I’m Baaaaaack!

It’s been 4 months since I’ve shared this space with you. Can you believe that? It’s gone by fast, but it also feels like a century since I shared my heart with you. 

When we first started this journey of “YES” that led us across the world to our life here in Ukraine it was very much the story and journey of our family. I shared the happenings on our blog, mainly just because blogging was “the thing” to do and I thought it could be kind of fun to try my hand at a public journal of such. I wanted a way to remember the process and also a way to fill in family and close friends in one bang. Killing two birds and all that jazz. The process, or journey, we started out on was an adoption journey. It was a personal, intimate journey for our family and sharing my heart and thoughts along the way was the only way I knew how to write. Over the years one thing led to another, which led to another, which led to us starting a non-profit, moving our family of 6 around the world, adopting Vlad, buying the Homestead property, taking guardianship of our boys, building the duplex…then war and refugee life and homecoming and horses and house parents and all.the.things. Over the past 12 years, this whole thing has become much more than our family’s personal journey and much more than my online journal of sorts. The writings here represent Wide Awake and Dim Hidnosti and there is so much more to be shared than my feelings about it all. 😆

And yet, I know that part of what has drawn people (and maybe you!) to this work has been hearing the personal perspective behind all the things happening around here. And because this work is not just my day job but also my family, my life, and the thing I believe I was made to do, it’s really quite impossible for me to tease out the personal from the organizational- even if I wanted to. I’m just, in general, a “heart-on-my-sleeve” type of person, so writing without getting too personal is just not something I’m able to do. That’s all fine and dandy when I’m feeling all fine and dandy, but it all kind of falls apart when I fall apart. 

Over the years we have seen and experienced so much beauty, and we have also experienced a great deal of pain. There were the early years that were so exciting, but also filled with uncertainty and worry (especially about our kids. Remember how worried I was that they would never learn Ukrainian???). There was the huge transition of bringing the boys out and then the disappointment of realizing that they couldn’t all live with us forever like we thought. (By the way, what were we actually thinking, imagining that would work???  My word, we have learned a lot.) Then there was/is the war. The day we had to leave our home and take the boys as refugees in Germany was the single most painful day of my life. All of that I freely and honestly shared with you. I never wanted you to think this journey was all rainbows and unicorns, so I tried to be very honest about sharing the amazing and the heartbreaking. But over the past couple of years, maybe since the war started that honest, personal, and free channel of communication from me to you has slowly become harder and harder for me to access. 

I can’t completely blame my “communication barrier”, of sorts, on the war, but I also can’t deny the part war has played in changing all of us to our cores. That time living away with all the boys in a different country was unbelievably challenging and traumatizing. I really hate to use that “T Word” because I’m aware it’s so overused and abused, but I feel like it’s a true way to describe that time. We left our home not knowing if we would ever be able to return. We then watched helplessly as our dear boys who had worked so incredibly hard, along with us, to come so far and heal so deeply and grow so much, slowly and then rapidly lose their skills and decline to such states that it became impossible to continue like we were in Germany. I don’t know if I’ve ever before or since felt such helplessness as I did in that time. I remember crying to Jed “I just don’t want this to be my life!” Rough times, Folks, rough times. 

Another barrier to my sharing has just been the fact that I was, honestly, a bit burned out with sharing the story. Gasp! Truth bomb. Hehe. I mean, I’ve been sharing this work and this journey for 12 years now and I just felt tired. I felt uninspired. I felt like, although the work obviously, is just as important to me as the day it was birthed 12 years ago, I just didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I wanted to live it and savor it and love it as much as I do, without trying to figure out creative ways to describe it. I guess it was just a case of good ol’ fashioned burnout. And I’m so thankful to Christiana for lifting that responsibility from me during our sabbatical so I could just rest. What a gift! 

And not to be a Debbie Downer, but there is one more barrier to communication between you and me. That one includes my kiddos and dignity and the whole jumbly casserole that comes out of life and ministry and work and family all being a mostly combined entity. To me, that jumbly casserole is the best ever and I wouldn’t trade that life for the world. But it does make communication a bit hard to splice out. 

When we moved to Ukraine our kids were young and it seemed like they were little extensions of my body. Their joys and pains were easy to see and understand, and in those early days of life in Ukraine, I was feeling a lot of those same joys and pains so it was natural to share them with you. Our family unit was like a little island here in Ukraine and we felt and experienced all the things together. Now most of my children are teenagers and sharing their joys and pains online with people who don’t even know them doesn’t feel right or even related to what you come here to read. So there is the need to separate some of the Johnson family sharing from the greater Homestead family sharing. 

But, there is a but. You know that our family is an adoptive family (several times over), and adoption has always been a big part of our heart. We heavily and successfully advocated for the adoption of foster children and many children from Ukraine before we moved here and then for several of our boys from Romaniv. I believe that adoption is God’s heart and a necessary act of love in this broken world. Children were made for families. Adoption is important and necessary, and also, adoption is incredibly painful and difficult. That is just the reality. Anytime a child is removed from their biological family there is pain, no matter the age of the child. Add in a history of substance abuse and the pain grows. 

We moved to Ukraine to bring people with disabilities into family and to create a model of family and care that can be replicated by others around the country. There are many reasons why institutions like Romaniv exist, but one big reason is because of the lack of social safety net for families who have a child with a disability. There is a huge lack of qualified therapists and mental health specialists. The schools are not prepared for children with special needs and most schools have zero idea of how to actually work with children who can’t learn in the way that is expected and have zero plan for how to successfully educate those children. We see the final outcome of the lack of social safety net in our adult men who have come from the institution into our Wide Awake family, and we have experienced the effects of the lack of social safety net in our own family with one of our adopted children. 

To parent a child with special needs in Ukraine is to fight the good fight on your own. There is no team brainstorming. There is no person telling you what they recommend you do. There are no provisions made. There is no support. All of these things you have to find on your own or create on your own. We have been doing this for our child for the past almost 11 years, and it has taken all that I have to give. I can’t tell you how isolating and painful it is to try everything and give everything and feel that at the end of the day, your family is alone in this fight for your child and there is no safety net if you should fail or make a wrong choice or miss a thing, or if you should have known better but just didn’t because you have never seen or known of another child like yours. To parent a child with special needs in Ukraine is to go at it completely alone and pray that at the end of the day, it will be enough. 

I haven’t shared as much with you recently because I have been elbows deep in my own journey of parenting a child who desperately needs more than we can give. Our child needs what can only be found outside of Ukraine, but we know that God has us in Ukraine for that very population. It hasn’t really hit me until just while I’ve been writing this that this must be how all the mamas of our friends with disabilities must have felt over the years. We need for our children what can’t be found in our country. And we wonder how things would be different if we had the resources that others have. We do our best but feel at the end of each day that we are failing and pray that God will cover it all. Hope can be hard to find at times. We can only trust that God loves our children more than we do and that He will give us the wisdom we need when we need it. 

So, wow, maybe this got a bit rambly (is that a word?) I just wanted you to know where I’ve been; where my head and heart have been. Praise God the work here continues, more beautiful than ever. Our team and our boys are thriving, even during these dark times in our country. Because of the amazing and steady work of our team I’m able to take more of a backseat from the day-to-day work of Wide Awake/Dime Hidnosti to focus on our child. I’m incredibly thankful for that. 

I’m back, feeling a bit more refreshed and ready to share with you again. With Jed and Christiana’s help, we’ll continue to keep you in the loop on all the things happening around here. There is never a dull moment around here and we are honored to walk this never-dull journey with you.