tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15958593141293350862024-02-08T09:34:47.138-08:00What Now?A candid account of my experience with foster/adopting a teenager in Los Angeles.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.comBlogger188125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-1642730686538363752017-08-15T00:34:00.001-07:002017-08-15T00:34:49.811-07:00Forged In FireOne of the most astonishing things about T as he's become a young man recently is the depth of his compassion. He has little patience for petty complaints, suffering, as he does, from an excess of life experience and perspective. In fact, he cuts short superficial venting (except on what he has designated "Mother/Son Venting Night", which happens on Tuesdays, and has two ground rules: no advice, no criticism--also, I have to buy dinner). However, when someone's number is truly up and they are suffering one of life's deeper indignities, his compassion and empathy are unequaled. <br />
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I had the occasion to witness this gift in action just recently, as my mother-in-law is dying now of late-stage Alzheimer's. She has entirely lost (or perhaps given up) her powers of speech. She communicates through gestures, or sits silent. I'm not at all sure she knows who I am. Last time I saw her, she cawed in surprise and backed away. But she remembers T. (The reason, I think, is that about a decade ago, she was struggling to adjust to being T's grandmother. She simply didn't understand foster care or older child adoption. Tim, my partner, had uncharacteristically sharp words for her. Like many a mother, she was keenly attuned to her son's disappointment in her, and she made an immediate adjustment to embrace T as our son and her (first) grandson. From that point on, she has shown T unmitigated affection.) Even in her increasing mental isolation, she lights up when she sees T. We visited last weekend and she ran to embrace him. She even teared up when she said good-bye to him the next day, which is the first real display of emotion we've seen from her in quite some time.<br />
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But what I meant to describe here isn't her affection for T, but rather, his deep empathy for her and for my father-in-law. T has a universal perspective and a true compassion for those who are dependent and isolated, particularly the elderly. He works as a nurse assistant, and he tells us on a weekly basis how much he loves his job, and how much the vow that nurse assistants take to protect the dignity of their patients means to him. With them, he enjoys his own position of gentle authority, and it makes him feel good to earn their trust. With my mother-in-law, he drew on his professional expertise, and on the deep value he places in family loyalty. He altered his plans to be present for her birthday, and his very presence made it a special occasion for her.<br />
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Late in the evening while we were with my in-laws, my father-in-law, who was raised in poverty and lost his own mother at a young age, devolved into the depths of self-pity. He is emotionally repressed and, as such, he's not been able to fully confront that his wife is dying now. As we sat outside and talked, he expressed his frustration that his old age isn't as he envisioned it would be, and he complained about finding himself alone but encumbered. After an hour or so of this, my patience grew thin and I wanted to convince him to get some help in caring for his wife and get on with his life. T texted me from across the lawn as we sat talking. "He's not ready," he said. "He's struggling to accept what's happening. Now isn't the time. When he's ready to accept what's happening, we can talk to him about what to do next. Right now, just listen. He needs to vent. He doesn't have anyone he can talk to."<br />
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I was humbled by his words, and by his selflessness. I was impressed by the extent of his patience and the depth of his wisdom. And of course he was right. <br />
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Amazing. The next day, he was back to acting like a kid, whining and demanding snacks from the back seat of the car, dancing to the music on the car stereo as we sat in traffic. He is a thousand year-old soul wrapped in the still immature body of a young man. I always knew and treasured his compassion. But after nearly a decade of being one of his mothers and his fellow-traveler, and sharing some significant measure of the loss he's endured, I understand him more, and, at the same time, I am more awed by his ability to turn suffering into a selfless and unpretentious generosity toward others in their moment of greatest weakness. Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-70592699149286709162017-05-30T20:18:00.005-07:002017-05-30T20:20:31.338-07:00AwayT and we just returned from our first real family vacation and T's first time ever leaving the country. We spend a week in Paris and it was heaven.<br />
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The week prior to our trip, he really regressed. He stopped keeping in touch, wasn't going to work, wasn't coming home. He let me know by text he was depressed. He said he felt haunted by the memory of how E passed away when the three of us were all traveling (I was on a business trip, Tim was with me, and T was living and working in another state). He kept saying "Last time we all left, something bad happened." This is what trauma looks like in our experience - deep grief, complicated by disregulation. On the one hand, his response does have something to do with losing his brother. On the other hand, he's long had a tendency to descend into periods of chaos like this, even before he lost his brother. He has good powers of self-preservation despite it, and so we just wait it out. There are few other options anyway, and even his experiments with medication didn't seem to even him out. <br />
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Long story short, he showed up 15 minutes before we were due to leave for the airport and threw some things in a bag. Once we got on the plane, everything changed. He was excited, warm, and easy-going. The best part of vacation was eating all of our meals together - we are three busy working adults, so in any given week at home, we probably share just a few quick meals together.<br />
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Introducing him to Paris was like setting a duckling down in a pond for the first time. He was curious, adventurous, captivated by foreign ways of doing things. He'd never seen people of African descent who weren't Americans, and he was fascinated by French Africans, the way they dressed, talked, danced, the food they ate, the music they listened to. He went out every night, and sometimes took us with him, using us as a sort of safety plan, making us wait in the back of a nightclub, pretending not to know him, until he knew he'd be okay there. He met people, he fell in love with the city, and he fell a little bit in love with the world.<br />
