My Lost Decade

What it takes to overcome obstacles

2006-03-29T20:34:00.000-06:00

What is it that makes some of survivors and other people unable to cope in the face of adversity? I have been asked many times why I think it is that I have been so successful, while other foster kids wind up homeless, addicted or incarcerated. The most honest answer I can give is that I don't know.

I have a lot of theories that I am happy to share. Maybe my early memories of my maternal grandmother and her love for me somehow sustained me through tough times and made me stronger or the fact that my birth mom has always felt I walked on water and I did not want to disappoint her with failures kept my nose to the grindstone. Maybe it was my aunt telling me how smart I was and how I should go to college some day that kept me from becoming a teenage parent. Maybe it was supportive foster parents, an involved case worker, good teachers or a circle of friends who generally did not do things that were immoral or illegal tht kept me away from drugs and alcohol. Maybe it was some combination of all of these or maybe those things have nothing to do with me making good choices. I do not honestly know.

My foster dad and my social worker continue to claim that I have some sort of internal fortitude that pushes me to fight when other people would surrender. If that is the case, it must not be genetic. No one else in my biological family has this instinct to rise above. If it is not genetic and it is not a product of the treatment I received from early childhood until now, then how did I get this magical power to see the light at the end of every tunnel and keep going until I get there? I do not think their internal strength, as wonderful as it sounds, is its own entity, but a result of something greater.

Am I about to make an argument for the existence of God? Sort of. Bad things happened in my life. I would not wish them on a child, but I would not unmake their existence in my own life. The thing is, I never was dealt any more than I could handle, with the support of the people who were in my life at the time. I could not have handled all of these things completely on my own, with no support, so I had to learn how to reach out for help, but I do not consider that a bad thing. It brought me closer to people and gave me an insight into the humanity of my fellow beings. Bad things happen to us all, but knowing that there are people there to walk with us through our hard times can make it a lot easier. It seems like my life is an argument for divine design merely by the fact that someone or something brought me the people I needed at just the time I needed them, like angels among us.

So what kept me off of drugs, in school, not pregnant and out of jail? In my mind, it was the right people at the right time, caring about me and acting as the hands of God. If a foster child is floundering, the first question I would ask is if they have an adult who they feel close to. If not, that should be the first priority for their worker.

What lies ahead

2006-02-19T18:53:00.000-06:00

I sometimes think foster children would benefit greatly from their foster parents knowing what is in the future for them. A lot of the foster parents I have spoken to have said that the future of the children they love is a major worry for them. They wonder if this child will wind up homeless. Will they finish high school? Will they create another generation of foster children? Will they become a substance abuser?

These are all valid concerns for any parent to have about any child, but I think with foster children it is that much more apparent how possible these fears are.

I sometimes find that I do not have the words to console foster parents or to help them know what to do. Since I do not have the pressure of a foster parent standing before me right now looking for the answers, I thought I would take this opportunity to list off some of the things I credit with me not making those bad choices that lead many foster children back into the system.

A good, realistic connection to my biological mom. I always knew what I could and could not expect from her. There was no fantasy about her coming to rescue me from my foster parents' rules. If I did not obey my foster parents and she heard about it, I got a hard time from her. Also, she was the best mom she could be, in spite of her disabilities. I learned that good parenting is the most important thing you can do and that I shoudl appreciate the fact that I will have the faculties to do it to the fullest and should not cheat myself or my children out of that opportunity.

A safe distance from dysfunctional family members, but with the ability to know what was going on with them. I was never forbidden from having contact with them, but they were far enough away to not be a disruption to my life. I could see the mistakes they were making and the reprocussions, but was not subject to the consequences of those mistakes.

A good case worker who was present all ten years I was in care...and beyond. She wrote letters of recommendation for me for college, came to my wedding and still sends me Christmas cards every year.

When I did happen to be in bad placements, I had friends whose families accepted me and treated me as one of their own. I still have connections to two ofthese friends and their families.

Foster parents who encouraged me and made me feel like my dreams and goals were in my grasp. I knew from the age of ten that I could and would go to college as a result of these foster parents.

A D.A.R.E. officer who made it about more than drugs. It was about choices and what you wanted to get out of life and how the choices you make lead to specific outcomes.

Intuition

2006-02-18T10:44:00.000-06:00

When I was in care, there were things that my foster parents just did not talk about. I think that they thought if they did not discuss them, then I would be blissfully unaware. Perhaps a normal child would have been. Not being a normal child, I frequently knew way more about what was going on than they suspected. I think this is due to a heightened sense of intuition. When something happened in my birth family that my foster parents knew, but I was not told about, I would sense something was up and start digging for clues until I found out what was going on.

This has served me well in my adult life. Keep in mind that I have no medical training as you read this. Just recently, one of the men in the group home where I work started having aggression issues which would be proceeded by a glazed over look in his eyes and a fall. We could not tell what the root of these issues were, as every trigger we knew for his aggressions was ruled out. I started talking to the staff and got a feeling like he was having seizures. I talked to the facility nurse, whom I do not normally agree with and she came to the same conclusion as I did. We took him to the ER that night for aggressions (sometimes an after affect of seizures because they diorient and confuse people) that we could not handle and the doctor looked at me like I was nuts when I told him to watch for seizures and told him why. The doctor said there was no reason to believe our guy was having seizures based on my statements and he wanted to send him back with us. Fast forward 24 hours and he is having BAD seizures in the hospital.

The weekend before that, I was talking to a foster family who told me how their foster daughter, a sixteen year old girl, correctly diagnosed a co-worker's leukemia based on bruising on her co-worker's back. I am sure that symptom could indicate dozens of diseases, not just leukemia and I thought it was odd that she intuitively came up with the right one. I could not get it out of my head, but now I think there is a reason why that convesration stuck with me. The next Tuesday, one of my co-workers mentioned bruises on her back that seemed to appear for no reason and would not go away and the fact that she has not been feeling well. I immediately heard the conversation about the sixteen year old diagnosing leukemia again in my head and I felt compelled to tell her she needed to go see her doctor and have him look at leukemia. Little did I know that she was already seeing her doctor for this and one of the things that he is worried about is leukemia. He is worried enough that he told her to quit her job and think about moving in with her parents.

Another recent weird intuition moment was when I started thinking about cutting back hours at work. I needed to do it partially for myself, but also felt (for no logical reason) like my mother-in-law is needing more from me than what I have been able to give while working 60 hours a week. I told my husband this and he said the she had not said anything to him, but to talk to her. I initiated the conversation with her and she immediately got a guilty look on her face. Within minutes she was telling me about how she has fallen more than once doing silly things like hanging pictures, nearly fell on the ice outside one day when no one was home and how she had made other risky choices that could have left her with a broken hip (she had them replaced last year) or worse. She had been feeling like she needed someone with her during the day but did not want to to say anything because she did not know how we could possibly make it work.

I guess the whole reason I am posting this is to tell foster kids to follow their intuituion on things, the let foster parents know that secrets are not always as safe as you think with foster kids in the house and to ask if anyone else has had similar experiences.

Imparting wisdom

2006-02-13T20:37:00.000-06:00

It is so funny to me that people care what I have to say about foster care. I have a lot of experience in the system and I speak/write about it passionately, so maybe that has something to do with it, but it still shocks me, after 8 years of presenting about foster care, that people really want to listen to what I have to say.

So what brought that on? I did a foster parent training over the weekend and there was the usual group of foster parents who liked seeing that the kids they are taking care of have a hope of making it in the real world. I am used to that. There was also a couple there who wanted me to kind of mentor their foster daughter, which I am more than happy to do. They met me for the first time Saturday morning and by Saturday afternoon they had told their foster daughter about me and how she needs to connect with me. That is what stuns me. I guess something I said had a huge impact on them, but I am not sure what.

Also, I will be going back to Washington DC in March to speak on Capitol Hill about foster care for the second time. I feel truly blessed to have done it once and getting to do it a second time is totally unfathomable to me. I am being invited to do this and the people who invited me value what I have to say so much that they are paying my way to DC and letting me moderate their briefing.

Not only that, but when I do not get to blog for a long time, I get e-mails from total strangers saying that they like the blog and that I need to write again. It absolutely makes my day to know that what I have to say here is ringing true for someone, maybe giving them hope or insite into a child in their care.

I do not think I could be much luckier than this. Thank you for reading my blog. I am going to send a thank you to the people sending me back to DC as soon as I get back from there. Would it be out of place to pass out thank you notes to the foster parents who I train? I really feel like I should. Not only do they open their homes to children like I used to be, but they value what I have to say and REALLY TRY to be the best foster parents they can be by embracing my ideas, advice and knowledge. They are some of my greatest heroes.

