We are all orphans, or why this website exists

Welcome to Side Notes. At the intersection of adoption, poetry, and pop culture is the reality that God will make his forever home with us.

It was in September of 2018 that my family became an insta family. Not insta in the Instagram sense. But insta in the instant sense, in the Mark Wahlberg-ian family dramedy sense. Instant family. We were matched with our girls, Rain and Lily, in late August, and they were placed in September 2018. (Our son, James, was adopted in June of that year.) Our family went from three to five in a little over two weeks. A couple of days before the girls arrived, I asked Lindsey, “Are you scared?”

“I’m 15 percent terrified,” she said.

Much has been said since then about our journeys through the wild and beautiful lands of foster-to-adoption. The terror has subsided. Life has what some might call a “normal” feeling to it, but that is such an unhelpful term that I’m hesitant to use it. We have not fostered or fostered-to-adopted any children since our girls came home. Only the Lord knows if we will again. And with so much time between the adrenaline-filled instant days and the days of now, I have found myself wondering if I still consider myself a foster parent. It’s a question about how much of the past still defines how I see myself and my family in these decidedly less insta times. Some days I do feel like we’re a “normal” family and the awareness of fostering and adoption are not front and center. In a lot of ways, that’s a good and healthy thing. Then there are other days (or weeks) when the reality of our family’s blended histories is very immediate and thick.

Regardless of that awareness level, I have realized that one does not so much foster or adopt as much as one gets fostered or adopted. The doing of these things does something to you. It forms you into a different kind of person. In the process of fostering and adopting, Lindsey and I have been given a whole new way of seeing and moving through the world. Even now, when we’re not actively fostering or adopting new children, even when the craziness of being an insta family has become a memory, we are in a sense always going about that work.

Or, rather, that work keeps finding us. And not just with our own kids.

There’s a girl in our neighborhood that comes over a few times a week to play with our kiddos. She has come to our kids’ birthday parties. We love being her neighbors. Partly because there is an intrinsic connection, a mutual—if unspoken—understanding of our respective stories.

Our neighbor girl is in a kinship situation—meaning, she is living with and being cared for by her Nana and not her biological parents. Not long ago, she showed up on our front porch just as we were finishing breakfast one day. She was sobbing. Lindsey stepped outside, hugged her, listened to her. She said she missed her grandma, the grandma she used to live with. She said she wanted to live with her again. She didn’t want to live where she lived now. As she was telling Lindsey why she was so sad, her Nana drove up and walked up to our front porch. The three of them talked for another minute or so before our friend was ready to go back home. Lindsey hugged her Nana and told her that we know how hard it is. They got in the car and drove off.

Margaret Pope, writing in The Mockingbird magazine about orphans and Harry Potter, observed, “J.K. Rowling did not have to create a hero and a villain who were both orphaned – but she did, because orphanhood seems to be part of what it means to be human” (emphasis mine).

The Christian Bible testifies to this reality, over and over again. But its basic structure supports this narrative. In the valley between Eden’s rupture and the Revelation promise of “all things new,” we walk as orphans looking for a place to call home.

But we weren’t the only ones looking. The story of the Bible is about a God who came looking for us, to find us and bring us in safely to his forever home.

That’s why we see this confluence of themes—or orphan-adjacent themes, at least—everywhere. In Hogwarts. In Gotham City. In the Hundred Acre Wood. In Mark Wahlberg. In poetry. In emo rock. (And in the lives of our neighbors, our near-ones.)

And I believe that these cultural artifacts are means by which God makes our valley of orphan-misery a place of springs (Psalm 84:6). These are gifts from him that help us to walk the valley floor. He is not a stranger to our sorrows and tears. He has entered our story. He has adopted us (Romans 8, Galatians 4), made us his children, given us an elder Brother and initiated the journey of bringing us back home. This story can’t help but come out in our smaller stories, like rain from saturated clouds. And God has promised he will bring the early rain.

So that’s what we’ll be doing here at Side Notes. Going from strength to strength, story to story, poem to poem, song to song. Taking note (!) of where realities of orphanhood, the work of fostering and adoption, and stories, films, songs, and poems about those realities and that work come together to give us a clearer vision of who we are and who God is.

The initial hope / plan is to post once a week on Wednesdays. I’ll send a monthly email so you never have to miss a posted note (ha). Subscribe here! And who knows, there may even be special emails that drop on a quarterly basis. Details TBD, but that’s what things look like at the moment.

Say hello in the comments below or give me a holler here.