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He's a kinesthetic learner. He has always impressed people like his high school health teacher, or his boss at his nursing job. He has emotional intelligence and incredible powers of retention once he is shown how to do something. Both of these things make for a skilled traveler.<br />
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Every night, we got to listen to him call his bestfriend back home. He spent twenty minutes telling her how the McDonald's in France serves Heineken and brings your food to the table! He talked about how funny it is to hear young French speakers sing American hiphop songs without really understanding the words. He told her how you could go out every night in Paris and dance until dawn, and how easy it was to take the Metro. He has had so few opportunities to be this person - not the kid with the tragic past, or the kid with the complicated family, or the kid with the endless court dates, but the kid with an enviable opportunity, the one who can share his good fortune with his friends and tell them something exciting about the world.<br />
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When we got home, we asked him where he thinks we should go on our next family trip. "Buenos Aires?" he said. "But then, why would we not just go back to Paris?" Bullseye!Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-63364313477292929492017-04-24T19:25:00.002-07:002017-04-24T19:25:33.270-07:00RecapI write rarely now. T is largely living as a young adult, still at home, working in his chosen career, slowly inching toward financial independence and, emotionally speaking, steering his own ship with a steady hand.<br />
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For anyone who has followed our family, it may be interesting to note that all of his childhood diagnoses seemed to amount to nothing more lingering than the general aftermath of trauma. I feel a bit foolish looking back for having dramatized or sometimes diagnosed him myself with the eye of an amateur. His behavior was alarming, even harrowing at times, but I see in retrospect that it was also pretty normal, given the very abnormal experiences he'd had in the system. These days, he goes without medication except for the marijuana he smokes on a daily basis, and no longer vacillates much in his mood or general well-being and capacity for sound decision-making. He's going on 24 now, and his maturity is right on track with what the science of brain development would lead one to expect for a young man. He has friendships and girlfriends that come and go, squabbles at work, and moments of restlessness like anyone his age. He rarely picks fights of any substance anymore, and while he can be self-absorbed like any young adult, and complex, like anyone who has seen too much at a young age, he is also very much our friend. In a few weeks, we are taking our first trip out of the country together.<br />
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My job brings me into regular contact with young adults who have been in foster care, and it gives me tremendous joy. What I lost with E's passing I see in a million luminescent fragments in the young people I know through work and I think of him every day, in ways that ground me, as if his memory is a pair of glasses through which priorities are easier to see. I have many moments with young people one-on-one and in groups when they are funny, profound, wickedly honest, hungry for compassion and solidarity, proud, vulnerable, and knowledgeable. I sit in meetings where representatives from the child welfare administration sometimes say things that make my skin crawl, things that are depersonalizing or unimaginative. But whenever one of our young adult clients who experienced foster care firsthand is around, everyone including me is energized.<br />
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I often ask these clients a simple question that is directly related to our advocacy work: if you could change something about the foster care system, what would it be? Every single one of them, regardless of personality or style, can answer that question quickly and without preparation in ways that will make you laugh and cry. Much of my work involves people who work in the system but have not experienced it firsthand, either as a child or as a foster parent (there are shockingly few foster parents working in child welfare, I've found!). They are well-intentioned, typically very well-informed, and very dedicated. But there is a unique quality to someone who can bear witness first-hand to the failed promises of the system. As my dad used to say of T, they have seen some of the worst that humans are capable of, and some of the best, and, as a result, they have a broad sense of the possibilities of human behavior.<br />
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The one thing almost everyone of our clients notes is the need for more loving foster parents, who can open their hearts and homes, look beyond behavior to recognize the soul of a child, help that child maintain contacts with their birth family, provide them with the safety and perspective to maintain those bridges in whatever way is best for them, and never, ever give up on them. Never "give them back", never threaten them with expulsion, never demand that they relinquish ties to birth family. Never demand that they fit in, never treat them as anything other than full-fledged members of the family. Never judge them, never reject them, never fail to forgive them if their rage is misplaced or appears out of proportion to the moment at hand. Never withhold normal childhood pleasures, like sleep-overs and social events, birthday parties, trips to the county fair or the school carnival or the homecoming game.<br />
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If we took the need for such parents to heart, and provided more ways for them to do the work of helping to raise children who can't stay with their birth parents, including making it possible for them to dedicate themselves full-time to meeting the needs of those children at least for awhile without the dual responsibility of earning a living by working full-time, we would have a great deal more justice overnight. I get to help encourage public policies that might someday build such a world, and I feel grateful for that opportunity and happy for my remaining time on this earth.<br />
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<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-24739615736282239462016-10-08T23:43:00.000-07:002016-10-08T23:43:02.352-07:00Family FleesSometime in the past year, T developed a preoccupation with researching his family tree and mine. He often likes for us to do things like this together. Over the years, he's heard me talk about my Irish American relatives, and formed relationships with some of my uncles, and he seems to enjoy a sense of solidarity in knowing that some of my relatives endured hardships of their own. <div>
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I imagine when you're adopted from foster care, it's comforting to know that you're forging an alliance with a new family that has had it's own humiliations and struggles, to lessen the sense of standing out as someone unfortunate. Building a family through foster adoption is intimate work that requires humility and self-knowledge, and, for both parent and child, it involves inviting people to whom you have not previously been related into your own family tree. <div>
