Dear Family and Friends,
 |
| Christmas 2020 |
Gabby (22) is living at home and has been a manager with
Eddie Bauer for over a year now and is looking to move out of retail in the new
year. Nico & Lydia (both 14) are
smack in the middle of 8th grade with all the angst that accompanies
it, Makayla (13) is in 7th grade, and Madie & Cynthia (both 12)
are in 6th grade. Why yes, we
do live in a middle school! 😉 We
are still homeschooling, and all are playing soccer and looking forward to
trying track in the spring. The girls’
main focuses are art and music while the boy’s interests are photography,
airsoft guns, and a future in the military.
I know some of you are wondering why there is no mention about Will (16)
above. It’s been a couple years since
we’ve done a family Christmas letter, and Will is one of the main reasons
why. Sending Christmas pictures when
you’re missing a kiddo just doesn’t feel right.
For those of you who don’t know, Will joined our family in 2010 at the
age of 5 (all 7 of our children were adopted from foster care). He had previously experienced massive trauma
due to domestic violence, food deprivation, and a multitude of other situations
in his birth family. By the time we met,
he’d lived with 7 families, other than his birth parents. Wounded barely begins to describe him.
In May of 2018, after 8 years of fighting for his heart, we
were forced to remove Will from our home.
It was revealed that he had been sexually abusing two of our other
children for over 4 years, and physically & verbally abusing the others. His actions caused DFCS to request that our
other son leave our home as well until they felt certain he was not an abuser
as well. That took 10 very long months.
Shattered is probably as close as I can come to describing
our family that year. Our other kids
have been through more in their lives than I can believe a child can go through
and come out still standing and smiling.
They are so amazing!
Both our wonderful parents each housed one of the boys
during that 10 months. Nico was
thankfully able to return home, but much more wounded than when he left. Being torn from your family because of
someone else is like the foundations under your feet suddenly being turned into
jello. Nothing makes sense.
After that 10 months, the judge listened to the psychologist’s
advice and Will was taken to a detention center and held there until there was
an opening in a residential unit for youth sex offenders. No matter what they’ve done, watching your
son be shackled and handcuffed is not an experience I can adequately describe.
He has spent the last 2 years in state custody being
“treated” for his actions. The problem
is they have completely focused on his behaviors and ignored the cause behind
them. He has never taken responsibility
for his actions nor been willing to deal with what happened to him when he was
young. We recognize that Will’s
actions are directly a result of the intense trauma he experienced. He has a rather scary list of diagnoses, from
PTSD to Reactive Attachment Disorder to Psychotic.
In February Will is being released back into our
custody. He cannot live in our home due
to the emotional damage that would cause our other children to live with their
abuser and his therapist has deemed him unsafe to be around them. So, we are being faced with 3 choices.
- Choice 1 is we refuse to pick him up and he is returned to foster care. Not only will this come with a lot of sticky negative legal ramifications (there’s an outside chance they could take us to court or press abandonment charges), but it would also confirm what Will suspects deep down, that he is too damaged for healing or not worth loving. No matter what the doctors say, we believe what Karyn Purvis says, “there is no child so wounded that they are past deep healing.”
- · Choice 2 is Tony separates from our family. Will is 16 but has 2 ½ years left to finish high school. He is too big and angry for Katie to handle. It would mean she and the other 6 kids would live without him 100% until that time. It would mean him not being able to attend any church, family, or friend functions for 2 ½ years. Not only are we not willing to do that to our other children and to our marriage, but we cannot afford two households.
- · Choice 3 is a quality therapeutic program that will help him to address what he has done as well as the early trauma he lived through to help him heal and change. We have searched for 2 ½ years. Every single one of them said no due to the nature of his behaviors. Then this November God gave us a gift: two programs have accepted him! This is a huge victory, but so is the price tag!
If you’ve read this far, thank you. Our family and several close friends know
this situation, but it is quite scary to be completely vulnerable, to everyone
we know, about something that can potentially bring a lot of condemnation. We dearly love Will and our prayers are for
his salvation and healing. But we know
it cannot happen in our home. We also
know returning him to foster care or Tony separating from the family are not
the best options either.
We feel strongly that God is leading us to one of the
programs, whose founder has almost 30 years of experience helping children with
complex early trauma, reactive attachment disorder, and other emotional and
behavior health problems that accompany them, especially including sexual
issues. We would like to ask our whole
community for help in praying for Will and our family. We know God has a plan for all that has happened,
and He will use it in a mighty way for His kingdom. Here are our specific prayer requests:
- · For Will’s salvation and healing, and for him to own what he has done.
- · For continued healing for all 7 of our children from both the trauma of the situation with Will as well as their own early trauma that placed all of them in foster care.
- · For finances to pay for the program we have chosen. It costs $350 per day. Yes, you read that correctly. Per day. That’s actually in the middle range for these types of programs. With our savings we can get him through about 6 weeks of the 28 months he would be there. We are working towards getting a loan as well, but it will definitely not cover the whole cost and it will take some time to get approved. Katie has taken on a part-time job and plans to start blogging again in hopes to bring in more income.
· If you feel lead to donate to help us, we have
been approved to have a fund-raising account with Helping Hands Ministries (www.hhmin.org), a non-profit here in Georgia. They collect all funds and will pay them
directly to the program for us, so we don’t actually touch any of the
money. They give tax credit receipts at
the end of the year to all donations over $250.
Our hope is to raise 6 to 12 months’ worth of Will’s tuition (6 months
would approximately $60,000 while a year would be about $128.000) and use our
savings and loans for the rest.
o
To donate go to www.hhmin.org.
o
On their home page click on the “Donate” button.
o
Scroll Down to the “Gift Amount” section.
o
Under “I want to support”, click on the drop
down box and search for “Gonzalez, Antonio & Katie”
Many of you are special to our kids and we thank you for the
love you have given them over the years.
One request we have is we would ask that you not bring Will up to any of
our children. If one of them mentions
their brother Will, let them talk, but understand that this is a complex
situation for a child’s brain to comprehend and it will take them all many
years to truly process and understand it all.
Despite all he’s done, he’s still their brother and they all deeply care
what happens to him. Some of them need
to talk about him while others, their emotions on the topic are too tangled to
go
Merry Christmas and God Bless,
Tony & Katie Gonzalez & Clan
 |
| Visiting the Mable House in Mableton, Georgia. Built by Katie’s Great, Great, Great Grandfather Robert Mable. Her grandmother Lillian remembers visiting there as a child when her great uncle, the son of Robert Mable, lived there and her grandfather Alexander lived just down the road. |
 |
| Standing in front of a portrait of Robert Mable |
The cooking fireplace in the kitchen.
Later the kitchen was moved into
the house. This building was originally
the smoke house as the kitchen burned
down at some point.
 |
| L to R: Nico (14), Cynthia (12), Gabby (22), Katie (age unknown), Madie (12), Tony (almost as old as Katie), Makayla (13), Lydia (14) |