Questions for "The Sperm Donor"

2006-02-10T07:27:00.000-06:00

I have a dad. He is married to my foster mom, he taught me how to drive a tractor, ride a horse, be thrifty with money and he gave me away at my wedding. Since I have never met the man who impregnated my mom, I do not consider him my father. I long ago decided that "The Sperm Donor" was a more appropriate title.

Although I would love to find out if I have any half siblings out there, that would mean having to go through "The Sperm Donor" to find out and I am just not sure at this time that it is worth it. I go through cycles of being angry with him for taking advantage of a young woman who was mentally challenged, being simply disgusted by the fact that my mom got no help from him in taking care of me and being saddened by the fact that I do not know anything about the genetics on that side of my bloodline. If I were to ever decide it was worth meeting "The Sperm Donor" though, in order to look into the possibility of having siblings, I would have a few questions for him.

1) What made you think it was okay to have intercourse with a girl with mental retardation?
2) Did you ever have contact with my mom after the night you got her pregnant?
3) Did you know she got pregnant? If so, did you offer to do anything to help her?
4) Did you threaten to hurt either of us if you ever saw us again?
5) What diseases run in your family?
6) Do you have any other kids? If so, how old are they and do you have contact with them?
7) Does anyone in your circle of family or friends know what you did to my mom?
8) If you knew my mom was pregnant, did you ever bother to find out about the baby?
9) Did you wonder how she would care for the child?
10) Did you assume she would get an abortion?
11) Did you ever see me after I was born?

What is most valuable?

2006-02-08T07:19:00.000-06:00

I started a new job in November, and as the dates on my posts will reflect, I have been very busy with it. It is demanding, but I enjoy the work. The company values protecting the rights and dignity of people with disabilities. I love being part of this organization because I know the values they are promoting are good, right and true.

The problems begin with the fact that I live four hours away from my family (birth and foster) and MUST see them at least once a month. When I accepted the job, I made my boss aware that this was not negotiable. He agreed that it would not be a problem for me to be gone from Friday evening to Monday morning, as the job is Monday-Friday and he "only ever had to work direct care about three times in three years" that he had my job. I also informed him at the time of the interview that I am a foster care system advocate and do A LOT of volunteer work relating to that. I told him that I would continue this work in my free time and that I may use my benefits to participate in foster care events. This was not a problem, he said, as I can use benefits as needed. The job is salaried at 40 hours a week and it might sometimes require more or less time, but generally would require around 45 hours a week to complete.

Fast forward three months. I do not make the schedule for the facility, as this is the job of my second in command and one that she guards jealously. If she does not get the schedule filled, however, I am responsible for picking up hours not covered. This happens every week or two. I missed a visit home a couple of weekends ago as a result. I got to go home last weekend, but could not leave work until after 6 pm Friday and had to be back early Sunday afternoon to do payroll, which is due first thing Monday morning, takes four-six hours and cannot be completed until an e-mail is sent to my work computer on Sunday morning. I cannot get the e-mail on any computer, so I can not do this anywhere but there. There is no possible way that I could spend an entire weekend with my family and my boss should have known this at the time of the interview. Not only this, but I am being told that the foster care events I love so much, "might" be accomodated, but only if my second in command is able to fill the schedule, which I will not know until a few days before each event, long after I have committed to take part in it. To top it all off, I worked 50 and 60 hour weeks all through January and still could not keep up with everything asked of me at work and thus was told my boss that I need to work more hours.

So here is my dilemma...do I stay at the job because the company is good at the core and I already more or less committed two years, while neglecting my family and foster care plans OR do I let go of a job where I can impact the lives of people like my mom, after only three months, because my boss lied and I am stressed out by the workload.

I guess it is about what a person values. I value having work that is enjoyable and meaningful. In many ways, this job fits that criteria. I value seeing my family. When I do not get to see them regularly, my mental health suffers. I value my mental health, which is also adversely affected by not being able to keep up with this job. I value being able to speak out about foster care and educate foster parents. Without doing this, the bad things I experienced in foster care are in vane and the good things I experienced are less likely to be replicated for other kids. I do not want that to happen. I also do not want to commit to foster care events only to be told that I must break that commitment to be at work. I also know that there will come a time when I will want to get my non-profit up and running. When that time comes, I will have to quit this job anyway. I suppose I will keep working through this in my head until I come to an answer.

It's been a while...

2006-02-07T07:45:00.000-06:00

Working too much...blogging too little, c'est la vie. Hopefully that will improve soon.

I did get to go home this weekend to see my mom and my foster family. It was a good visit. I am crocheting a blanket for my best friend's baby and there was a brief moment when my bio mom thought I was pregnant, so I had to explain that to her, but other than that, nothing to report with her really. I looked into becoming her guardian a week or two ago and it would cost me $500! Needless to say, I do not have that kind of money. I am thinking a program to pay for guardianship expenses would be a good thing to incorporate into my non-profit someday. I cannot be the only child of a disabled adult out there. There must be other people in my shoes.

My foster mom and I have been getting along better since I got married. I do not know if she needed that milestone to help her realize that I am not a kid anymore or what, but she has been treating me more like a competent adult and I am not the only one who is noticing. My foster dad said something about it too.

Better get going...I need to leave for work pretty soon. I will try to blog more later this week, although, if this week goes anything like last week, it probably won't happen.

Seeking closure with old ghosts

2006-01-15T14:18:00.000-06:00

I have mixed feelings about my experiences in foster care. Sometimes I am able to conquer my negative feelings in order to appreciate the positives that being raised in the system brought to my life and sometimes the memories of injustices left unfixed and pain left unhealed is too much to push aside.

I wonder sometimes if I will ever be able to forgive the foster parents who abused or neglected my foster siblings and I. The things they did sometimes got told to case workers and therapists and sometimes we were too afraid to say anything until it was too late to address the issue.

The thing is, when you are unable to ever talk about this stuff, it is harder to forgive, harder to forget and harder to move past. I still have dreams where I am stuck in those old situations. I still get angry sometimes when I think about the things the foster parents in those homes cheated me out of like normal childhood and teenage milestones, a sense of personal dignity and the ability to trust other people.

The people who I know have suffered as a result of the things I learned at those homes include my foster siblings in those homes, the foster parents who helped me age out, the men whom I dated (including my husband) and myself. There may have been others in my own life or the lives of my foster siblings as well. I feel like those foster parents owe apologies to all of the people named above, but I never want to speak to them again, so I cannot get those apologies from them.

I sometimes write letters to those foster parents, to get what I feel out of my system. I never mail the letters, but it helps me to let things go for a little while. It never lasts forever though and sooner or later I am feeling those same feelings and having those same nightmares again. I wish I could find a way to permanently get past it all...to forgive, forget and let go. Then, the ghosts of the past will have no power over my future.

Joys!

2006-01-08T13:04:00.000-06:00

Last week I spoke to a group of teens who are in foster care about the opportunities that have been given to me to speak out about the system, to attend college and to do other things that I never would have dreamed of doing when I was in care. It was a very exciting thing for me to get to do, as I am a firm believer in the power to improve the world by empowering future generations of leaders. I made it a point of telling them how much like them I was at their age and how all of the opportunities I was given are things that they too can get. This particular group is forming a speaker's bureau so that people can learn more about the foster care system from the people most knowledgable and most affected by it, the kids. I want them to know that they can achieve that goal and so much more.

One other thing that came out of me talking to this group is that one of my best friends, who has been an excellent public speaker since high school and has only gotten better since, came along to meet the group. She decided to help them with their public speaking preparations and other related things. This friend was never in foster care, but she is one of the most compassionate people that I have ever met. As soon as I started talking to her about my non-profit, this speaker's bureau and the like, she was ready and willing to help out. I cannot say what an immense asset she will be to this group, with her knowledge, passionate speaking, empathetic nature...and, oh yeah...she is a certified sign language interpreter, so now they can reach deaf audiences as well. I am so happy that she is doing this, it makes me want to cry.

This friend of mine is truly an amazing woman. She has popped up in a couple of my other posts. She is 23, but her younger brother is only 9 and she is the one listed to care for him if anything ever happens to her mom, which she has taken very much to heart. Should she ever be called upon to fulfill this duty (God forbid, cause her mom is awesome and I want her around forever) she wants to do it to her fullest capabilities and so she has been planning her financial assets around that. In addition, she is in charge of her company's charitable donations and she really gets into that. Her company sponsors a family year-round and my friend is in charge of getting them what they need. Also, she is a girlscout leader, a volleyball coach and an awesome friend. I count myself really lucky to have her in my life.

Other than the speaker's bureau...what does this have to do with foster care? Someday, she wants to be a foster mom! Won't that be amazing?! She is exactly the kind of person I would have loved to have had for a foster mom when I was a kid. I cannot wait until the time comes when she is ready to do that. She will be great.

How do you define family?

2006-01-01T09:51:00.000-06:00

To anyone reading this, Happy New Year! I think it is going to be an interesting one. I am starting 2006 with a lot already going on.

