We're home from an early Thanksgiving at Papa Ken's house. Safe and sound--except for the girls' emotional rollercoaster that will, I expect, play out over the next day or so.
Reading all the scary stuff about the girls' pasts last night, as well as my FB stalking of maternal grandfather, Mike and his guns definitely freaked Theo out, too. This morning he was hunting through our paperwork to take with us legal documents proving we're their foster parents. I took a picture of the girls just before we left in case I needed to give it to the police. This is how we both think now and I am not okay with it.
We got there around 11am. Ken's house is a run down 20 year old mobile home. He has never been married or had kids and he's been employed in good jobs his whole life--where does his money go? I was surprised to see how dumpy his property is. Except that maybe an old bachelor with a tendency to hoarding just doesn't care. There were piles and piles of junk everywhere and yet he made a point of telling us many times how much cleaning he'd done before we came.
One confusing thing--when we first met him he said he really wanted the girls but couldn't take custody of the girls when they were removed by CPS because he, "didn't have the room at my house." Yet, it's a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home. So, there's another reason. He didn't want to wade into the mess of keeping the girls away from their biological mother? After keeping them every weekend for a year he knew how exhausting they were and didn't really want to raise them 24/7? He suspected social services would think it weird that a non-relative bachelor male wanted custody of two young girls and didn't want the hassle of them monitoring his life? Any of those seem like perfectly good reasons.
I don't blame him for not wanting them. I just find my ear very finely tuned to any inconsistencies in people's stories. Trust is so fragile.
Nikki, the girls' mother's twin sister, was there along with her boyfriend, Kevin, and their two girls, Gabby (age 5) and Elizabeth (2 months). Nikki and Leah aren't identical twins but still, on the doorstep when I looked into the house and saw her sitting there, I was taken aback. She looks more like Leah than I'd remembered.
Yet the girls barely reacted to her. They didn't really recognize her and certainly didn't go to her. Nikki herself seemed pleasantly surprised when I told her the girls were excited to see her. She said, "They remembered me?" I realized that she wasn't around them much. Both she and Leah dumped their girls on this guy, Ken, every weekend and never looked back. And Nikki still does this with Gabby.
Mainly the girls just wanted to play with Gabby. Jane and Gabby are very close and I know Jane truly misses her cousin and good friend. Kate is along for the ride and happy to join in the fun but the truest bonds are between Jane and Gabby and, for Ken, between himself and Jane and Gabby. Those three spent many hours together. He only began getting Kate when she was about a year old and she was 20 months when she came to us.
I took Nikki aside and asked her questions about Leah and Laura (Leah and Nikki's mom). She said Leah is "down" over missing the girls. And she said that she has no contact with Laura and that Laura has no interest in anyone's life. That Laura hasn't even met baby Elizabeth yet. Nikki doesn't even have contact info for her mother but said she's very close to her dad, Mike. Nikki said that when she was 5 Laura told them she was going out to the laundromat and instead drove to Florida and didn't come back for years.
Then she told me a bit about her kids. She has four. Her 16yo daughter lives with Mike's second wife, Nikki's stepmom, whom he's divorced from. Her 14 yo son lives with her father. Gabby was repeatedly taken away from Nikki during her first year of life. Four kids with four different men; no marriages, only two children living with her.
In summary, there isn't a single normal, stable relative in the girls' lives. Why do I keep being surprised by this? Theo read last night in the removal report all the lengths the social workers went to to find a relative placement and all the reasons each one was either disqualified or expressed no interest in taking them.
So, we came, we ate, the girls helped Ken put up his Christmas tree, and then we left. About 4 hrs altogether. And now we are exhausted. The girls bickered all the way home. Kate asked, "mama hold me?" as soon as we got her out of her carseat. I rocked her for quite awhile, then fed the kids, and now have cartoons going. There truly is a time for mentally zoning out in front of a screen and this is one of them.
I expect nightmares from Jane tonight and maybe more. Both girls could not get to sleep last night and stayed up, bickering at each other from their beds, two hours past their bedtime.
Last things--I brought two pies, a pumpkin and a cherry. My pies are very basic. I buy frozen crust, open a can of pie filling, put it all together and bake. But, when I set them out Nikki was amazed. She said, "you made those?" and then pointed to the lattice top on the cherry pie and said, "how did you get it to do that?"
Ken's Thanksgiving dinner--which he'd been emailing us anxiously about for weeks--consisted of a ham, a can of baked beans heated on the stovetop, and two tubs of grocery store salads, one potato salad and one coleslaw salad, on the table with just the tops popped off. We ate off paper plates and drank pop from the can. It was just sad.
I feel sad about all of it. About the fact that every treasured picture of the girls Ken showed me makes me cringe because in those pics their hair is thin, rough, and all different lengths (both girls would pull out their hair or develop knots that needed to be cut out, plus their awful diet and exposure to smoking and drugs made a coarse, brittle texture). Their skin is wan and they are staring blankly at the camera, unable or unwilling to smile. They look like sad little orphans. And he can't see it.
Nikki kept commenting on how happy and healthy the girls look now. She hasn't seen them in over a year. She was shocked by how much Kate was talking and that Jane's stutter has gone away.
I needed them to see how much better the girls are doing because I truly don't want them to worry. But there's something really sickening about essentially saying, "See? Going to strangers was better for them than being with you people who've loved them from birth because you couldn't care for them." It is not a message I felt good about delivering.
I did have a moment with both Nikki and Ken separately where I explained that the reason we don't have regular contact is because any contact with anyone sends the girls into an emotional spiral of nightmares and fears afterwards. I said that the girls just need stability and that determines everything we do. They seemed reassured after I said it. It is the truth. It felt good to be able to say it in person. And now I want to be all done for a good long time.
