Foster Further

These two disorders together look like a girl wearing pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a winter coat with the hood up, standing outside in the sun in 80 degree heat. This is what I saw yesterday while outside watering my garden. It's about 11am and I'm in shorts and a tank top and a huge sun hat, sweating away under the hot sun, wishing I could be in the shade. I look up and here comes Jane dressed for winter. This is at least the fifth time this summer she's come outside dressed like this. Why? Because she can't find her sun hat. I have an inviolate rule that the children must wear sandals and a sun hat when playing outside. No more splinters and sun burns since the rule went into effect!! Once Kate, age 3, couldn't find her sun hat so she scrounged around among the winter things and found a knit cap and was running around in that. I explained the purpose of the sun hat and Kate now wears the right hat every time. Jane is a year and a half older than Kate but she c...

This month Kate is 3 years, 2 months old. She is the exact age that Jane was when the girls came. Kate was 20 months old when she came. She is now 38 months old. July will mark the turning point where she will have lived half of her lifetime as a member of our family. From July 30th onward she'll be more ours than not. Jane won't hit that kind of milestone until she is 6 years, 4 months old so...January 30, 2022. Wow. That is so incredibly far away. And what a clear illustration of how many more years of unhealthy living Jane experienced and thus, why she has been much more effected. But, after the growth of these last few weeks, I feel like we have sped up her transition to healthy living exponentially. (Horray!) These milestones don't really matter to the girls, or anyone else in the family for that matter, but they feel really significant to me. Marking the girls movement from their old life to their new life. Perhaps because it is springtime and there is new life blosso...

...an organized mind. Planning, finding patterns, predicting outcomes, maintaining focus long enough to follow through creatively--I am suddenly seeing mental skills I've never observed in Jane before. This week Jane began lining up her dolls when playing with them. She played school with them for the very first time in her life, ever.  In the sandbox area Jane has begun putting on tea parties. Each container (all identically holding mud, but some decorated with leaves while others have stones or twigs) is a different food. There are even condiments such as salt and paper and sprinkles. She does an elaborate explanation for me while inviting me to sit down and partake. It's so earnest and intentional and creative and REAL to her. She's enthralled. She began writing "storybooks" which consist of multiple pages with pictures and scribbled lines that she tells me are the words of her story. She tells me what she plans to write before she makes a book. Her stories hav...

After my saddest day with her...this moment of unbearable joy. Jane drew a picture with our whole family (that's seven people, each represented by just their eyes, waist, and legs), a sun, and a rainbow. She draws almost every day and usually many pictures in each sitting. She's lived here 16 months. This is the very first picture with a sun and a rainbow. Drawn on a cloudy, cold, muddy spring day. I realized almost a year ago that she never drew any suns or other happy scenes. I'm a special education teacher for behavior disordered children; I don't have a degree in child psychology but I know some signs to look for. I took notice and started waiting. 16 months. Two Christmases, a birthday, and an adoption later...she finally found her sun. And this is the very first time she has drawn our whole family together. She named each one for me while I blinked furiously so she wouldn't see my teary eyes. 16 months. 16 months. Such a long time for her to finally deeply...

Strange how isolating ourselves from all social contact has somehow filled our days. Maybe it's spring coming and lots to do outside; maybe it's Theo's scheduled 4-week break from work and the big list of household projects he's working on. Maybe it's both the effort and importance of maintaining social contact now--even a ten minute chat across the fence with a neighbor feels important now, like it's the highlight of the whole day so it fills the day more than it once would have. For whatever reason, I feel busier now than I did last January when I had nothing to do but stew about how incompetent our social workers were. The only part of the foster/adoption issue that is coming to mind these days is how desperately grateful I am that my girls are not in their birth mother's home during a pandemic. I think there's every chance she would've killed them. I'm not kidding. She was already falling apart, neglect to the point of losing custody is no ...

This week starts with losing an hour to the time change, has a full moon in it, and ends with Friday the 13th. It's also the week my three littles start "real" preschool for the very first time in their life. Not one of them has spent a minute in a school setting before but they'll need to be full time by Friday. Hah! P.S. I got a job. I resigned from teaching a year ago to be home with the girls and now it's time to go back. I found an online teaching job that, let's be honest, isn't real education in the truest sense, but it does give me the flexibility in scheduling that our family needs. So, the littles go to real preschool now, not my little homeschool version. On the week with a time change and a full moon. Oh lordy. Because I know how hard it is to add a new kid to the class, let alone THREE at once, I have already prepared gifts for the classroom teacher and the secretary and we are planning to make a nice, fat donation to the school. At one ti...

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 ...

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...