For starters, I am doing my first foster care related work on Tuesday, when I talk to a group of teens in care who are part of a speaker's bureau. Their facilitator asked me about six weeks ago if I would come talk to them some time and then I got an e-mail from her the other day and some time became Tuesday. I am going to talk to them about speaking out, including how opportunities present themselves, knowing your audience and tips to sounding prepared. I am really excited about talking to this group. As corny as it may sound, I believe that children are our future and an investment in someone younger than me who has aspirations is the best way to use my time.

Also, my best friend is expecting her first baby around my first wedding anniversary. I am SO excited. I called dibs on the shower as soon as I heard and have already been working on it. I feel as though this baby will be like a little niece or nephew to me. It never occurred to me that perhaps my friend did not view this exactly as I do.

We were talking on the phone recently when she commented that she and her husband have decided that they need to make a will, now that they are expecting, and decide who they would want to care for their child, (God forbid) should anything ever happen to them. She has a brother and so does he. They would seem like the first logical choices, but neither of them are presently in a situation to care for children. The next step in her mind and mine was to think about the grandparents, but that also did not yield an acceptable answer. To me, the next step after that was each of their closest friends and family who they are really close to. This was where my friend and I disagreed and what led me to the title of this post. She told me, "We would want to keep the baby in the family." I will not lie, this stung, since she has no sisters and has always called me her sister, but I tried to understand her point of view. My friend defines family as the people related to you biologically. She was raised in a traditional nuclear family with a mom, a dad, two kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins and this is what she pictures when she thinks of the word family.

Because I was raised in foster care, my view of family is a little different from hers. To me, a family is the group of people who you choose to have as your support network, who are closer than your outer rings of friends. For me, my family includes my birth mom, my foster parents, my foster sister, my foster grandfather, my two best friends and their families, my husband, his mother, his brother, my mentor and her family. They are the people my husband and I count on when the chips are down and the ones we would think of if we were having a child and wanted to plan for a guardian for them. I am predisposed to define family this way, as I lack functional biological connections people like my friend have and I have set about to fill up the slots with other people who love me and who I love.

So, clearly, there is a difference in definition because of a difference in perspective. We are both right for our given situation. I feel bad because I tried to change my friend's mind and convince her that my husband and I should be the ones they choose, even after she said they want to keep the baby with blood relatives if anything were to happen. I feel that everyone has the right to define family as their heart tells them, and yet I tried to infringe on my best friend's right to do this. I am going to give her a call and let her know that I will support whatever choice they make and that I do not expect her to change, since she would not expect me to change.

It still hurts a little though, to know how high up on my list she is and to know that I am not equally high on hers. This has been a problem I have encountered most of my life, so you would think I would be past it by now, but I am not. I have always wanted to be as important to people as they are to me, but with few rare exceptions, it has not happened that way. Perhaps this is something everyone deals with and I am just more sensitive to it because I grew up in foster care and know how easily people throw eachother away. Perhaps I cherish my connections mroe than most people because I have fewer of them. Either way, it is an icky feeling that I hope I will some day find a way to deal with.

Legacies

2005-12-06T14:54:00.000-06:00

Whenever life takes you away from the people and places you have known, there is a mark that you leave behind you. Whatever the people from your past remember about you and whatever deeds you did to change their lives or the situation you were in together becomes your legacy. I thought it would be interesting to think about the legacies some of the people in my life have left for me. I'm going to try to keep the lists to two or three items per person and go for a chronological listing of when they exited my life so that the end of the list are the people who are still in my life. Part two will be written some other time and it will list the legacies I hope to leave for others.

My biological father - A dad is someone who takes the time to get to know you, loves you and raises you. Sperm donors are a better name for men who don't do anything but inseminate your mother. (Only makes the top of the list because he exited my life before I was born.)

My maternal grandmother - Unconditional love means forgiving people. Never marry a substance abuser. Tell people how much you love them regularly so that you do not have regrets when they are gone.

My maternal grandfather - Substance abuse can ruin lives. It is important to apologize to people you may hurt before you are on your death bed. Introduced me to chocolate.

My maternal aunt - Always do your best. Know when it is time to cut your losses. You do not have to be wealthy to lead a rich life.

First foster family - God will forgive you for just about anything, but you need to ask and really be sorry that you messed up. There are gifts you can make that are better than anything you can buy in a store. You are never too old to be young.

Second foster family (also see sixth foster family) - Families are important. Anger makes people do stupid things. I never want to own a horse when I grow up.

Third foster family - The Department of Human Services is totally oblivious to what foster parents are really up to in their homes. Children are powerless to stop adults who want to hurt them. Adults are fallible.

Fourth foster family - The Department of Human Services treats good foster families like crap. A good family with a small house gets less respect from DHS than a corrupted family with a big house.

Fifth foster family - Foster parents sometimes take in children to meet their own selfish emotional needs. You can make money by being a foster parent, but you have to deprive the kids to do it. Some foster parents are willing to deprive the kids of basic needs.

Sixth foster family (see also second foster family) - Anything can be forgiven. Families are forever. Nobody is perfect.

All of my foster grandparents - Being a grandparent rules. The more grandkids, the merrier. Once you are part of a family, you will always be part of that family, no matter what happens.

Best friend #1's family - A real Christian does not judge people. Your family can be made up of anyone you want it to include. God only gives us what he knows we can handle.

Best friend #2's family - Even perfect looking families have their problems. Being a young mom is not always a bad thing. Figure out whose back you have and make sure they have yours too.

Best friend #1 - Geographic distance does not kill a friendship that is real. People can be ugly ducklings too. No matter how much you love your best friend and wish she was your sister, having her date your brother would be too weird.

Best friend #2 - Just because someone is as strong as stone does not mean they do not have feelings. Too thine own self be true. Don't let anyone tell you who to love and not love.

My birth mom - The number of years you have been alive has nothing to do with your real age. Though a person's capacity may be limited in some regards, it is often heightened in others. Intelligence is highly over-rated.

My sister - You can be anything you want to be, as long as you are yourself. I am an admirable person. Your twin is sometimes born ten years after you, and has no blood connection to you.

My husband - Anything is forgivable. Anything is achievable. It is possible to fall madly in love with someone you once refused to even consider dating.

I am Jane Eyre

2005-12-03T17:54:00.000-06:00

I enjoyed writing the recent Harry Potter post so much that I decided I would make a similar list of parallels between my life and that of one of my other favorite literary characters, Jane Eyre. For anyone who is not into Victorian literature, Jane Eyre is a book by Charlotte Bronte about an orphan girl. I first read it in high school for and I fell in love with it instantly. The movie is on TV right now and I am listening to it as I type. I wonder if other foster kids have found similarities between their life and this book.

An obvious connection is that both of our names start with the letter J.

Both of us were without any siblings.

We both also fell in love with and married a man named Edward, whom others find a bit odd, but whom we find beautiful, charming, brilliant and amazing.

Both Edwards were with a woman who was out of her mind before we came along.

Jane had no relatives who were ready/willing/able to take care of her, so she ended up in the care of strangers. This is true for me also.

Both of us had an aunt on our mother's side of the family, who was a single parent, who had three children and tried to take care of us for a while.

It did not work out in either case.

Those women were the ones who sought alternate placements for each of us.

While she lived with that aunt, Jane had a male cousin who constantly picked on her with no intervention from his mother. This was something I also experienced while living with my aunt.

Both of these cousins also had J names.

Jane and I were both girls who drew more attention for our intellect and artistic gifts than for our beauty.

As a child, Jane's favorite past time was sitting somewhere quiet and looking at books. The same was true for me.

Note: My new job is going very well, but making it very hard to find time to blog right now, so please bare with me if my posts are a bit sporadic.

Follow up to Familiar Strangers

2005-11-21T07:31:00.000-06:00

I decided not to go to my bio uncle's this past weekend. My mom went. She said she had a good time. She loves her siblings and was looking forward to seeing them when we talked before she left.

Part of the reason I decided not to go was that I had already made plans for this past weekend and was really looking forward to them. I decided I was not going to just kill my plans just because I received an invitation to do something else. I will go to my uncles this weekend with my husband instead. None of the rest of my bio family will be there this week, except my uncle and his girlfriend, but maybe it is better that way for now, for the reason spelled out in the October post I called "Choices".

Another thing that crossed my mind, I'm sorry to say, was the fact that my uncle called less than a week in advance to invite Mom and I. I do not know how long ago he decided to have Thanksgiving at his house, but it did not sound like this was thrown together at the last minute. It felt like Mom and I were after thoughts and I am not okay with that. To me, this is what we have always been in my biological family and I don't like it. When people get married or have a baby, we never find out until right before and then we have to scramble if we want to be involved. When people die, we hear about it not when they first got sick, but once they are already dead and it is too late to say goodbye. Sometimes we don't hear at all. It has been this way since I entered foster care 16 years ago. That means that for 2/3 of my life, I have been out of the loop.

