This.

     It's difficult for me to write right now.  I want to be truthful and I want to stay transparent.  I want to express our new found hope; but not discount the daily battles that our boy is still working on.  It's such a fine, fine line.
     My mind thinks of all my friends in our trust based parenting group; the parents that get what I mean when I talk about my giant 6 yo moving his body like a toddler.  The moms that understand the heartache of fighting for a child, day in and day out, that doesn't believe he is worth fighting for.  I want to transpose some of the glimpses of healthy that we are getting more and more and more of.  I want those families to know God is bigger than the hurt any child has endured.  God may not fix it now but He sees and loves and knows each of these babies by name.  As they were, as they are and as they will become.
     Etienne only slept a few hours last night.  Once he needed all his sheets changed, he just couldn't settle his body or his mind back down.  He was in the unreachable place.  I think we both fell asleep just before dawn.  Needless to say, our morning was rough.  Tears over the shape of his Afro and that the toothbrush was "too wet."  Any parent familiar with the hardcore attachment stuff will know what I did.  I hugged him close.  I whispered words of Isaiah to him.  I made him stay right next to me.  This is where we have new hope.  He listened to me and he heard me and he felt me.  He stopped fighting me, he swallowed his tears and he said he was sorry.  I could reach him this morning.  He got out of that unreachable place.
     Those moments, they break my heart all over again for him.  They make me forget our long night and the endless laundry.  They remind me of where we have been and they give me more strength than a restful night of sleep could ever do.

"Great is your faithfulness; Your mercies are new every morning." -Lamentations 3:23