Reading all the scary stuff about the girls' pasts last night, as well as my FB stalking of maternal grandfather, Mike and his guns definitely freaked Theo out, too. This morning he was hunting through our paperwork to take with us legal documents proving we're their foster parents. I took a picture of the girls just before we left in case I needed to give it to the police. This is how we both think now and I am not okay with it.
We got there around 11am. Ken's house is a run down 20 year old mobile home. He has never been married or had kids and he's been employed in good jobs his whole life--where does his money go? I was surprised to see how dumpy his property is. Except that maybe an old bachelor with a tendency to hoarding just doesn't care. There were piles and piles of junk everywhere and yet he made a point of telling us many times how much cleaning he'd done before we came.
One confusing thing--when we first met him he said he really wanted the girls but couldn't take custody of the girls when they were removed by CPS because he, "didn't have the room at my house." Yet, it's a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home. So, there's another reason. He didn't want to wade into the mess of keeping the girls away from their biological mother? After keeping them every weekend for a year he knew how exhausting they were and didn't really want to raise them 24/7? He suspected social services would think it weird that a non-relative bachelor male wanted custody of two young girls and didn't want the hassle of them monitoring his life? Any of those seem like perfectly good reasons.
I don't blame him for not wanting them. I just find my ear very finely tuned to any inconsistencies in people's stories. Trust is so fragile.
Nikki, the girls' mother's twin sister, was there along with her boyfriend, Kevin, and their two girls, Gabby (age 5) and Elizabeth (2 months). Nikki and Leah aren't identical twins but still, on the doorstep when I looked into the house and saw her sitting there, I was taken aback. She looks more like Leah than I'd remembered.
Yet the girls barely reacted to her. They didn't really recognize her and certainly didn't go to her. Nikki herself seemed pleasantly surprised when I told her the girls were excited to see her. She said, "They remembered me?" I realized that she wasn't around them much. Both she and Leah dumped their girls on this guy, Ken, every weekend and never looked back. And Nikki still does this with Gabby.
Mainly the girls just wanted to play with Gabby. Jane and Gabby are very close and I know Jane truly misses her cousin and good friend. Kate is along for the ride and happy to join in the fun but the truest bonds are between Jane and Gabby and, for Ken, between himself and Jane and Gabby. Those three spent many hours together. He only began getting Kate when she was about a year old and she was 20 months when she came to us.
I took Nikki aside and asked her questions about Leah and Laura (Leah and Nikki's mom). She said Leah is "down" over missing the girls. And she said that she has no contact with Laura and that Laura has no interest in anyone's life. That Laura hasn't even met baby Elizabeth yet. Nikki doesn't even have contact info for her mother but said she's very close to her dad, Mike. Nikki said that when she was 5 Laura told them she was going out to the laundromat and instead drove to Florida and didn't come back for years.
Then she told me a bit about her kids. She has four. Her 16yo daughter lives with Mike's second wife, Nikki's stepmom, whom he's divorced from. Her 14 yo son lives with her father. Gabby was repeatedly taken away from Nikki during her first year of life. Four kids with four different men; no marriages, only two children living with her.
In summary, there isn't a single normal, stable relative in the girls' lives. Why do I keep being surprised by this? Theo read last night in the removal report all the lengths the social workers went to to find a relative placement and all the reasons each one was either disqualified or expressed no interest in taking them.
So, we came, we ate, the girls helped Ken put up his Christmas tree, and then we left. About 4 hrs altogether. And now we are exhausted. The girls bickered all the way home. Kate asked, "mama hold me?" as soon as we got her out of her carseat. I rocked her for quite awhile, then fed the kids, and now have cartoons going. There truly is a time for mentally zoning out in front of a screen and this is one of them.
I expect nightmares from Jane tonight and maybe more. Both girls could not get to sleep last night and stayed up, bickering at each other from their beds, two hours past their bedtime.
Last things--I brought two pies, a pumpkin and a cherry. My pies are very basic. I buy frozen crust, open a can of pie filling, put it all together and bake. But, when I set them out Nikki was amazed. She said, "you made those?" and then pointed to the lattice top on the cherry pie and said, "how did you get it to do that?"
Ken's Thanksgiving dinner--which he'd been emailing us anxiously about for weeks--consisted of a ham, a can of baked beans heated on the stovetop, and two tubs of grocery store salads, one potato salad and one coleslaw salad, on the table with just the tops popped off. We ate off paper plates and drank pop from the can. It was just sad.
I feel sad about all of it. About the fact that every treasured picture of the girls Ken showed me makes me cringe because in those pics their hair is thin, rough, and all different lengths (both girls would pull out their hair or develop knots that needed to be cut out, plus their awful diet and exposure to smoking and drugs made a coarse, brittle texture). Their skin is wan and they are staring blankly at the camera, unable or unwilling to smile. They look like sad little orphans. And he can't see it.
Nikki kept commenting on how happy and healthy the girls look now. She hasn't seen them in over a year. She was shocked by how much Kate was talking and that Jane's stutter has gone away.
I needed them to see how much better the girls are doing because I truly don't want them to worry. But there's something really sickening about essentially saying, "See? Going to strangers was better for them than being with you people who've loved them from birth because you couldn't care for them." It is not a message I felt good about delivering.
I did have a moment with both Nikki and Ken separately where I explained that the reason we don't have regular contact is because any contact with anyone sends the girls into an emotional spiral of nightmares and fears afterwards. I said that the girls just need stability and that determines everything we do. They seemed reassured after I said it. It is the truth. It felt good to be able to say it in person. And now I want to be all done for a good long time.
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