So, I want to see my bio family and all of that and I do not expect them to change their plans to fit my schedule or anything, but I also do not want to be an after thought. I think I would encourage this by sending the message that I have no life and am just waiting for their call or that if I do have plans and they call at the last minute, that I will just ditch whatever is going on with me to be with them. If they want a special presence in my life, they need to earn it, just like everyone else has. In the mean time, I will be happy to go see whichever of them care to see me, but I'll have to fit them in where I do not already have plans.

The right to do versus the right thing to do

2005-11-17T17:45:00.000-06:00

I am of the opinion that just because you have the right to do something, that does not necessarily make it the right thing to do. This belief stems would apply to a lot of my experiences in foster care.

Examples:
I was in foster care for ten years. After about five of those years, the judge on the case terminated my mom' s parental rights. The judge had the jurisdiction and thus the right to do it, but it was not the right thing to do, given the situation.
I had the right, when I aged out, to turn my back on my foster family, never thank them for what they did and never speak to them again. It would not have been the right thing for anyone, but I had the legal right to do it.
One of my foster mothers got angry at me and put me in respite to punish me and put me in my place. She had the right to put me in respite, but in this case, it was not the right thing to do.

On the other side of this paradox is the fact that sometimes you do not have the right to do the thing which would be right. You may know what would be best and have every desire to do it, but because of the law, you may be prohibited from doing it.

Examples:
I lived in a foster family that was abusive. My social worker moved me when she learned that the foster parents were abusive. She knew that the best thing for the other children in that home would be to be moved elsewhere immediately, but she could not do this, by law. When the investigators assigned to the case found no evidence of abuse, she simply had to leave those other children there because she was not their worker and did not have the right to move them.
By the time I aged out of foster care, the statute of limitations had run out to sue the abusive foster parents or the state for what was endured in some of my placements. It would have been right to make abusers pay back the money they pocketed rather than caring for kids, but I had no right to do so.
It would have been right if my friend's parents, good Christian people who loved me, could have gotten their foster care license when they saw I was being mistreated in a foster family, but their bedrooms were too small, and so they had no right to pursue licensing.

I wish more people would stop and think about the difference between their rights and the right thing to do. They are not always one and the same.

Familiar strangers

2005-11-16T18:10:00.000-06:00

I was just writing not that long ago that my mom has five siblings and 17 nieces and nephews and never gets a visit from any of them. Sure enough, one of them has suddenly decided to come forward and make a liar out of me. I'm okay with that. My mom loves her family and enjoys visiting with all of them, even the dysfunctional ones.

I had a message when I got home last night that my mom's functional brother wants her to come visit his home for an early Thanksgiving this weekend. Because of mom's condition and inability to tell her family no, even when it is in her best interests to do so, the facility where she lives calls me whenever something like this comes up. I was happy because I knew Mom would be excited. The messed up brother will be there too, but after talking to the good uncle last night, I am confident that he will be kept in line.

I called Mom tonight to see if she wants to go and she is REALLY happy about it. She adores this brother who invited her and is looking forward to seeing the other members of the family who have been invited.

I was invited to come too, but am not sure how I feel about it. First off, I promised my time elsewhere and could not get there until evening. Secondly, my foster parents have been really good to me and they might feel a little bit unappreciated or hurt if I suddenly start spending time with my biological family, when none of them (except Mom) have bothered with me for most of my life. My foster family has been more like a family to me than my bio family has. They have been there for me through some really good times and some really rough times and there is no way anyone could compete with them for my love, but my foster mom gets really jealous sometimes and I worry about her feelings as a result. I think I might take some more time to think about it before I reach a decision and maybe talk to my foster mom once I have sorted through my own feelings on the subject a bit more.

To Disclose or Not to Disclose...

2005-11-14T22:15:00.000-06:00

I just started a new job, hence the decrease in posts, and I find myself in an odd situation. My supervisor wrote a letter announcing my arrival and briefly stating my past experience and expertise. It was a nice thing to do and a well-written letter. Many of my employees have read the letter and commented on it already.

Mentioned in the letter and relevant to the job, is my foster care work. Though I'm not working directly in foster care, the overlap between foster care and my job makes it worth mentioning. The thing is, most people only get into foster care because they were a foster kid or knew a foster kid. People always seem to want to know which it was for me.

In my last job, it was known to pretty much all of my colleagues that I grew up in care and I was okay with that. I'm not sure that I want to tell everyone at my new job though. For starters, in my last job, I was encouraged to socailize with my colleagues, thus making it okay to disclose more personal information about myself to them. Here, I am a supervisor and socializing with employees outside of work has been discouraged by my boss. My thought is, if I am not to hang out, perhaps I am to keep my personal life to myself in general. This won't be easy, since I have only been there a week and some of my employees have already started asking about my background. What am I supposed to say if they ask how I got involved in foster care?

If I don't disclose that I was in foster care, they may still figure it out, since I am only 24, but having over two decades of experience advocating for a person with disabilties helped land me this job. If I explain that my mom is disabled and lives in a home for people with disabilties, a smart person will put two and two together to realize I was in foster care. Also, I do trainings for foster parents on the weekends and frequently have articles published in magazines, newspapers and on-line. I am fully identifiable by the accompanying photo and/or biography. Once they figure out I was a foster child, they might assume I had solely negative foster care experiences, since I did not disclose this in the first place. I am far from ashamed that I was in foster care, but I wonder if it would be unprofessional to disclose such personal information to my employees. It feels like it might be crossing some invisible line.

My husband disagrees. His opinion is that being a foster kid and the child of a person with a disability are job credentials in this case and thus it is okay to state those facts. In his opinion, making this information known will only make it more clear to my staff and others with whom we interact as a company that I have the kind of know-how and compassion needed to do my job. It will send the message that I care about vulnerable people and will not accept things that are not in their best interests.

I'm not sure yet what I will do. If I do not disclose, this will be the first time in my life that I have not done so. I have always been very upfront about it in school, at other jobs and with friends. I have taken every opportunity possible to educate people about foster care and recruit people to be foster parents if I think they would be good at it. On the one hand, it makes me feel good to enlighten people about foster care and potentially bring more people into the circle. On the other hand, I've always felt a little bit exposed by disclosing my past. It might be nice to not feel emotionally naked for a while.

The luck of the Irish

2005-11-10T17:25:00.000-06:00

A friend recently told me that the luck of the Irish is "Stepping in dog doo, but you weren't wearing your good shoes." I guess that is a pretty good descriptor of my life. Sure, I had my share of bad experiences, but I had some really good fortune too. This post is dedicated to those lucky breaks I experienced in care.

My grandmother died when I was six and this was tragic. I miss her to this very day. The thing is, I had her for my formative years. I have dozens of memories of her, all of which are good. I am not sure if this would still be true, had she lived longer. We lived in poverty, partially due to my grandfather's alcoholism, partially due to my mom's disability and partially due to the fact that my grandmother weighed 400+ pounds and could not work. It is conceivable that as I grew older, I would have come to resent my grandmother for enabling my grandfather's addiction and not taking care of herself better. She was taken from me before I could take her for granted or judge her.

I entered the foster care system because no one in my birth family was willing or able to take care of me. I am now one of the only college graduates in the family and one of the only members of the family to make it to my twenties without becoming a parent. If I had been raised in my birth family, who's to say this would have happened?

As mentioed before, I was in a couple of foster homes that probably should never have been licensed. The thing is, in those placements, I made some really good friends who had really good families who let me hang out at their houses all the time. I spent less time with the foster families as a result and was less scarred by the experience than I might have been otherwise. In one of these situations, my friend's family even went so far as to contact the Department of Human Services to inquire about getting licensed as foster parents. Their hearts were huge, but their house was too small, so they were told it was not an option. I never knew they had done this until YEARS later, when their son mentioned it in passing. When I asked my friend about it, she seemed a bit annoyed that he told me. Their parents were not doing it for glory, money, my appreciation or anything like that. They simply wanted to help out a kid in a bad situation. As I look back at it, after they were turned down for their foster care license, they doubled their efforts to make sure I was safe. I was invited to more sleepovers, church events and family gatherings than before. That friend was the Matron of Honor in my wedding and I still value her whole family as a key part of my support network.

I left one perfectly good foster home for five years before I moved back in with them. I lost all of that time to bond with my foster family. I will never get that time back, but I learned to appreciate them more. My foster parents are not perfect, but their intentions are good and they want me to be happy and healthy. I can appreciate this about them now, but had I never lived in bad placements, I might take them for granted. As it is, I am thankfully every time I interact with them that I have a family.

