Unwanted

Last week we were ordered to leave our house within 10 days. This would be upsetting under any circumstances, but especially since we are just a month or two away from adopting four teenagers from Peru. A caseworker approved our home. Another one approved our financial status. A medical doctor approved our physical condition. A psychologist approved our mental state. So did a psychiatrist. Customs & Immigration gave us approval to bring four foreigners into the United States. And at last, the Peruvian government approved us. We started thinking about travel dates and plane tickets and houseful of kids. Then the very next week, our landlord commanded us to vacate our home. Evidently he does not approve of us.  

We’ve annoyed our landlord by asking him to replace the carpet in a bedroom that the former tenants’ cats used for a litter box. After he said no a few times, we annoyed him more by pulling out the wretched carpet and scraping up the crusty, stained padding and throwing it away. And we annoyed him even more when we reported the problem to the city’s Department of Licensing and Inspection. Now he doesn’t want us living in his house anymore.  

Unwanted. It’s a strange feeling. I’m 32 years old and I’ve been told all my life in thousands of ways that I am loved. Valuable. Accepted. Wanted. I’ve had friends and aunts and siblings. Parents and grandparents. A husband. I’ve had bosses and colleagues and teachers—and even landlords who liked me and wanted me living in their house. Even so, the landlord’s rejection stings.  

It’s got me wondering about how our kids must have felt when they were taken from their parents’ home and delivered to an orphanage. When they waited and hoped for visits from their parents that sometimes happened but usually did not. When six years went by and they always showed up parentless to school performances and sporting events.

When we lived in Peru, we sometimes took the kids from the orphanage to the mall to look at the Christmas decorations or see a movie. I used to wonder how it felt for them to see the other kids at the mall with their parents. I remember seeing a young girl walking in between her parents, one of her chubby little hands in each of her parents’ hands. I wondered what the orphanage kids must think and feel about that.  

I was that little girl holding both her parents’ hands in the mall. I’ve had a lifetime of experience with which to process the insult and injustice of our current situation with the landlord. What must it be like for a child who is told in thousands of ways that they are unloved, unworthy, unwanted?  

Very soon we will bring our kids home—maybe to this house or maybe to another. We will pour on the love and affection and show them in a thousand ways that they are very, very wanted.