An Instant Family

Sitting at my desk, reading about ways to build empathy and tolerance in preschool settings and am hit with a hot wave of grief. 

I literally feel tossed about by it, gasping and trying to hold back tears. It catches me so off guard I look for a trigger and cannot find one. I worry that this seems to be sitting inside me and bits of it seem to break loose and hit me in the side of the head every couple of days.

I’ve never really lost someone I cared about before. How long will this last?

Some of the children we’ve been “applying” for have terrible names spelled in ways that don’t make much phonetic sense and that are going to look ridiculous with our super long, intensely German last name.

Is it wrong to change it? Is it gross and colonial (or straight up racist?) for a white couple to change the name of some black children? 

One of the kid’s name is equivalent to a girl being named Prada. 

Prince and Lois has an amazing CASA. I just want to make a clear distinction between their CASA case manager (who I sometimes felt wasn’t doing the best thing for the kids but who also went to bat hard for them a few times when I asked her to) and their actual CASA who was a lovely older man who’s been doing this for years.

Their CASA took the kids to a museum one day so Ryan and I could take a nap. He picked them up for school on a couple of occasions and transported them to visits. When we wanted Lois to go to the fancy charter school in our neighborhood their CASA came on the tour with us to show support.

And this all happened even though Lois was ADAMANT that she HATED him. That he “doesn’t know how to talk to kids” and “disrespected” her and a bunch of other pre-teen nonsense that meant that he had the gall to treat her like a child and not a YOUNG WOMAN. 

Lois was so mature and parentified that when adults treated her like an 11 year old she was often offended to the point of them being dead to her. And yet, he took all of this in stride and kept showing up. Even when the placement was breaking down and all Ryan and I could do was cry and beg the team to find a place that could competently parent the kids in a therapeutic way their CASA was kind and respectful towards us.

I’m glad to know he is still with them since we can’t be.

One of my best and oldest friends sent me this e-mail today: 

And I really thought about it before writing her back:

I guess my overwhelming feelings of failure concerning the whole thing and the fact that I still keep getting beat up on by their CASA worker’s attitude that we are Bad For The Kids is coloring my framing of the whole experience too much. 

I just got an email looking for an adoptive home for a legally free 7 year old girl. She has a very sad story but has been in a stable foster home for almost 3 years and seems to be getting tons of great services.

She’s delayed but has an IEP that seems pretty comprehensive and someone responsible seems to be in charge of her schooling. She’s repeating Kindergarten right now to give her a chance to catch up.

In stark contrast, Prince has only attend about 4 months of Kindergarten due to their unstable home life. When he turned back up at school (because he entered foster care) because of his age they placed him in second grade. This led to nonstop struggles about homework (which he actually wasn’t capable of) a low self-esteem when it came to school and being so far behind in reading that doing his nightly 20 minutes of required reading almost always ended in a tantrum.

It’s amazing what good foster parents can do for a child if they are strong advocates. However, feeling like we were fighting the school was always demoralizing for me.

I work with small children and lately have been going in to the infant room and taking a fussy infant and walking with them around the building.

I tell myself (and the grateful teachers) that sometimes a baby needs a break and so do the teachers. There are several who instantly calm down and I know it’s because of the change of scenery and the new stimuli but it feels good to let myself believe a little that I’m good with them. That they like me.

This is a gross and needy feeling. I don’t like the idea of using babies to meet my emotional needs, even if it’s happening in a fairly benign way. 

I suppose losing Lois and Prince in this dramatic, traumatic way made me doubt myself. I’ve always thought of myself as, first and foremost, Good With Children. Failing so spectacularly makes me feel lost, and sad but also sort of adrift in my self concept. I was just starting to know how being a mother factored into my identity and then, just as quickly, it disappeared. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was looking forward to Mother’s Day and now feel sad and conflicted about it. It’s not something I feel like I can talk about. Because I was mothering for such a short time and so poorly. 

I got an email from Lois tonight.

I forwarded it to their CASA worker and asked her to answer it.

The Dinosaur and the Giraffe have their parental rights terminated tomorrow and boy, I am thinking about them more than I’d like to. I haven’t been pricing cribs or anything (like buying adorable baby shoes in Target tonight) but I feel them tugging at the corners of my mind when it gets quiet.

I am immensely missing Prince and Lois too. 

Before they left us Prince was in an inpatient facility and Lois was worried about him spending his birthday there (something that, regrettably, happened) so to try and help we offered to take her to buy a present for him to have when he got home. She picked out a Captain America Lego set and some shark (his favorite animal) wrapping paper and a fluffy silver bow. That night we wrapped it and talked about missing Prince together. 

Tonight I found that present in Ryan’s car, still wrapped. I suppose it fell out of the bag of his belongings we gave to his CASA. And I feel too demoralized and self-concious and unsure of my place to try and get him the present but his sister carefully picked it and wrapped it and I want him to have it. 

This sucks.

Last night our caseworker sent me this email -

Please don’t kill me!!  I got this referral for two wee ones that are almost legally free.  I know we talked about one….and also that you could go younger now…and foster vs foster adopt vs adopt…but I thought, “what the hey.”  Hehe  No worries if it’s a big fat no!  LOL  This would be slightly more formal in that they would narrow it down to 3 families and then pick their top choice. 

Which is why I LOVE our caseworker. Ryan and I agonized over dinner and then decided to ask her to submit our homestudy. The pictures she sent of the kids included one of them in Halloween costumes. They were a dinosaur and a giraffe. 

They are boys, 1 year and a little over 2 years and are so cute. Younger one was born at 28 weeks and has some minor healthy problems. I’m not going to get excited because there’s a great chance we wont be chosen BUT it does feel good to be excited about kids, to make some room in the grief we’re both feeling to hope.

Just to be clear, the e-mail was one I sent to her BEFORE she left our house in response to an e-mail she sent me from the other room one night that simply said, “I love you Sam. Please don’t let them take me” in which I explained that Ryan and I wanted the best for her and that we would always care about her.

The second was of the new collar I bought for Vanna. (because we had shopped for collars before she left and couldn’t settle on one we liked) and the third was to let her know how to reset the parental setting on her NintentoDS (I figure policing it is someone else’s problem now.)

Their CASA has seemed to behave in their best interest so maybe they are right but I can’t help but feel this is a petty retaliation for us disrupting their placement. I also wonder how many kids out there thing foster families “threw them away” when actually we let them be moved and then were forbidden to contact them.