Foster Further

 I really should just change the title of this blog to The Jane Show, shouldn't I? She's the only one I need to write about anymore.  Everything, and every one, else is doing so good right now. I'm happier than I've been in a very long time. For some reason, over this last month I have just felt the anger melting away. Anger I didn't understand, didn't know where it came from or why, anger I couldn't control. It's gone. I'm quiet and calm even when one of them breaks the TV and the other messes with my computer.  Kate is in one of those adorable phases. She flipped the switch from 3 and stubborn to 3 and sweet and it's just so much fun. She is cute and funny and says those things that make adults smile all the time. She's happy and affectionate and just...normal. Completely and utterly normal.  James is also growing in all good ways. Suddenly his vocabulary has blossomed and he's developing a sense of humor. He's full of jokes and bur...

It's Easter morning but it sure doesn't feel like it. Hard to feel the wonder or mystery without the hymns and words and signs of celebration that being in a full church brings. Hard to make homegrown celebrations when my husband is of another religious practice that is still deep in the darkest days of fasting and waiting and he won't celebrate the great resurrection for another week. I've decided to hold off on baskets and eggs until Pascha so we just do one celebration all together since family unity is more important than a date on a calendar...but still. It's hard. And a reminder that he left my religious practice knowing I could not follow and that decision he made is still the most difficult thing in our marriage and home. I make the choice not to fight it because I understood that I lost that battle the moment he made a decision that was about his needs, not ours, and that decision was made years before I even knew it and it was not going to ever be undone...

It's been awhile since I last posted. After I wrote the previous post where I grouped Jane's behaviors into weeks/months where we saw A and then weeks/months were we observed B, I went downstairs and started talking to Theo about this idea of A/B behaviors. The words, "it's like she's switching personalities..." were coming out of my mouth when I just stopped...horrified, frozen, tearful. Dear God. Her mother is bi-polar. Is it possible for a child to show traits of a mental illness this young? I know the medical community won't diagnose this young. What does this mean if it's already here? That moment pretty much sunk me. I went into a depression stronger than anything I've ever experienced before. So much fear. So much grief. Then...all the irrational responses: anger, distancing myself from her, resenting her for all the dark and nasty impulses this fear awakened in me. There were several days of doing nothing--frozen in the nonstop ...