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It's affecting to trace T and E's family history. It gives T and I a way to talk about previously unmentionable topics, like the fact that his birth mom doesn't know who his birth father is. That came up this morning, while we were looking at new information about how his family arrived here during the Great Migration. In tracing his ancestry together, we were able to talk about the forces that cause families to break down and young mothers to suffer, and to do so while engaged in an activity, so that the tone stayed casual and easy, always the trick with teenagers.</div>
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I was struck in doing this exercise that in my own family, both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother came from broken families, a fact which I had known, but not really examined. My Irish American maternal grandfather, the son of someone who came here at 12 years old and worked in the disease-ridden salt flats of Syracuse, New York, for over a decade until he left for the frontier, lost his mother when he was 10. His father very quickly remarried another Irish woman, whom he must barely have known, and my grandfather, who was still a young boy, left and lived for awhile in a car, becoming a teenage runaway. On the paternal side of my family, my grandmother dropped out of sixth grade when her father drove her to school one day, handed her a bit of cash, told her to take good care of her mother, and drove away, never to be heard from again. She raised several siblings and never even graduated junior high herself. Even now, it's impossible trace what became of her father; he just disappears without a trace from all public records. Without dwelling on these things, which didn't affect me directly, T and I were able to talk about the way that child abuse and abandonment echo across generations. </div>
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We're a biracial family and T's part of our tree has many branches that are severed by slavery and Jim Crow. Mine is comparatively intact, because my relatives in this country had the benefit of being considered white. However, 6 of my 8 great grandparents are fully documented from the Irish famine through brutal labor or domestic servitude upon arriving in this country (when they are what we would consider children today) to itinerant frontier lives. For a long time T thought that all white families in this country had once been rich and owned slaves. So tracing our ancestry together has given both of us a better sense of what poverty and disenfranchisement looks like outside of the African American experience, and it's given me a deeper sense of the privileges that "white" Americans gained through the lens of American racism as our families assimilated. </div>
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Tonight, his great aunt called. A distant relative in Texas noticed that he was tracing his ancestry online, and wants to offer information. He's been able to see his relatives extending all the way back to Shreveport, a town where half the population once comprised slaves. We're considering a family road trip, retracing the Great Migration route his family took to get to the coast. They made that journey less than 100 years after my relatives fled Ireland, moving progressively further west. At the moment, we feel like the most American of families!</div>
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Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-174532349797082062016-10-04T21:13:00.003-07:002016-10-04T21:13:35.919-07:00Right Livelihood When I was younger, I remember hearing about the Buddhist concept of "right livelihood"--in essence, a commitment to earning a living in a way that is ethical and does no harm. Of course, I didn't seek to do harm, and I always pursued jobs that were somewhat idealistic. But as the main income earner in my family, I was practical. I did what I thought best to earn a salary and benefits.<br />
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Since E died, I've been more....free. I lost touch with my mom and dad, after they didn't do anything to support us in the moment of E's death. At that same moment, I stopped caring about many of the external trappings of success and stability. I confronted all the ways that I've lied to myself. I went through a very deep and uncharacteristic depression. I felt emptier than I thought possible. I told myself that we grieve in equal proportion to the love we feel for the person who is gone.<br />
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Eventually, I canned my "safe" job and went to work for a nonprofit that advocates for foster youth. I just didn't care anymore about doing the "right thing." I just DID--whatever I wanted, without question. I just COULD NOT sit at my desk all day anymore doing what was lucrative but meaningless.<br />
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Fast forward, and today, I got to offer a fellowship to a young man in foster care to connect him to the arts. I met this young man in one of the job programs sponsored by my new employer. He struck me as unique, and I happen to know people who can make opportunity for him in his area of interest. So I reached out and helped him get a fellowship that I hope will lead to a creative career for him. And I feel so happy and alive afterwards. The conversation with him was short and sweet. He understood exactly what was being offered, and he believed that he deserved it. It was amazing to connect someone so deserving with something so right for who he truly is.<br />
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By a strange coincidence, he shares a first name with E. But I know myself well enough to know that I'm not that impulsive, that whatever inspired me to reach out to him was genuine, not superstitious. It's just an amazing feeling to take my love for E, and all that both boys have taught me, and use it to tilt the balance for kids in foster care. I don't care who dislikes me, and I'm not embarrassed when I make mistakes. I go to work now because I believe, again, in the value of my work. It's a great feeling.<br />
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When you're acting as a parent, the foster care system and the trauma the kids endure can be so maddening. As a professional, I find I have the benefit of neutrality. I can choose to work at an abstract level, on policy, or step in on a more personal level, as I did today. I go to work eager most days, and I leave energized. I often work at night because I want to. Whether my work impacts one kid, or thousands of kids, I'm happy either way.<br />
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Every day, I call on the knowledge E. and T. taught me. Every day, I am braver than I used to be, on their behalf. I enjoy every small step forward toward a more just reality for kids who can't be raised by their birth parents. I have compassion for them, for myself, and for a world full of confusion.<br />
