Foster Further

This blog has had a very narrow focus--mainly issues with Jane, birth family, and social workers--and so I thought I'd take a moment to write a bit about the other two in our Three Little Musketeers trio. First, Kate is almost three. Her birthday is next month. She is teaching me why the term " threenager " was coined. Oh my, is she ever. All my boys had more difficult threes than twos (I don't know where Terrible Twos came from) but it's about stubbornness and big-opinion-but-deficient-vocabulary scenarios. Kate, on the other hand, has as much attitude and emotional fluctuation as my actual teenagers. I mean, thank god all this attitude is in a body that only comes to my waist, and also that she has the attention span of a toddler so she genuinely forgets why she was being pissy, because, wow, that girl can bring it. And I keep having this moment where I realize that Jane came to us just two months into her three year old year. Poor thing. If she was dealing ...

During our visit with Grandma today Jane was really pissy. Flat out angry. If Grandma asked her a question she would stare right at her but not answer until I prompted her to. But even as she was pissy she was also whiny and clingy--insisting on holding Grandma's hand in a babyish voice and then yanking incessantly on Grandma while we walked. It's a regression to behavior she only ever displays when with Grandma. I've learned to pretty much ignore it because we only see Grandma for a few hours per month now. It ceases as soon as we leave the visit. After we got home I decided to try to talk to Jane about it since she's been interested in talking through her feelings with me lately. I opened the topic in an as-neutral-as-possible way and just invited her to talk. After chatting a bit I asked her how she felt. She did the super fake smile and said she felt happy. I just flat out countered her by saying, "Really? Your face didn't look happy to me." That...

The day after the adoption was finalized I call Aunt and told her the news. It was never going to be an easy phone call and I didn't want to see underhanded in any way by delaying. I mean, it's not like this was a surprise; they knew the adoption was imminent. Aunt was very nice. Saying all kinds of nice things about our family and how happy the girls are now. I'm grateful for her continued support. She's a great liaison between me and grandma on difficult topics. After calling Aunt I contacted Grandma and set up our next monthly visit for today. We met at the mall after church. There's an indoor kiddie playground that my three love to romp around in while we adults chat. The minute Grandma walked in I knew that she already knew about the adoption. Her sister probably called the second we hung up. Grandma was extremely subdued and weird--she tried to sneak in without Jane seeing her in order to generate a big response by surprising Jane. The girls always act v...

Tomorrow we tell Grandma that the adoption was finalized. I've been preparing a letter we will give her that a) thanks her for continuing to be a part of their lives, b) assures her we want that to continue, and c) outlines our boundaries going forward. I'll talk this through in person but I also wanted to give her a letter so she'd have something concrete to read if she became too emotional while we were talking and also so she could show it to others in her life who could help her understand. I've already called the Aunt and told her about the adoption finalization and she agrees this is a good plan. One thing I waffled with is trying to manage her social media posts. On one hand it's ridiculous to even try. She can open up new accounts I don't know about--she can show people pictures she takes on her phone when she's with them in person. If she's going to have access to the girls then I cannot control what she does with that access. On the other...

I wrote this letter today to thank the clerk of the court who, I believe, pushed our paperwork through sooner than we might have expected after I wrote her an email detailing how stressed Jane has been about lack of permanency. Dear Ms. B*, (*all names changed for privacy) Enclosed please find our adoption announcement. I wanted to share this with you to thank you for your help as Adoption Coordinator for J* Family Court. I am sure you have a very busy job and we appreciate you taking the time to communicate with us during the process. I thought you might also like to hear how the girls have taken the news that their adoption is finalized. Jane* is 4 and she was clearly more aware of the situation and more distressed by it than her younger sister, Kate*, who is 2, so her reaction was more immediate.  I got your email just minutes before Jane and I needed to head out to her dance class. I had just enough time to shoot out some quick emails to my husband and our social wo...

It's still sinking in. We are done with foster care. They are no longer foster children. We all have the same last name. I can introduce "my daughters" without feeling a bit like a fraud or obligated to whisper the caveat over their heads. We no longer have any social workers in our lives. We no longer have to see the therapist we no longer felt was effective and are free to pursue a better one. We no longer have to go to O.T. (which was super helpful for a time but at this point she'd met all her goals and now the therapist was just killing time to fulfill the doc's prescription). So much more freedom. The ability to just make good parenting decisions without any bureaucratic hassle. Freedom from either feeling like a criminal when we skirted rules we felt were silly; or gritting our teeth through meeting a silly rule we couldn't get around. This morning Theo and I left the kids in the care of their 17-year-old brother, Seth, and it was finally legal to...