January been a rough month after 2019 was a rough year. Theo and I were spending some time together this Sunday afternoon talking it all through. I told him that in many ways I'm, weirdly, feeling like I'm in that 3 month postpartum zone. I always said my pregnancies were 12 months long because I wasn't really myself until my newborns were about 3 months old. Well, I feel like this adoption process has been a 15 month pregnancy that still isn't over. I've got so much to worry about that I'm not sleeping.  I'm having all these perimenopausal hormonal fluctuations that make my thinking foggy and my emotions too raw. I feel too tender and exposed, with no capacity for maintaining a thick skin about anything anymore. I have three little kids who need contact with my body all day long and while I've always been a hands-on mother at some point I am just done with other people needing access to my body for 12 straight hours a day. And I have to have my h...

I took Kate to the doctor's office today for our fake, made-up, bureaucracy-sucks appt (see previous post). She adores outings 1:1 with me, even to the dr office. We walk in and she's chatty and smiley with the receptionist. In the waiting room a cute little A-A boy sat beside her and she joyfully crowed to me, "Mama, look, it's my friend!" (she'd never met him before). We get called back and she's so friendly and expressive to the nurse that the nurse keeps cracking up and at one point whispered to me, "She's adorable!" So Kate is having a good old time until a student doctor walks in. She FROZE. Like a baby bunny before the jaws of the fox. Absolutely could not move a muscle, eyes wide and locked on him, totally unresponsive. I think she almost stopped breathing. I looked at him and saw what she saw--he looked a lot like her biological father. Same hair; same long face; maybe even a similar voice though I'd only heard him speak once...

Today has been a momentous day. And the stress just keeps rolling off... A good, good day. 1) I got my book to enough of a polished rough draft that I'm willing to show it to initial readers. This blog and this fictional book have both been outlets for my worst fears and most constant anxieties. They got me through a lot of anxiety-induced insomnia. It felt amazing to watch my "manuscript" (hardly seems I have the right to use the word, but maybe I do) get bound at the printers and then shipped off. A tiny step toward a long held dream of mine. 2) While I standing there at the printers Theo called and told me that the state agency that approves adoptions had signed off on the girls' adoption. That's it! We're done! The next step is a quick signature by a judge on all the legal paperwork but that's really a rubber stamp. They're essentially adopted. What a relief! No more foster care social worker harassment!! That's like ten pounds of worry off...

Kate has begun this touching/grooming behavior on me that is sweet and weird all at the same time. She gets herself cuddled up to me and then just gently touches me all over my head and arms and chest and back. It's somewhere inbetween how primates in the wild groom each other and how she might fondle a new baby doll she'd just been given. I realize that I always did this touching/stroking behavior with my babies. Theo says I did it to him when we were dating and newly married. During rock-a-bye time each night I stroke the girls hair while they talk or rub their backs or arms. (Now I do a full brushing and joint compression protocol with Jane at the beginning of bedtime so she gets both.) It's weird to have it done to me, though. It reminds me of the power of touch in human connection and bonding. It feels like she's "falling in love" with me--but obviously not in a romantic sense. And, I gotta say, it's very relaxing. She about puts me to sleep. It r...

Last week I had to drop off some paperwork at the foster care agency's local office. We haven't been there since last February, when the girls had their last family visit in that office. If my memory serves, they were in that building exactly four times: twice to visit birth mother in December, twice to visit aunt and grandma in February. There were no visits in January. (After those initial visits I suggested we begin meeting off-site every two weeks with grandma and aunt and that's what we've done ever since.) The office is in a bland office park and the reception area literally has almost nothing in it but three chairs and one table. We walked in and Jane instantly said, "I've been here before!" There were two doors out of the room. She pointed to the correct one and said, "That's where Mama Leah is! There's a kitchen in there! Can we go play with it?" I was utterly astounded. That girls' memory is bizarrely accurate someti...

Yesterday I spent the evening with two old friends who have been my friends for so long I met their mothers at the same time that I met them. Our mothers have strong opinions and a fierce love for their families. Diana and Mary Kay and Eileen* have always figured largely in our lives. As we talked about other things our mothers kept coming up in the conversation; woven in as seamlessly as our husbands and children and pets and new cars and favorite restaurants. As they talked I kept seeing their mother's faces super-imposed upon their own. I saw them in the sagging jowls and crow's feet, in a certain wave of the hands and deeply familiar fake-scowl expression that I've been seeing since I was five. And I know they saw my mother's face in my own. And also in my hands and sagging breasts and well-padded hips. I am now the age my mother was when these girls were becoming teens and rebelling against my mother, the principal at the school we all attended. In conversati...