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In case my story has depressed or deterred anyone, I want to say that I am happy.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-77599037971470076292016-08-29T22:01:00.001-07:002016-08-29T22:01:06.600-07:00A Year OnIn a week, it will be a year since E died. He was never adopted by us - by the time his brother T had been placed with us and we'd managed to hunt down E and make a connection, he had already slipped into the nether regions of the nexus between the foster care and juvenile justice systems, which is to say that he had been tossed from a group home into juvenile detention for behavior that was not at all within his control. If you have been exposed to older youth in foster care, particularly boys, that story is sickeningly familiar. When his "sentence" came to an end, the county couldn't find another group home with availability and sufficient services to take him, and thus he remained in juvenile detention, straining the limits of what is legally permissible. In fact, I'm pretty sure they well surpassed what is legal, but we were naive then. Eventually, under probation, he was released, but only to so-called high supervision group homes. My partner Tim persisted in visiting him, moving from concerned family member to advocate to surrogate parent.<br />
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After court dates and a million conversations with the social workers, group home workers, judges, and lawyers involved in his life, we were able to go from short supervised visits to overnights to a long period of years where E spent every weekend at our house with us and even took short trips. As I've noted before, our commitment to E started out as an obligation, a debt to T coupled with a sense that E was sinking and the only moral thing to do was to try to help him, until something rich, idiosyncratic and sanguine replaced that initial obligatory sense.<br />
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We mimicked traditional parents-and-child when E needed or wanted that, and, at other times, we were more like very close friends who share a home, or sometimes like a patient and his caregivers in a hospice might be. I suppose every family thrives on the assigned roles of its members and we were no different in that respect. Our life with him was largely independent of our life with T; T was an adult and living several hours away throughout this time, and even when he was home, he concluded that it was best that he distance himself.<br />
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It took nearly a year to get the autopsy report that concluded that E had died of an accidental drug overdose: meth, to be specific. Many would like to say he was an addict, because that's a likely narrative when a 19 year-old dies of a meth overdose, but he wasn't. He was just despondent, self-destructive, and congenitally lacking impulse control, which is a notable consequence of being born drug and alcohol exposed, and having received no pre- or immediate post-natal care. (He had no birth certificate, and no social security number, sure evidence that he was not even born in a hospital or the vicinity of a doctor.) Much is written about the likely consequences of maternal drug and alcohol use; very little is written about those who live and die marred by the resulting disabilities.<br />
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Perversely, we find the accidental nature of his death to be a slight relief. He had once tried to commit suicide by slashing at his arms with a table leg. Another time, he slammed his head against the wall until he was restrained. So to think that he had slipped overboard, quickly, without thought, was, by contrast, peaceful. Terrible. But fast, unintentional.<br />
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I apologize to anyone reading this for such harsh realities. It helps me to write about them, though. Losing a child is said to be among the most difficult of losses. Losing an older child who was not yours, but who attached to you in a childlike way when he was said to be incapable of such attachment, and with whom you had such unexpected happiness and compatibility, is also uniquely difficult. It's basically impossible to talk to anyone about it. They can't, won't, or don't listen. I do feel compelled to write about it, to make sense of it, to make sure the truth gets said somewhere, to remind the world that he existed, in all of the vivid tragedy and individuality and poetry of himself.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-89365336545885785922016-07-14T19:52:00.001-07:002016-07-14T19:54:03.252-07:00One Less Than FourNext week is E's birthday. He would be 20 years old. It's been ten months since he died.<br />
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Perhaps fittingly, just this week I started a new job. I left a good career and a very good salary and pension to work in a large organization that does policy and advocacy for kids in foster care. My former boss thinks I'm crazy but my closest friends think the move makes perfect sense - the job requires the same skills I've built up over the decades in my career, in the service of the cause that is obviously nearest my heart. As I do my new job, I call on the struggles and confusion and pain and good humor that E shared so openly, and I like to think that E is there each of my efforts. I like everything about the job, although I only just started. I even like my office. It's quiet, with a pretty view of the hills.<br />
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Meanwhile, T has been thinking for months about how to mark E's birthday this year. He craves appropriate opportunities to publicly express his grief, as he wants, understandably, to be seen as a good brother, one who took responsibility for his younger sibling through all of his struggles. (T has actually lost two brothers; a year before E died, the eldest of his siblings was murdered. They had only known one another for a couple years but the loss was stunning. Now he has two deaths to mourn at the same time.)<br />
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And yet T has not been self-destructive lately, which is a mark of how much he has grown up. He still lives with us, which is largely a very joyful thing. This morning he bit me on the shoulder while I was getting ready for work. We pick him up every night from his job in healthcare, and if we go more than a couple days without talking, he usually comes up with some clever scheme to spend an hour or two together (and get us to feed him at the same time). He's old enough to go to bars, rent a car, and do all sorts of other adult things; I find that I'm able to treat him as a friend as well as a son.<br />
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The three of us decided to get a tattoo on E's birthday. We chose a three-legged crow, a mythical creature in various Asian cultures that symbolizes divine intervention in human affairs and "a great master in nothing to fear" as one source says it. To us, it also represents our family: one unusual being that rests on the strength of its three parts that has come through something extraordinary. Three is a meaningful number - both one more than two, and one less than four, which is what we used to be.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-53022753618169155272016-05-09T17:50:00.003-07:002016-05-09T17:50:24.699-07:00EmergingIt's been eight months since E passed away, and Tim and T and I are emerging from a fog of grief. We won't ever be the same without E, but we are no longer bumbling around like zombies divorced from our own lives.<br />