I thought of another example (see previous post) on how bureaucracy harms more than helps. In the checklist of items to do before being initially licensed was a CPR certification for the adults in the home. The agency offered a link to a website where you could do a chintzy online quiz to get your certification (the same one I've done every year before school starts as part of back-to-school PD for teachers). I knew it was a joke and I wanted us to all be truly prepared--even our oldest son since I knew he'd be watching the kids sometimes. So, back then I signed up Theo, Seth (then 16) and I for a 4 hour class, in person, with real CPR dummies, an AED practice thingy, first aid materials, etc. We paid about $60 per person out of our own pocket. Since we were the only people in the class we were able to focus on infant and child CPR and scenarios that might come up, like choking. In the weeks after the class we talked about it and also taught Gus (then 12) a few things. It w...

It's really hard to rise above bureaucracy. There's pretty much no rising allowed. Either you do the petty paperwork or...you're out. Tomorrow we meet with our licensing social worker to renew our license. (This is social worker #3 in our lives. She's not to be confused with the foster care social worker nor the adoption social worker. If I believed it actually took some level of expertise to manage all the rules and paperwork for each area then I'd understand. But, in reality, all three of them give us the forms ahead of time and we fill them all out by ourselves, then turn them back in. If the forms are so easy a layman can do it--how does their agency need to hire three different people just to manage one family?) The list of things we have to do to renew our license is long and feels sillier by the minute. There's a 10 page questionnaire with statements like: In the past year have you kept your medications locked up? In the past year, if you own a g...

This morning was the last day of a full week at home with sick kids. Everyone is feeling just well enough to be bored but not snot-free and fatigue-free enough to go to town. Yesterday we killed time making Valentines (the kids swirled glue and glitter and stickers all over construction paper hearts--Pinterest-worthy we are not but they were happy nonetheless). Today I decided to do a mini spa day with the girls. After breakfast I got them dressed and took a picture that was a re-posing of a similar picture I took about a year ago. I showed them last year's picture and then did their hair the same--great fun getting ready for it. We were back in their room getting ready to paint nails when suddenly I realized that their bedroom window was open. I can't even describe the horror that rolled through my body when I saw the window open about 3 inches from the bottom. It was like watching your kid just barely miss getting hit by a car. Their bedroom is on the second floor. Th...

I just finished reading: Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother by Jana Wolff. A quick read, I was through it in a couple hours. And it was riveting. She speaks with the clear voice of someone who is living an experience and has much to say. She also speaks with all the honesty of a gut punch. Real and immediate and shocking and violent. She spoke so honestly I feared for her adoptive son, one day, when he would read this book. But, she's right. And, at the end, when she talks about how naive she and her husband were, as white people, adopting a black boy, well, I had to applaud her honesty. She's not painting herself as any hero here. And I appreciate her efforts to educate herself and educate her reader to see the inherent racism in a world created by whites, for whites, where black people are often, to quote her on p. 143 as either, "...missing, misrepresented or included as if for extra credit." My favorite quote is on p. 111, "Adoption is a bittersweet so...

Finally, tonight, here's a short essay (just under 2,000 words) that I wrote to flex my creative nonfiction muscles. I wrote this piece first and then used it to craft the Micro Fiction piece by the same name. A Cry So Big It Must Part The Clouds The little one’s cries rise up like a smoke signal, a strobe light, an SOS balloon blotting out the sky. They expand to fill the whole space. Her panic pumps them full of energy till the house is ringing with her full-throated, wide-mouthed, tongue-quivering wail. They vault me from my bed or chair or away from the stove or from deep inside the washing machine reaching for that damp baby sock plastered to the smooth metal drum. She cries high and urgent and louder by the second. Now. Now, she cries eight, nine, a hundred times a day. At first, she did not cry at all. She came to us, a foster child, at 20 months old, grossly obese and nearly silent. A lifetime spent in a crib with one sugar bottle after another. Literally, a l...