I try not to get too caught up in the bad things that I have experienced because most of the time it gets balanced out by good things. It is easy for me to see this in hindsite, but I continue to work on it in the present. I have a friend who is always telling me that she has to "turn things over to God". I think that is what I need to do as well. I do not have the all encompassing knowledge of the future to handle it all on my own and it is always good to have a second set of eyes on things anyhow.

Why Me?

2005-11-06T11:39:00.000-06:00

I had the good fortune to spend some quality time with one of my dearest friends this weekend. She lives two hours away, so we have to do a bit of coordinating to make this happen. I was in her neck of the woods, so it worked out well.

My friend is a protector. She shelters people she cares about from the storms of life. When she is unable to do this for someone she loves, it tears her up inside. I also tend to do this, but I can see where hardships (when limited in number, intensity and duration) can give a person character and emotional fortitude. This friend of mine is a perfect example of this.

Her dad is all kinds of expletives and caused her more harm in life than good. Her mom had to compensate for this, which was not easy, given that she was a young mom with three daughters (and later a son) and her husband acted like a child. When they divorced, my friend, the oldest child, was placed in an even tougher spot and had to be the mom for the half of the year when the girls lived with their dad. When they were with their mom, she still had to do more parenting than most kids because her mom was a single parent working overtime to keep them fed and a roof over their heads. My friend endured hardships that I would not have ever wanted for her, and if I had been in a position I would have done what I could to protect her. In doing so, I might have done her a disservice though.

My friend does not feel bad for herself. She says her parents were young and human. They made mistakes and she loves them anyway. She is glad she was there to take the brunt and protect her sisters. She has a tender spot for the afflicted as a result of her past. She runs her company's charitable donations and does a great job of it. They are the only company in their area to support a low-income family year-round and it has a lot to do with my friend's hard work and dedication. If it weren't for her suffering as a child, this family might not have food on the table, winter coats or Christmas gifts. She can see how her personal hardships opened her heart.

What she can't see is how this works for other people. For example, while we were talking, she told me that her sister is struggling financially. She has a daughter who my friend loves to pieces. It kills my friend to see her sister and niece making sacrifices, pinching pennies and utilizing public assistance. She wishes she could take care of them. When she told me this, I told her how admirable it is that she loves her family so much, but that God has a plan. My friend's niece is in her formative years right now. She may be learning something from all of this that will make her a great social worker, teacher or humanitarian later in life.

When I was four, I remember getting WIC, commodities and food stamps pretty regularly. It was not ideal, but we had food to eat and I have never judged anyone on assistance as a result. I remember one of my teachers bringing boxes of stuff that her daughter had outgrown to our house. I got a lot of joy from the things she gave me and I learned the value of passing things along to others when you no longer have use for them. I grew up in foster care and while it was difficult, it made me much more appreciative of family and good parenting. If I had had a perfect life, I might take things for granted and never help anyone else. But I did not, so I do not. I never ask, "Why me?" I know why. Because it made me a better human being.

I do not think my friend's niece will ever ask that either. I think she will take something from the circumstances that she could not have learned any other way and she will incorporate it into herself. When she gets older, she will be a stronge, wise, compassionate woman, just like her mother, aunts and grandmother. She will respect her mom for working so hard to take care of her and she will become an amazing woman. My friend and everyone else in their family will shelter her from what they can, so she will not be hardened to the world or completely disillusioned, but she will be a real person and she will have some idea of how to get through the trials she has as an adult. She will know what it is like to live without certain luxuries and she will comfort people who are less fortunate than herself. If my friend saved her from her present, she would potentially doom others in the future.

Harry Potter

2005-11-03T10:45:00.000-06:00

I had a conversation with my best friend's mom some time ago and it just came to mind, so I thought I would include it here. It is important to know that I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan. I own all of the books, have seen all of the movies and own the ones that are available on DVD. I have a Hogwarts watch and a replica of the necklace Hermione wore ot travel through time. I even wore it to dress up as Hermione to hand out candy this Halloween. One of our wedding gifts was book six, which came out on our wedding day. We nearly had duplicate copies because multiple guests were going to buy it for us. My love of Harry Potter is no secret.

That said, my friend's mom does not share this adoration of Harry Potter. As she told me, she started reading the first book and it just wasn't there for her. She did not connect to the book in the way I did. She thought perhaps I was drawn to the magic and wizardry in a way that she was not. It really was not that for me at all, so a discussion ensued, where I basically stated the following.

*Harry Potter is a foster kid like I was.

*He was placed in kinship care after his parents died. I entered kinship care after my primary care taker, my grandma, died. They were all three (his parents and my grandma) taken in very sudden and horrific ways.

*Kinship care ended and he moved on to a place that better allowed him to be himself and pursue his talents. This was also true for me. Entering foster care allowed me more of an opportunity to be a kid, do extra-curriculars and make friends.

*Harry witnessed some terrible things in this new place. I witnessed some terrible things in foster care. I witnessed other kids being abused and was powerless to stop it. The people inflicting this were demented. He faced Dementors.

*He came through things that other people were amazed he was able to handle at such a young age. The same was true for me. No one expected me to bounce back so well.

*We both came through relatively intact, but with some definite scars from our experience.

As I sat here writing, I came up with the following additional parallels:

Though I have the above in common with Harry, I lived in families the size of Ron Weasly's (and want one in the future), had a disposition similar to Hermione Granger's in school (complete with getting on people's nerves with my academic focus) and still have Neville Longbottom's hand-eye coordination. I see a lot of myself in a number of the characters.

In addition, Hagrid reminds me of my foster uncles, if you cross Professor Dumbledore and Sirius Black, you get my husband and my foster mom is a transfiguration spell shy of being Professor McConagall. I have a foster aunt who reminds me of Professor Trelawny as well as a high school friend who is Neville through and through.

As far as the evil characters go, my Voldemort is death and separation from the ones you love. I have always had a hard time dealing with both and he deals them continuously. Draco Malfoy is every kid who ever gave me a hard time in school because I was new. When Hermione punched him in the face in book three, it was like she punched every bully on the bus for me. It was a beautiful moment. Lucius Malfoy is the adults who did not understand foster care and who acted weird toward me as a result. Snape represents for me all of my foster parents who should not have been licensed and appeared so transparent to me, while the authorities were completely oblivious to their B.S.

I had a foster family that punished one of my foster sisters by making her sit on the stairs to the basement for weeks on end, from the moment she woke up until she went to bed. No one was to speak to her or give her any attention of any type. The whole set up of the basement staircase and her isolation from everyone else in the house was what I thought of when I first read about Harry sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs.

So, I may be a bit obsessed with the books. I really connected with them. I would be interested to see if other foster children and former foster children feel the same way.

The Foster Care Culture

2005-11-02T19:45:00.000-06:00

I am a member of a foster care site called Foster Club. Currently, they are holding an essay contest for current and former foster children about what it means to be part of the foster care culture. My submission is below. The deadline is November 21, so it may be a while before I hear how I did.

From the day I entered care, being a foster kid meant missing school every other week to go to therapy. Sometimes kids asked if I had cancer because I went to "the doctor" so much. Conversely, I was told I could not go to court hearings because I had to go to school. One of the court hearings I was not allowed to attend was the termination hearing. Being a foster child can mean being told that a judge decided your parents are not your parents anymore and you were not allowed to say how you felt about it.

In grade school, being in foster care meant having friends who called my primary female caregiver "Mom," when I just called her by her first name. It also meant not knowing how to handle it when kids asked uncomfortable questions on the playground, and just going for shock value with my answers. Like many other foster kids, I was not sure where I would be in a year, or sometimes even a month. I can remember saying under my breath, "Hopefully," on the last day of school, when friends said, "See you next fall."

In junior high, being a foster child meant being asked how it is that I was completely white and my sister was a full-blood Sioux Indian. I think our answer was, "Different moms and not the same dad." It meant having lots of "siblings" from all of my past placements, but never getting to see them once I moved because nobody understood why I missed them, when they were not my "real" sibling. It was in junior high that I started to feel like I did not really belong. Sometimes I was included in family activities and sometimes my foster parents would leave me out or send me to respite. I never got too excited about anything because I never knew if I was "part of the family" when it came to that activity.

Being a foster child meant wondering, my senior year of high school, if I would still have a home the day after graduation (even though my foster parents said I would) and how I was going to be able to be an adult in such a short time when I still felt so much like a child. It meant holding on tighter to my high school days than most other kids because I was so afraid of what was to come when they ended.

As I talked to a fellow college student a year or two later, being a former foster kid meant realizing that the "welfare problem" he did not want to pay taxes for included feeding foster kids and paying for them to have a place to live. Being a former foster child meant not wanting to take "welfare" because I was trying so hard to break the cycle that landed me in care in the first place. I remember wondering if my scholarships counted as welfare.

Last year, being part of the foster care culture meant that when I took the training to become a foster parent, I caught mistakes in the information being taught to new foster parents. It meant having people in the class look at me differently than before, once I mentioned that I grew up in foster care. It also meant being one of the only people who had no trouble writing a letter to my future foster children because, having been a foster child, I knew exactly what questions they would have upon entering my home.