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T lives at home now and has since the day we got the news. He finished his nurse assistant training this winter and started working, caring for older people, which has been his dream since high school. He loves wearing his scrubs, and takes his obligations to his patients very seriously. He has grown up so much, we often feel like we are living with a friend, whose wisdom and humor have both reached adult proportions. I always told him that someday, when he was no longer in school, he'd look around and find himself surrounded by adults, and he would no longer feel like the unfortunate "foster kid." That day has finally come. He can mostly be trusted to make sound decisions on his own behalf, and isn't that the ultimate goal?<br />
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It's great having him at home. I've tried to avoid leaning on him in my grief and it's important to me that he not feel that the tragedy of losing E has made us fearful and over-protective of him in a way that would burden him. Nevertheless, getting through these last several months was difficult for all three of us, with intermittent period of pain, confusion, forgetting, ruminating, and alienation from other people, and I can't really imagine going through that without him close at hand.<br />
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Frankly, it's been a very lonely time, the loneliest I've ever experienced. Losing a child is excruciating, and losing an older child who is yours through foster care is doubly alienating because many people have a poor understanding of that sort of parenting to begin with so they aren't sure how to regard you. I sometimes wonder if people thought we were foolish, to open our hearts to a kid like E, and felt we had somehow set ourselves up for tragedy. The fact was, he was T's brother, how could we deny that he was also our family? Anyway, it would require a cold heart indeed to refuse to respond to a kid like E. and fate just happened to put us within his reach, too late to prevent his pain, but just in time to love him as deeply and instinctively as any parent loves a child.<br />
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Friends wanted to be there, but after the initial expressions of sympathy, they didn't know what to say and so stayed silent. For months, nobody came over and nobody invited us anywhere. After years of entanglement with the social service system to try to support E's needs, everything in our world went quiet, as if all lines had been severed. At work, my boss stopped coming to me with assignments until I was able to convince him that I am just fine, unaltered. Even my own parents declined to show up for us when E died, saying they hadn't understood how close our bond was. They didn't attend the funeral and spent the subsequent holidays with my brother's family without inviting us to join them. Through all of this, Tim and T and I relied on each other, reflecting one another's sadness and sharing the daily discipline of just getting by.<br />
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I can't really write much more about losing E. Any attempt to capture feelings in words seems to do his memory a disservice. He's still there in nearly ever moment. Every Sunday afternoon, I feel his absence around the time we used to have dinner and say our prayers. On Mother's Day it hardly seemed like a year since he rushed into my bedroom last spring to hand me a carefully-chosen card that said simply "I love you with all my heart." Our weekends seem long after two years of carefully supervising him, visiting him when he was locked up, and arranging our home life to accommodate his needs when he was free to be with us.<br />
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I miss his astounding honesty, and his gentleness, and his trust. I will always miss him, and Tim may miss him even more, because they were each other's best friend. E was like someone from a dream, a personality loosely tethered to the world, saddled with more misfortune than one person can bear, and yet he was so loving and lovable. Our time with him always felt as if the clock had stopped and the needle had been lifted from the turntable and we had stepped into a private dimension. We can't go there anymore without him, but I'll never lose my sensation of that special extra dimension that existed solely through the magic of him.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-50422948971513310412015-11-06T21:02:00.002-08:002015-11-06T21:07:22.090-08:00Putting it in Words<div style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12px;">
When E. was alive (I force myself to write that to test whether I can stand to say it), I rarely felt like writing and so I let this blog linger. It was a happy time, and I didn’t have many complexities to unravel. Parenting him was easy. His illness made his needs very obvious, and his blissful compatibility with Tim made me secondary. The three of us acquired an uncomplicated rhythm, though that would seem most unlikely to an outsider, who would surely overestimate the impact of his near-constant state of crisis. Being with him was like driving on a very bumpy dirt road in a very beautiful part of the world. Once you learned to settle your stomach and stopped wishing the pavement were smooth, you learned to move with the rough motion of the road and enjoy the sun. Which is to say: we were merry together, through psychiatric group homes and hospitals, through two stints in jail, and one period where he insisted he preferred to be homeless and sleep in the park in a rainstorm. I am not being flip or ironic when I say that life with him was fun. </div>
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I’ve rarely been secondary in our house; I have a dominant personality and a forcefulness that Tim has kindly allowed to govern many of our life choices, though he’s the one who carries the dares through most of the time. Being second-in-command during our time with E was relaxing for me, like a long vacation of the will. I had developed the habit of playing basketball on Sunday mornings then visiting the car wash and the nail salon in the afternoon because I wasn’t needed at home. When E began living with us part-time, I hadn’t been superfluous in years; to the contrary, when T was in high school, and then later in rehab, it was hard for me to find time to go to the bathroom, much less a nail salon. But E was different and though he loved me, he didn’t need me. </div>
