September 23 Newsletter: Anger and Healing

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Just a taste of life around here

This week, I left Romaiv mad. It was a pretty typical day at Romaniv, but I fumed for nearly 30 minutes as I drove our team home and then finally broached the topic with another team member. It was better than keeping it bottled in and ready to explode, but I was still mad by the time we arrived home. 

I was mad about everything. Every last stupid, unjust, inevitable, avoidable, unintentional, deliberate, gosh darn thing that I had seen that day. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but for some reason yesterday the ordinary absolutely pissed me off. I will not sing the full Song Of My Complaint (10 Minute Version), but just to give you a taste:

They recently did significant renovations in isolation hall (perhaps I mentioned this, as we were unable to visit for several weeks while this was happening) and now the hallway, where most boys spend most of their days sitting or slowly wandering, is clean, fresh, new, and… off limits. Apparently, it is a very high priority not to let the boys mess us the newly painted white walls. Prior to renovations, there might be a few boys in their bedrooms if they were sick (or the higher functioning boys who live in isolation hall sometimes just prefer to be there), and perhaps a few boys in the day room (which has evolved over the years but currently has padded walls and floors with a few stackable discs of the same padded material and a yoga ball laying around). The rest of them, the majority, would be in the hallway. 

Now obviously, I do not like the idea of our friends spending most of their days sitting on benches in the hallway. But when I walked into isolation hall, through a pristine hallway, and then was hit by the scent and heat of all the boys crammed onto the floor of the day room, I nearly lost it. I went immediately to open the window, but the small part that can be opened already was open. The door had to remain shut because otherwise several boys would try to get out of the room into the—now forbidden—hallway. There was nothing I could do to make the situation any better. I had literally just come from a conversation about this issue with the director, where he had explained that they had hoped to paint the walls of the hallway with paint that was washable, but had run out of money and now could not do so. He pointed out that he had allowed the boys to be in the day room (which was in it’s way a concession because it had previously been off limits when it was new), and said that he would think about our concerns. 

Our friend who was not in that room was tied to his bed. The last several times I’ve been there, he has been tied in bed, and we haven’t been allowed to take him out because he was “having a bad day.” This could mean so many things… seizure activity, sickness, recent self-harm, knocked out on drugs for one reason or another (even just thinking of the list of possible reasons is infuriating). Instead of untying him, lately I’ve just had to sit next to him while he remains tied up in bed, and I hate that. I can see such an obvious decline in him from when I first met him 8 years ago, and yesterday it hit me that if he stays at Romaniv, we are just going to keep watching him get worse until he dies. But his parents still have parental rights, and we’ve never yet been able to take guardianship of a boy from Romaniv whose parents are still in the picture. How do you convince people who don’t really know you that they should let their son come and live with you? Unless that happens, there is a good chance we will just watch him continue to lose skills and have an increasingly worse quality of life until he dies a totally preventable death.

There’s a taste of why I was so mad on the drive back from Romaniv. 

Then I got back to the Homestead. Home. And I sat at our table, in our open kitchen/dining room/living room with vaulted ceilings and natural light and fresh air. As I ate leftovers of a delicious Ukrainian dish that the assistants had made with our boys from lunch, Vova came over and sat down at the table, because he likes to be with people now. Then the assistants sat down to chat, and they helped me fix a message I was trying to write in Ukrainian. Soon we were joking together about a Ukrainian word that Dajana and I didn’t know how to use correctly in context. Yarik started feeding off the building energy as we hung out and joked together, and then somehow we were all yelling like Tarzan and one of the guys was play wrestling with Yarik. When I reluctantly moved upstairs to get some work done while the assistants were still here, I could hear one of them singing a sea shanty and Yarik commending the song choice 🤣 And the anger had faded.

Our home isn’t perfect. It’s a bunch of imperfect people living life with boys whose disabilities and trauma can be heavy. But it was so healing for me in that moment to be home. Home where our boys are loved in word and action. Where I can leave the house knowing that the boys will be treating with dignity and I don’t need to worry about them while I am gone. Where so many of the things outside of our control at Romaniv are just so delightfully…manageable. Life here isn’t perfect (or sometimes even easy!) but it is so good.

If I find it healing to be back at the Homestead after spending part of a day at Romaniv, what about our boys who lived there for years and years? I think and hope that the healing they experience here is much greater, even as it is slower and more rocky.

Often we talk about one benefit of everyone regularly going to Romaniv being that we maintain a soft heart for our boys at the Homestead. Remembering where they came from, what they endured, gives us the patience and compassion we need to bear with them in love when things are difficult. But I’m also noticing that it puts us, in some small way, in parallel with them and their journey. We are not untouched by our time spent visiting the institution, although coming face to face with that darkness affects us all in different ways. We mourn, grieve, get angry, or get numb. Then God meets us in our weakness to provide what we need, to restore and to strengthen us. Our boys are needy, but so are we. We can relate to them not as superiors capable of doing more, saying more, handling more, but as equals who also experience hurt and are in need of healing.

If you have experienced hurt and are in need of healing today, you are not alone. I know some really brave boys who are learning that people can be good. Who are considering that the messages of worthlessness they received for years might not be true. Who are fighting to leave behind the cycles they learned in response to terrible things that should not have been done to them. Who are waiting on the Lord to restore all of the years that the locusts have eaten. And those boys aren’t doing it alone, because we are right there with them. We are also asking God to redeem what was broken. You are welcome to join us.

Wishing you sunny and peaceful skies,

Christiana