Why Amazing Parents?

Because a very wise woman once told me that experiencing suffering on a huge level, the level that RAD families experience it, is like a suspension bridge. It is a long, treacherous bridge made out of rope and old wood. It looks rickety — and it is.

The human being is born on one side of that bridge with the rest of humanity. Life is good on that side. The people there are joyous. They laugh, they play, they dance. All is well on that side of the bridge.

You go on about your business and never notice that there’s even a bridge.

Until…. some point in your life, you happen to glance over while you’re dancing, and you see the bridge. Something compels you, maybe even propels you, to cross it. You tiptoe over each thin board and hope against hope that each one holds your weight. Your knuckles turn white from gripping the rope for dear life. Will you even make it to the other side?

If you do, you are both blessed and cursed all at once. What you find on that side is something you never expected. You find suffering. Suffering on a huge, catastrophic level. The level of shear horror. Because you suddenly realize the pain that your child feels. And not only that, but also that it’s not just your child. It’s all the children who lost their birth families. It’s all the children whose mother’s were on drugs. It’s all the families that took in those children. It’s hundreds, thousands, millions of hurting children and families suffering the same pain. They are all out there somewhere and they all have lived through things a normal person would find unimaginable.

For so long you didn’t even know that side existed. But now you are all too aware. And now you are facing extremely intense emotions that you never even knew were in you, that you didn’t know were in anybody.

On the suffering side of the bridge, you are lonely, afraid, utterly, utterly sad. The thoughts you face on that side of the bridge are completely mortifying. At times you are completely consumed, even paralyzed, by pain. All you want to do is close your eyes and run back across those rickety boards to the other side — where people are still laughing and dancing and carrying on.

That is the bridge of suffering. That is the bridge of Attachment Disorder.

The problem is, it’s not until you cross it, that you realize it’s one-way. You can never go back to the life you had before, to who you were before. You can never go back to NOT knowing.

This is the reality that many adoptive and foster families struggle through and endure every single day with their children. And what they learn over time is that the only way to survive that side of the bridge is by not trying to survive it alone.