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Starting just a few months ago, I embellished my Sunday habit by not going right inside the house when I came home. I’d go out to the garden instead, and if I found Tim and E together there, we’d hang out, but if they were inside, I would watch them through the windows. On one such occasion a few months ago, I peeked over the kitchen ledge and caught them brewing beer together in the kitchen. E was sitting on the floor, sprawled out, leaning up against the wall and Tim was leaning on the counter and there were hops boiling in water on the stove and they were both laughing, probably about nothing, or at least not anything they could explain to me. They saw me and waved, but they didn’t stop what they were doing or come outside because they were engrossed in each other and they were accustomed to me dancing around the fringes. Standing there looking at them was like seeing a movie that I would love to watch over and over every day for the rest of my life, and even at the time, I knew that I was recording it to memory on purpose.</div>
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It’s my nature to be an observer, so I felt very much myself at home during this interlude in our lives. At work, I have a public self that is outgoing and organized and I am often the one who ends up in charge of things, because for whatever reason, I’ve always been that obnoxious kind of person. Even in my friendships, I find it hard to relax and I feel pressured to buoy other people. But in my private life, I’m much looser, introverted and introspective, and I like to entertain ambiguities. I prefer not to talk, unless it’s to Tim, but I do like to write. And my private self needs a lot more prime time right now than it used to.</div>
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For the last two months as we absorb the shock of losing E, I wanted to write about it at various times but I felt it would be unseemly. There is nothing I can say that can capture our feeling for him or the depth of his spirit. But I crave writing anyway, even when it’s cheap comfort, because I am cast out of the happiness I had when I was quite willingly the third wheel and I feel thrown back into a sea of need which includes my own, but also Tim’s and T’s. Everyone in my house is grieving hard. Even the dog is looking for E. </div>
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My public self is disturbingly intact and appears to bear less relation to my inner self than usual; I went back to work after one week, and after about three, people stopped acting awkward and making crude expressions of condolence tinged with misunderstanding, and I just got on with the routine of running things. I even took a business trip, though I took T with me because I couldn’t stand to have him out of my sight, and I suspect he felt the same about me, and anyway, it was an excuse to visit my favorite uncle. </div>
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But within my family and my household, everything has changed, as if someone came into our home in the night and moved all our furniture, took all our clothes, and replaced everything familiar. Or, more to the point, as if our minds and our bodies inhabit two different worlds, as if we move among familiar objects but when we touch them there is only nothing, while by contrast, we are wracked by sensations the cause of which we cannot see. A few days ago T texted Tim in agony, saying he couldn’t believe that E is gone because “he wouldn’t leave me like this.” We don’t cry often, and we don’t stop living, but all three of us individually are pointing in two directions at once, toward the ordinariness of today and toward exquisite infinity of death. </div>
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I am sure we grieve as a consequence of loving and in proportion to the attachment and intimacy we have with the lost person. For that reason, I don’t find grief ugly. I don’t even wish that it would end quickly. But I do, for the first time in my life, find myself deliberately refusing to think about him. Every morning for the last eight weeks, I wake up happy and relaxed with a sense that something is eluding me, and then over the course of several seconds I remember what it is that I forgot, which is that he died. In that moment I feel the superficial animal consciousness that drives me to pursue food and shelter and shiny objects come face-to-face with my soul and step politely aside to let it pass, hoping that it stays mostly quiet for the rest of the day.</div>
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I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. Once the workday ends, I go straight home. I am avoiding both of my book clubs; I don’t have the endurance for lengthy discussions about other people’s plots and problems, and the most casual comment can suddenly inflict great pain and slam me up against the limit of my tolerance. I want to be alone with my thoughts or those of the only two people whom I trust loved E even more than I did. I don’t want my head filled with other people’s words. I don’t want to watch their faces when I can still very easily replay the expressiveness of his in my mind’s eye. And so I’m back to writing, private conversations with myself. </div>
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Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-40682919384878588762015-10-28T16:51:00.003-07:002015-10-28T16:51:39.178-07:00E EndingThis is an incredibly hard post to write, but it would be wrong to leave this blog up without including this chapter, which shuts the door on an entire period of our lives: seven weeks ago, we lost E when he ended his life with a drug overdose.<br />
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It may have been an accident and it may have been intentional. Most likely, it was an accident that happened because he was not fully committed to surviving, and so it is a blend of both possibilities. In any event, we'll never know, because we weren't there when it happened.<br />
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There is no wisdom to share from this, and no pithy story to tell. There is only emptiness where for a time we had one of the great loves of our lives, and certainly the most unexpected.<br />
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In the last conversation I had with him, he complained that I wanted to wash all of his clothes before I let him wear them, as he'd had bedbugs recently. I started to lose my patience. Then I remembered that I had often told T that we might one day lose his brother, and so we should be sure to never end a day on an argument, and to tell him how much we loved him at every opportunity. Taking my own advice, I pulled back from the knife's edge of frustration and said simply, "I explained why I need to wash your clothes. I can see that you don't agree. But I love you and I want you to have a comfortable bed to sleep in when you're here at home. So you're just going to have to trust me." He gave me a wild look, threw his head back, laughed loudly, and scampered away. And shortly thereafter, he was gone forever.<br />