This summer, being a former foster child meant confusing guests at my wedding who were from nuclear families by introducing them to too many parents. I had two foster mothers, my birth mom and two foster fathers there, plus my new mother in-law. I also had two foster sisters there who did not know each other because they were from two different families. I have never met a non-foster kid who could introduce two of their sisters to each other for the first time at their wedding.

Years after aging out, being a former foster child still means being torn between loyalty to my birth family and accepting the love of another family, then feeling like a jerk regardless of what I choose. It means not knowing where I am "supposed to" spend Christmas, but feeling like I am betraying someone regardless of what I want to do.

Ultimately, being a foster child means seeing things through a different lens than the one other people use. It means having a heightened awareness of human nature, a greater capacity for compassion and a broader notion of family. It frequently means not having someone else's successful path to follow and having to blaze your own trail. Sometimes it means feeling most alone in a room full of people and least alone when reading the post of a stranger on a message board because they have been there too and they said something that made you realize you were not alone at all, but a part of a huge family of survivors who have a shared history of being in foster care.

Being Good Enough

2005-10-31T12:30:00.000-06:00

I pride myself on being my best. I try to make good decisions & admit when I'm wrong. I make efforts to learn new things & I consider what others have to say. From an objective point of view, I think I'm a pretty good person & I have a lot to be pleased about.

Yet, I never seem to think I am good enough. In junior high, I did not think I was good enough to join extra-curriculars or be popular. In high school, I didn't think I was good enough to interest the guys who interested me or to be Valedictorian. I was sure in college that I was not good enough to be admitted to my dream school or the journalism program there or to get on the college trivia team. I certainly did not think I was good enough for my husband when we started dating. Most recently, I didn't think I deserved the job I was offered by a very rigorous interviewer who I feel asked all of the right questions to get the best person for the position.

All of my insecurities fly in the face of what I objectively know to be true. I know I am smart because I got good grades, always understood concepts quickly & excelled on IQ tests, the ITBS, the ITED, the PSAT & the ACT. I was co-captain of my high school trivia team for two years. I know I am likable because I have plenty of friends & strangers have commented on how kind & helpful I am. I know I'm not ugly because my friends' dad accidently threw away my photo once because he thought it came with the wallet his son was carrying. I have nearly 2 1/2 decades of experience with overseeing the care of my mom, a person with disabilities. I am a hardcore advocate for vulnerable people of all sorts & I have an excellent education from a respected university. These are facts I know to be true & yet, these insecurities which are directly contradicted by the facts linger.

Maybe my confidence in my appearance was undermined by worse than usual teenage acne & a foster mom who told me if I lost a few pounds & they didn't photograph my face, I could be a model. Maybe I have less faith in my intelligence because of the rough start my education had. Is it possible that I never became popular because I felt like an outcast & the other kids just picked up on that? Was I only less athletic because I did not believe I could make the jump shot, score the goal or outrun the competition? Do I think I am a cold, unkind person because of the foster family and roommate who called me the "Ice Queen" when I would not respond to their hateful comments about me? Do I still secretly believe I am a bad person because of the foster family that told us all that we were heathens & constantly punished someone for something? Did a childhood full of people who would not listen to me make me feel like I do not have anything valuable to say or any control over my world?

All I know is that it is time to quit letting the past haunt me & make my decisions for me. I am just as good as anyone else & I deserve to reap the consequences of what I sow, not just bad, but also good. It is time to listen to the good things people say & put a lot less stock in the negative.

Christmas

2005-10-30T12:30:00.000-06:00

It may seem funny that it isn't yet Halloween & I'm thinking about Christmas already. I've been this way since I started college. To demonstrate, I decided to make my own Christmas cards this year. They are designed, printed & signed. I just need to buy envelopes, address them, enclose a photo & send them off. Also, I already bought gifts for about half of the people on my list. They are wrapped, labeled & ready to give. I have a good idea what I am buying everyone else. Not only that, but I have been cruising the ornaments at Wal-Mart for weeks.

So, I am trying to figure out how I got this way. I remember commenting as a child, that it was not right for stores to have Halloween stuff & Christmas stuff on display simultaneously. There was plenty of time AFTER Halloween to sell Christmas stuff. Here I am now, one of the people the stores are targeting.

I think a seed was planted in my head when my grandma died. Needless to say, Christmas was not the same without her. I opened my gifts still numb with grief & thought how I would give up everything I owned to have her back. I later realized that Grandma spent the last few weeks of her life shopping for Christmas gifts for her "grandbabies" & that this would have been a very happy time for her. She was a very giving person & though we did not have much money, she lived for the times when she could splurge & buy things for people. When she died, she had completed all of her Christmas shopping & everyone got one last gift from Grandma. With that in mind, I started shopping earlier & earlier each year.

At each of my foster homes, there were different traditions for when & how things happened at Christmas. In some foster families, the tree went up on Thanksgiving & in others, not until a week before Christmas.

In the first scenario, it tended to be a fake tree. Its purpose was to get everyone into the Christmas spirit & having fun. It was not the kind of tree you would see in a magazine, but it reflected how the whole family saw Christmas. There were eggnog, homemade ornaments & music. As gifts appeared under the tree, it was okay to shake them & try to guess what was inside. I got really good at guessing. I love this type of Christmas.

In the second scenario, it was about appearances & propriety. It was usually a real tree, because they looked better, but that meant having to vacuum up needles every other day & remembering to water the tree regularly, so we had to wait to put it up. Every decoration had to be placed perfectly & nothing got on the tree unless it fit the theme, which may not reflect anyone's idea of Christmas. No one thought to play Christmas music or buy eggnog. The focus wasn't on getting excited about the holidays, but on looking good. Shaking gifts was forbidden. This was not an approach I really liked, but I see a little of it in myself sometimes.

It has been interesting trying to combine my experiences with my husband's sense of the holidays. Christmas has never held the kind of magic for him that it always has for me. When we have decorated a tree together in the past or I included him in Christmas shopping, I could tell it was weird for him, but in a nice way. He likes shopping for me & I think he will love shopping for kids once we have them. He will probably take great glee in making the children's gifts appear to be something other than what they are, just as he sometimes tries to do with me (I am too good at guessing, so it seldom works). We have had a blast making gingerbread houses the last couple of years, which is something he did as a kid, but I had not done until we started dating.

As I get older, time moves a lot faster. There are obligations as an adult & there is little time anymore to just sit & stare in wonder at the lights, the presents & the snow, as I did when I was a child. Tomorrow is only Halloween, but before I know it, it will be time to take down the tree & how well will I have enjoyed the holidays? I have tried to pick from the best of all of my experiences & make Christmas the way I think it should be. That means cramming the best traditions from my birth family, my husband's family & five foster families into a short period of time. I guess that's why I extended my Christmas season so much. It has become necessary.

The Beginning of the End of the World as We Knew It

2005-10-26T22:00:00.000-05:00

If you asked most people to identify the moment their childhood ended, they either would not be able to say or they would give some traditional rite of passage, such as getting their diploma, voting, starting or finishing college or becoming a parent. I was six-years-old when it happened to me & it took three simple words to end my childhood.

I had lived with my mom & maternal grandparents since birth. Because of my mom's disabilities, she was more like a sister to me & her mom was more like a mother to me than a grandmother. I adored my grandma. She was a big lady, with big hugs & an even bigger laugh. She thought I was the best thing since sliced bread.

Things were not perfect in our home. In first grade, I was already falling behind my peers academically. I had been tested for special education but my grandma refused to let me enter the special ed classroom. Beyond school, there were other problems. Mom changed boyfriends about as often as she changed clothes. She kept hoping that she would find me a daddy. Grandpa drank too much & frequently spent all evening in the bars downtown only to come home muttering or yelling unintelligibly. Grandma protected me from a lot of this ad kept Mom & Grandpa in line as much as she could.

Then came that fateful December night when everything changed. My aunt & her family were over for dinner. The adults were eating around the kitchen table & the children were enjoying their supper in the living room. I remember emptying my plate & going to the kitchen to put it in the sink. I stopped at the table full of adults & gave my grandma a hug before being sent back to the living room with the other kids.

I was playing with my three cousins when their was a sudden commotion in the kitchen. I looked up & it was clear that something was wrong. I could not tell what, but the adults all looked terrified. It soon became apparent that my grandmother could not breathe. I watched in horror as she started to turn colors & the adults lost their heads. Finally, one of the grownups called the paramedics. I was very confused when my preschool teacher, one of the paramedics, came in the ambulance.
Someone eventually realized that the children were watching their grandmother choke to death & we were ushered to my bedroom & told not to come out. We sat on the floor & cried & prayed & asked God to keep Grandma safe.

