This week’s guest poster has asked to remain anonymous and Things They Can’t Say is a safe place for her to vent.
I was supposed to write a post about compassion a couple of weeks ago for a blog movement I signed up for. The date came and went, but today, I want to share what compassion means to me. I’m not going to look it up in the dictionary. I’m going to speak from the heart.
Compassion is taking in your husband’s rude, snotty, disrespectful stepdaughter’s newborn baby so he doesn’t go to foster care.
Compassion is taking care of him even though you are being used as a scapegoat and blamed for everything.
Compassion is continuing to take care of him even though every attempt to deny your existence and role in the baby’s life has been made.
Compassion (and stupidity) is letting them steamroll over you and make you feel like you’ve been run over by a freight train, a passenger train, and a semi all at once, just because the baby needs the stability.
Compassion is not leaving your husband when he brings the baby home after you said no, anyway.
Compassion is doing something good for someone you dislike just because it’s the right thing to do.
And sometimes, compassion comes back to bite you hard on the ass.
Please realize I am angry. My compassion makes me continue with the fostering, because, after all, it’s not the baby’s fault who his parents are (or that the problems existed long before the baby did.)
Please understand, I never wanted to do this. Compassion is having a bitch forced down your throat, changing and rearranging your whole life to take care of their child instead of letting him fall into the system, and being smacked on the cheek constantly for it.
Compassion is turning the other cheek, and eventually, you run out of cheeks.
My cup of compassion is empty. Unfortunately, it was wasted on the undeserving.
I’m a mom, I know.
That’s such a tough situation but good for you for taking the high road, because you are right it’s not the babies fault.
I am so so sorry you are going through this, I cannot even imagine what it would be like. I was a foster care worker when I was first married and totally understand the importance of good family and foster parents; I cannot even imagine how hard it would when the mother is family and not good family. So many days on my job I just had to remind myself, I do it for the kids, I do it for the kids.
I don’t know who you are but I want to hug you and thank you for being you. For putting yourself out there for this child. For loving beyond yourself .
I know words are not worth much, but I think you are a very special, selfless human being for deciding to this this. I know it’s hard and not what you signed up for, but it’s also LOVE in its purest form.
I’ll be sending good thoughts into the universe for you.
I think it is important to recognize that you are angry … and yet all the while doing the right thing.
It doesn’t make you lacking in compassion … it makes you a human.
A good one.