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I have no taste for discussing the various injustices that contributed to E's suffering and eventual demise. If you read blogs like this one, chances are you already know and care about the realities of life for youth in foster care, the wreckage and debilitating insults delivered by the child welfare system, the poverty of services for traumatized and mentally ill young adults, and the disheartening odds for children born drug and alcohol exposed and suffering related disabilities. I can't think about those things anymore. I could make myself quite insane thinking about all of the inadequacies in the care he received and all of the dead ends and disappointments we encountered trying to help him. But it doesn't matter anymore. I can't let generalities replace the particulars of E that I treasured so much, and even righteous anger can't quell my grief. There isn't room for both.<br />
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We held a beautiful service for him, modest, with his relatives and some of his previous caregivers. We sang his favorite songs, and his brother T gave the eulogy. Their birth mother whom I've never met came for the viewing though not for the service, although she was invited. While she was there, she and I held T as he sobbed over E's body and then we held each other. She said she was sorry she hadn't been able to mother E; I told her I was sorry I hadn't been able to keep him alive.<br />
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It was hard to be with his body, an empty shell that once held his most animated spirit. His ashes are at home with us. T and his birth mom asked me to be the one to decide what to do with them, and after a lifetime of being tossed from one foster home to another, and later, from one mental health facility to another, I couldn't stand to deposit his ashes anywhere other than at home with us, where he was, briefly, happy and so loved. So with us his remains will stay until one day they are buried with ours.<br />
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Obviously he was ill, and suffered greatly. He was also the funniest person I ever knew, and we loved him as our own son. He and Tim were true soulmates, everyone who saw them together remarked on it. E showed us things about ourselves that we didn't know, good things, patient, loving, tender things. The time we had with him often seemed other-worldly. It's impossible to imagine that he's gone forever, because he was so deeply a part of us. In the first several weeks, we felt as if we'd been left behind, as if we were meant to follow him. We followed him through so many harrowing events--including hospitalizations and incarcerations--and so many triumphs--his first road trip last Christmas with Tim, his first day of college last month--that it seems impossible that we can't follow him wherever he's gone now. But days pass and he's still gone, and the hard fact of it sinks in slowly with a terrible weight.<br />
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There is almost nothing to say about this, no way to interpret in words the unrelenting fact of death. But it is important to me to say that we would do it all over again. We aren't angry with him, we don't regret anything about our time together, and we wouldn't hesitate to embrace the opportunity to be his family again; quite the opposite.<br />
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T moved back home the day that we lost E, and the three of us are grieving together and will be for the rest of our lives. Grief brings us closer, clarifying the bonds of family. There are things only the three of us will ever know, including how brilliant a light has been extinguished and how very much has been lost.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-40073096288093213392015-06-12T17:37:00.004-07:002015-06-12T22:15:17.386-07:00Beyond BehaviorI am not an expert by any means, but I have had a lot of occasion to think lately about parenting an older child who was prenatally drug exposed. As we have spent more time focused exclusively on E and understanding how to nurture our relationship with him, I find that his disabilities pose mysteries that I hadn't considered before. (Though both boys were born severely premature and exposed to cocaine, for whatever reason, E shows long term signs of resulting disability, while T does not.)<br />
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I feel like you can learn a lot about traumatized kids by observing how they respond to stress and change, and we've had the occasion to see both boys react to big life events over the years. T tends to take over. He activates his natural leadership skills and uses his cognitive abilities to get his situation organized, even in the most difficult of circumstances. He is formal and reserve when he is uncertain, but even then, he can be extremely charming, even manipulative, trading on his good-looks, mature point of view, and winning ways to forge useful alliances. He likes to keep his clothes tidy, his papers in order, and his schedule predictable. Even at his worst times, he always had the coming week's schedule committed to memory, in detail. Even in his moments of greatest anger with me, he would pause to tell me that the color of my shoes clashed with my purse, or that I should remember to get dog food. He is capable of mastering many trying situations, and if he cannot get what he needs, he exercises a powerful denial to push the thing that is making him anxious far from his mind; if that fails, he uses drugs to go the extra mile, numbing himself to what he cannot control. Dysfunctional and damaging, yes, but it follows a certain rational progression.<br />
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E is quite the opposite. He responds to stress or disruption by getting severely emotionally upset, almost immediately. His changes of mood happen extremely quickly. Under duress, he quickly begins to whine, sigh, pout, and otherwise express a great deal of self-pity. He regresses to total dependency, asking others to decide and do things for him even when he is capable of doing them himself - things as simple as, say, opening a milk carton or adjusting the stereo speakers. He tends to become self-involved and pessimistic, to cling to whatever authority figure is present. If that's us, we minimize all stimulation and he gradually recovers. But if there is no authority figure at hand whom he can trust when he is upset, he can quickly spin out of control, having tantrums, running away, or--if severely taxed--becoming self-destructive. I know from my gut that what plagues him is not just the aftermath of a deeply traumatic childhood that he shared with his brother (as if that weren't enough), but the frustration and confusion that result from disabilities that he's had since birth. His wiring is off, in layperson terms.<br />
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What I mean to describe is his behavior, and some of the challenges of parenting a young adult who is disabled as a result of prenatal drug and alcohol exposure. What that leaves out is that he is very much an individual, with spiritual and emotional depth and highly original gifts. We've drawn naturally closer until we are indisputably his parents. He calls us mom and dad, and recently asked to change his name, entirely unprompted by us, because he wants to take the same last name as Tim. With great effort, he has become less actively self-destructive over the last several months. We helped him get from the department of child services to a department of mental health services program where he gets better care and has freedoms appropriate to his age, and that means we have been able to better integrate him into our daily life. He uses public transportation to go places he'd like to go, he spends time not only with us but with our friends and family. He walks the dog, he cooks meals alongside Tim, we take little trips. He is as close as he has ever been in the last ten years to having a normal life.<br />