One of the adults came in & told us we would be going to stay with some family friends for the night, while Grandma went to the hospital. We all assumed that meant she would be okay & we packed up. I was unable to sleep all night because I wanted to see my grandma. I lay in a sleeping bag between my cousins & watched the Christmas lights outside the window blink off & on.
The next morning, my uncle came to pick us all up. The family friend who had taken care of us all asked him when he entered what had happened. In the next moment, he said the three words that ended my childhood. He took a deep breath & said, "She passed away." He had intentionally used a term he thought the children would not understand. Unfortunately, it was a term my grandmother had often used to talk about death & I knew all too clearly what it meant.

I remember shrieking & running. I fell to the floor in the living room & cried even after I had run out of tears. I felt like I would throw up & like I would die. I was certain the world would end without her. In some ways it did.

Less than one month after that, my mom & I were in a homeless shelter to protect us from Grandpa, whose alcoholism spun out of control after Grandma died. Mom agreed to place me in kinship care with the aunt who had been there that night. This was the first step in my inevitable entry into the foster care system.

Good Memories from Placement One

2005-10-24T22:30:00.000-05:00

When I was eight-years-old, I entered my first placement. The foster parents were an old couple. They had adopted girl who was a year younger than me. At the time, they also had a sixteen-year-old foster daughter in their home.

Since I have highlighted a lot of negative things, I decided it would be good to focus on some positives. I remember a lot of positive things about that first foster family. These are the highlights:

I had my own room for the first time ever. This was both awesome & scary.

If I had bad dreams, my foster mom would sit with me until I fell back asleep.

We had french toast a lot. I was allowed to use honey & syrup & peanut butter on my french toast.

We went to Canada for a camper rally. The foster parents brought along myself, their adopted daughter & three of their granddaughters.

They had two aquariums. I loved to watch the fish.

They had a big backyard. Because I was young it seemed ENORMOUS. I am sure it was just a bit bigger than average.

They had grand kids my age & they would come over to play a lot.

My foster sister had more Barbie dolls than anyone I had ever met. They were all named Christina. So was her fish.

We had a huge box full of dress up clothes & had more fun with those than anything else in the house.

We went to church every Sunday & got donuts during "Fellowship," which fell between Sunday school & church.

Choices

2005-10-20T17:45:00.000-05:00

When I was 16, I hit one of those proverbial crossroads of life. Not only was I in a position where one decision was going to change the rest of my life, but I knew this to be the case.

I had only recently resumed visits with my aunt (the one who cared for me for a year after my mom went into a care facility & who ended up placing me in foster care) & her family, when they offered that I could move back in with them. I turned it down, but began to think and write about it in the form of letters to express my feelings. I did not send any of these letters, in fact, I tore them up because I decided I was better off staying with that foster family for the time being. I forgot about the letters completely.

Just before the start of winter break, my foster mom sent for me to come home early from school. When I arrived, I was confronted with the letters, which I explained fully & honestly for what they were. Her two daughters, who were in their twenties & living in the home rent-free decided their feelings were still hurt. I was told to call my aunt & I better hope that she would be able to come get me or I would be out on the street at 5 pm. They took back everything they had given me, including my winter coat & other items paid for by the state's clothing allowance.

I stayed with my aunt's family through the break, but was forced to "reunify" with the foster family. In a horrible confrontation with my foster mom & her oldest daughter during a therapy session with a counselor I did not know, I was expected to grovel & beg to be part of their family again, which was not something I wanted. I was put back into their home, where I was treated like a felon for a while & expected to return love for this treatment.

My aunt's attitude toward me started to change once I was moved back into the foster home. She started talking badly about me behind my back, which I found out from other members of the family. She started treating me like she did not trust me. She acted as though any concerns I might have about moving back home were personal attacks on her. It became impossible to carry on a relationship with her.

By now, I had gotten a part-time job & started working on the weekends. I did not have as much time to visit my aunt & uncle but still wanted to move to their house at the end of the school year. My aunt did not believe me & argued with me to the point that I decided I could not handle living with her.

It was then that I made a life changing choice. Instead of moving back with my aunt's family, I decided to stay in care. Though the home I was in was not good, it was my first chance to attend one school for more than two years. While I didn't feel loved, I felt stable, which I didn't feel on visits to my aunt. I felt that if my aunt really loved me, she would want me to be happy & she would stick by my decision. I was wrong.

She bailed on me & I have not heard from her except when I called to try to get information about my great-grandmother's funeral. She more or less told me that she would send someone to pick me up & if they found me, great. If not, that was just tough, but she would not take directions to my house. Other than that, we've had no contact in eight years.

Fears

2005-10-19T17:30:00.000-05:00

I have a number of fears. I am not sure if they are related to having been in the system or if they are fears lots of people have & just don't talk about. I also don't know if they are logical or not, given what my life's experience has been.

Being a bad mom. They say you tend to parent the way you were parented. I was parented inconsistently. I had foster parents who were great & who I would be delighted to emulate. I had others who I would never want to be like in any way, let alone parenting. Perhaps it will be like my husband. He is the best of all of the male role models I had, but isn't really exactly like any one of them. Perhaps I will draw on the best of all of the parenting styles I experienced.

Never filling the gaps inside me. I feel like I belong in my birth mom & my relationship & for the longest time, that was the only place I felt I belonged. Then, in high school, I found a niche of friends & clubs where I belonged, but I lost that when I graduated. Once we started dating, I got a sense of belonging in my husband & my relationship, which I still have. I still do not feel like I belong in his family or in my foster family. It seems like I need to belong more than most people, but express it far less.

Abandonment. I think this has less to do with being in foster care than having my primary caregiver, my grandma, die when I was six. It was very sudden & unexpected & she was only 54-years-old. Pretty much ever since, I have been afraid people will leave, or die, or get sick of me & want me to leave. This is another fear I do not express very much.

Getting angry. I have a hard time talking about feeling angry. It's the only emotion I have any trouble expressing. I think it is partially because of being born into an alcoholic family & anger being translated into violence too often. I think it also has to do with the fear of abandonment. If I get mad, someone might get mad back & leave, or they may storm out, die angry in a car accident & I never get to apologize for something stupid I might say.

The Dreams

2005-10-18T19:30:00.000-05:00

The bad stuff in foster care happened some time ago. It has been 7 years since I left my last "bad" placement & I left the first "bad" placement two years before that. So, why do I continue to dream about being stuck there two or three times per year.

In the dreams, I am as I am now. In spite of this, I am stuck in a bad foster home. It is not always clear if I am still there from before or there again. What is clear is that I've done nothing wrong, but am accused of it anyway. I cannot leave my room, even though I have my own real, adult obligations to fulfill. I'm depressed, angry & humiliated. I should not be here & know I deserve to be treated better, but don't know what to do about it.

Other than being an adult, the dream is a fairly accurate picture of how I felt in those placements. I was often accused of things I didn't do & treated like I was there to serve the needs of the adults in the house. In one placement it was the foster mom & in another it was the foster mom's adult daughter & her fiance, who lived with us but paid no rent & treated the foster kids like beggars.

Perhaps I am still angry about the injustices incurred in there. Anger is an intense emotion. Why don't I dream about the intense emotions I had in foster care that were good? Why don't I dream about when my foster sister was born, when I graduated from high school or when I was placed in TAG classes? Those intensely happy feelings had to be as strong as the anger. Is itbecause I was able to express that happiness & it got filed under "complete" in my subconscious mind?

There has never been an appropriate time to express all of my anger. At the time those things were happening, I could not talk about them. Once it was over, my new foster family didn't want to hear about it. By the time I found an outlet besides them, it seemed like it had been too long ago to talk about anymore.

The whole time I was in foster care, I was forced to go to therapy. I had some really lousy therapists & I was not ready to think about what had happened yet, so it did not help much. Now that I could finally use it, it is no longer being offered. Isn't that typical?!

Insensitivity vs. Oversensitivity

2005-10-17T20:00:00.000-05:00

I don't always have the thickest skin. Sometimes I take things much more personally than they are intended. I am pretty good at not letting this show, especially to strangers & people who I know are not trying to be jerks.

That said, I hope I pulled it off this weekend while attending a meeting of foster and adoptive parents. I believe I am the first former foster youth in the country to be asked to sit on a board like this without being a licensed foster or adoptive parent first, so the fact that I am involved at all says great things about the forward thinking nature of the members. But, even on this board, with its great members, people say some really stupid things sometimes without thinking & I cannot help but be a bit offended.

Being very concerned with confidentiality, I am not going to describe any of the people on the council or say the name of the association, & while I cannot quote directly because it has already been a day or two & I did not write down the statements when they were made, I will do my best to replicate the statements that upset me.

Foster parent 1: People think these kids we adopt are beautiful, normal kids. They are not. (This made me feel like asking why they adopted the kids in the first place if they found them so detestable.)

