes the work-horses in our family stumbled and needed extra care. They got it. That’s how challenges within effective families are handled. But when the individual struggles were under control, our sons would be put back in the harness. I never would have wished the difficulties that came onto members of our family. My wife and I lamented that our home and family were not the comfortable little bubbles that shielded our children from the outside world. We had taken that away by the decisions we had made to bring the outside world into our home.

I don’t know when I actually began to understand challenges within effective families. It came slowly, over time. As I lamented the loss of the protecting bubble, I soon saw that our actions had replaced it with something else. Our home had given up some of its protecting qualities while assuming the role of a training camp for life. Of course my children learned that they were loved and cherished. They learned that their parents would help them and protect them when they needed protection. But they also learned that they could do hard things. As they got old enough to experience real problems with life on their own, they didn’t immediately run to my wife and me, expecting us to solve their problems. They rolled up their sleeves and went to work.

The challenges our traumatized children brought into our home trained our other children about challenges within effective families, how life was to be lived and how to succeed against the odds.

Once they had done all they could do, if they still needed help, they came to us. They stuck to it when they had problems because that is what they learned at home. They fixed problems rather than skipping out because they knew it was the right thing and they knew that anything worthwhile doesn’t come easy. They had learned from the difficulties they faced in our family-building, how much could be accomplished over time with enough work. The challenges our traumatized children brought into our home trained our other children about challenges within effective families, how life was to be lived and how to succeed against the odds.

While I wouldn’t have wished those challenges on my family members, seeing what that life taught them, I wouldn’t take it away. The disrespect they experienced taught them the importance of respect. The temporary hate that was handed to them in return for their good deeds taught them that good should be done for the sake of good and not for any reward. The difficulties and struggles that went on and on, built them up. The work and repeated exercise gave them inner strength that would serve them for the rest of their lives. Watching the slow but measurable progress that came at a snail’s pace gave them wisdom. Challenges within effective families are well worth their cost.

As I look back, I can still hear words from another generation. Yes Grandpa and Uncle Garth… I guess my children got what was coming to them.

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