Foster parent 1 (again): If I did not get a subsidy for my adopted son, I think he would be homeless right now. (I cannot tell you how many red flags this sent up. There is something be be said for honesty, but this is downright unkind. I have to wonder if the foster parent has said this to the adopted son.)

Foster parent 2: It's not a matter of if you will get a false allegation of abuse, but when.
(There are a lot of people who do not understand that an unfounded child abuse report is not necessarily a statement that a foster parent was innocent of all charges. It just means that nothing could be proven. Not only that, but I am pretty sure that a lot of kids who change their story from saying that they were abused by a foster parent to saying that they were not are only doing so because they have been threatened into doing so. Nobody seems to think about that. They would rather assume foster children are liars.)

One person asked me a question she feared MIGHT be offensive & repeatedly apologized afterward for asking. The thing was, it wasn't offensive. It was phrased appropriately & if I'd felt it was too personal, it was clear I could decline to answer. I do not want people to feel like they have to apologize left & right for being honest in front of me, walk on eggshells or not be themselves. Between that & being new to the board, I did not want to jump on people too much.

There is talk of bringing a teen who is still in care into the group at some point. I think there will have to be some definite paradigm shifts before that will be successful. A kid still in the system would have emotions that are still far too raw to sit through some of this.

Some of the parents seem like people who do not know they are prejudiced, but who are. They do not want to say things that are unkind or ignorant, but they think them (at least subconsciously) & then they end up saying them. I do not know if it is my responsibility (as part of the group being talked about) to step up & help them reframe their views in the kindest manner I can or if I would be overstepping my bounds to do so.

The Termination

2005-10-14T17:00:00.000-05:00

I do not recall my mom's parental rights being terminated. Maybe I never knew or maybe I blocked it out. What I do recall was rummaging through some old court documents to try to get something that would prove to the financial aid office at my college that I had been in care up to my 18th birthday. I was a freshman in college & finding the paperwork from the termination proceedings was the last thing I was expecting.

I remember the strength in my legs giving out & feeling ill. I felt numb as I read the document over & over. At that point, I had already aged out of care & it hit me how very alone I was in the world. Although my foster parents loved me & were fairly supportive, I realized in that moment that I had no legal, official, binding connection to anyone in the world. But as alone as I was, I knew someone who was even more alone.

I was the only child my birth mom ever had. Mom was born with cerebral palsy & mental retardation. She was shuffled from place to place until she aged out of foster care at 18. In the eight years she was in care, no one taught her how to care for herself or a child. Apparently no one ever expected her to get pregnant. Mom had been out of care less than a year when I was conceived.

We lived with her parents for six years, until her mother passed away. After that, Mom went back into an institution & I went to live with her sister for a year, before entering foster care. I lost touch with my biological family except Mom within a few years. Mom & I had visits every month, like clockwork. By the time I got to high school, we had started pretty much repeating the same visit every time.

Mom: I miss you.
Me: I miss you too, Mom.
Mom: How are you doing in school?
Me: Good. I got mostly A's again, except in math.
Mom: That's good. You are so smart. I'm very proud of you.
-Silence.-
Mom: Honey?
Me: What, Mom?
Mom: I'm gonna get out of here soon & get my own place. Would you want to come to live with me?
Me: We'll see. Let's worry about it when you get closer to getting out.
-This is where I changed the subject.- We repeated this conversation several times per visit with other subjects in between.

Even if Mom did not know, I knew she was never getting out. Even when I was ten, I could see the decline in her health from when I was younger. In my earliest childhood memories, I recall having to run to keep up with her walk. I remember calling to her to slow down as we walked a couple of blocks to the grocery store. By the time I was 11, her legs had weakened & she was falling so much that she started using a walker. Some time around my sixteenth birthday, she started using a wheel chair on bad days & by high school graduation, she could no longer walk at all.

Mom has five siblings who have seventeen children between them & yet, I am her only visitor. Correction. She has one brother who did visit for a while. He is on record as having given her enough alcohol (which does not mix well with her seizure medication) to get her drunk & try to pimp her out. That was while I was in care & I didn't find out until I aged out. He disappeared when my caseworker stepped in & when he suddenly showed back up at her facility when I was 19, I put a stop to those visits. No one else comes to see her.

When I told her I was getting married, she was afraid I was going to stop visiting her. No matter how often I told her that was not going to happen, the next time I came to see her, she needed reassurance that I would still come to see her once I got married. Even now, she still seems surprised each month when I show up to visit. I wish I could explain in a way she would understand. I tell her that love her & that she is my mom & always will be, no matter what. Even more than that, she is my only link to my past & I am hers. There is no one else in this world that can replace us in each other's lives.

I'm pretty sure Mom doesn't know about the termination. I'm not telling her. We both fought it tooth & nail. She knew I didn't want to be adopted & I knew she had no one but me. That wasn't enough for the judge. He thought the foster families I lived with were better for me. Some of the homes would've been okay. The rest make me wonder why they even bother with licensing foster families at all. I would have been better off on the street than in two of the placements. Oddly enough, those two were the ones that pushed hardest to adopt me & the ones who tried to punish me by taking away visits with my mom. I don't think so. Homey don't play that.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

2005-10-13T22:15:00.000-05:00

My husband & I got married on July 16. Other than me not being able to find a job, it's been great. Everybody told me things would be different once we got married. Apparently, they did not know him. Nothing has really changed between he & I.

His mom is living with us. Things HAVE changed between her & I. I used to feel really comfortable around her. I could tell her about anything & I thought she felt the same way. Now, I find that she chooses the weirdest times to reinforce my own worst fears about myself.

The things she says are to the effect that I do not know how families are supposed to work (due to having been raised in foster care), that I am not as much a part of his/her family as those born into it & never will be, etc. Mind you, she does not say it exactly like that, but the idea is there. I have a lot of worries about what kind of mom I will be, what kind of wife I am & if I will ever be able to create enough of a family for myself to not feel a huge gaping void where the family of my childhood should have fit. My foster family, try as they might, never has made me feel like one of their own. I've always been an outsider.

The statement about me not being part of the family really hurt, because she was comparing me to her youngest son who lives in the same town as we do, but never seems to be able to make time for her or his brother. I had a foster family who liked to do things to point out to the foster kids that we did not really belong & it does not hurt any less now that I am an adult. Though no one else had been on the subject, my mother-in-law felt the need to bring it up just to point out that he is more part of the family than I am. Apparently, no amount of caring for her after she's had surgery, no amount of loving her oldest son, no number of favors done for her, no number of grandchildren carried, will ever give me a spot in the family anywhere near the son who does not even care to be part of it.

I tried talking to my husband, but he doesn't get it. He does not have the need to belong that I have. He would not care if someone said these things to him. He does not understand why I am so upset by what she says & says I should confront her.

How would I go about doing that without looking like a total hag? Here she is, this little old lady with two artificial hips & a memory that lasts about thirty seconds, & I would either be confronting her in front of her family (automatically making me look bad) or waiting until no one else is around & she no longer even remembers making the comment. I don't know what to do.

Looking Back

2005-10-12T17:30:00.000-05:00

August marked six years since I aged out. Sometimes it seems like it has been twice that long. Other times, it feels like it has been less than a day. I try very hard not to hold on too tightly to the past, for fear that it will hold me back. On the other hand, talking about the pain I experienced in foster care is the only way to prevent other kids from experiencing the same things.
Placement #6 became my forever family, though not legally. They were also placement #2, but it did not work out at that time, so I moved to a few other homes & ended up back with them five years later, at age 17. They don't like it when I talk about my experiences. My foster dad says that talking about the bad things (even when I also talk about the good things) is ungrateful. He says I should show thanks for the system that raised me even if it was not always perfect.
I do not think that is it at all. I think they don't like it when I speak out because they feel guilty for not being there for those five years to protect me. All of the bad things that happened were in placements 3 & 5 & I think he & my foster mom feel like if I had not moved out of their house, those things never would have happened.
My take on that is different. The way I see it, those things happened because I could handle them. I am not overly religious, but I feel that God let that stuff happen because he knew I am the ultimate lemonade maker. I was never thrown anything I could not cope with & God surrounded me with people who cared about me & who provided me emotional shelter from the worst of storms. There were always good friends & they often had parents who embraced me like family, plus I had a social worker who worked her tail off for me & a birth mom who thought I walked on water & did her best to love me, in spite of her disabilities. It is amazing what a person can get through with the right people by their side.
Now, because I am a survivor, because I am able & because I feel passionately about foster care, it is my duty to call attention to the parts of the foster care system that I know can use some work. I am eternally grateful for the things I was given, but I know there are many more kids who had it worse than I did & who did not have nearly the number or quality of resources available to help them through as I did. I need to call attention to the things that are not right & help work to right them. I do not do this to bash the system, but to honor it & make it even better.
It is the least I can do.