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Recently we had such a small triumph, nobody else would have noticed or recognized it as an accomplishment at all: we had adult friends to our house for a game night, and E included himself, sitting with us for over two hours, playing board games of great complexity. He smiled, laughed, competed, and even won. He is intelligent, sensitive and capable, when he is operating within a safe environment in a very familiar setting with people he trusts. After this magical evening, I wondered at how "normal" he had seemed, and questioned (as I often do) whether I was underestimating is abilities.<br />
It occurred to me that we were playing board games - there were rules, visible indicators of progress, and a routine governing who got to take their turn as the main actor at any given moment. The environment of the game brought us all into a small, controlled microcosm where it was easy to see what was happening and what would happen next. Under those circumstances, he was very nearly indistinguishable from someone with no impairments at all.<br />
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But the world is not such an environment. I think of what it must be like for him. I imagine that in school or even now in some of his programs, he must feel people are functioning at an intellectual level above his. He has so often been excluded, for example from conversations between social workers, judges and service providers. He has real limitations in his inability to keep up with fast-paced or unanticipated activity, and reacts with uncontrollable emotion.<br />
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It is rarely E's disabilities or cognitive limitations that get in the way in his daily life; rather, the problem tends to be people who expect or demand a level of function that he is not capable of. Over the years, I have seen him expelled from so-called therapeutic foster homes, arrested, incarcerated, put on probation, and more, for "crimes" that are a direct and obvious behavioral result of circumstances that are deeply provocative to him because of his disabilities. No wonder he is sometimes overwhelmed by despair!<br />
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He also has very severe limitations in his social interactions with peers and his ability to make and keep friends, and so he gets terribly lonely. We are not just his parents - we are his best friends. For long stretches, we are sometimes the only people who play with him, go to the movies or the mall with him, laugh, sing or dance with him. We structure our weekends with him to maximize those experiences and minimize stress and intrusion. He gets enough of that during the week, when he is navigating the network of service providers and others who are part of his web of support, or (as in the case of his probation officer) the consequence of his mistakes.<br />
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Sometimes we'll go for several weeks feeling that he is very easy to be with, easy to love, and loads of fun. Then come abrupt interruptions during which he can be much harder to be around, and at those times, his pessimism can be contagious if you aren't careful. Occasionally, though it happens less often now, we feel some measure of despair and anxiety that we aren't able to help him and don't know what is going to happen to him. I am not religious, but at those times, we turn it over to God, for wont of any other workable strategy, which is to say, we stop trying to have all the answers. And so far, right when I'm about to feel like I have no idea what I can do to help him, he snaps out of it and shows us the way.<br />
<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-58711752031545139342015-04-21T20:08:00.004-07:002015-04-21T21:42:00.261-07:00Hand-Me-Down ParentingI'm having a great time lately being one of E's parents. After his <a href="http://lafosterblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/stitched-together.html">recent struggles</a> we've settled back into an easy rhythm of weekends at our house, while he spends weekdays in his program nearby, punctuated by mid-week visits from us. Throughout the week, we have facetime video calls and a volley of text messages, very much the way one might with a child his age away at college, except that he's in a transition-aged youth program for young adults with mental illness. He's doing great.<br />
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I think we're still in a honeymoon phase. I jokingly think of us as his hand-me-down parents; it was only when T grew up that E decided he had the right to have us all to himself. He finally trusted us, because we had "belonged" to his older brother already. So now he wears us around proudly, his older brother's hand-me-down parents.<br />
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Being E's parent is so very different than being T's parent! He's a more casual, more loving, more emotional kid. He expresses himself freely; there are few surprises. He is very aware that he needs support to get by in life, and so he accepts help readily and doesn't resist interdependence.<br />
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I'm not a good compartmentalizer. When T was living at home, it often felt all-absorbing. After T moved out, I focused more on my career, and had the chance to quiet the emotional part of me and indulge the analytical. But as E became more and more dependent on us, I've found myself distracted from my job much more. Dormant emotional instincts have reengaged. This unexpected chapter of my life in which we are hand-me-down parents to E has me riding a wave of profound feeling.<br />
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There is something about parenting traumatized older kids that highlights the highs and lows, the beauty and injustice in the world. This is part of why I hate it when people tell me that what we're doing is "good" and "wonderful" - it's not charity work, and we don't sit at a comfortable distance bestowing benefits on our kids. We are right down there in the shit with them, trying to figure life out, and it's hard, and we're not always good at it, and a lot of what we see makes us mad or sad. The kids are so innocent, and we are so imperfect.<br />
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When someone tells me that we are "such good people" for foster parenting older kids, I get mad, because I feel like they are telling me I'm not REALLY a parent - I'm just a nice person, a selfless volunteer. And I know that's wrong; foster parenting isn't charity work, it's just an alternative way to build a family. However, foster/adoptive parenting IS different than other kinds of parenting; among other things, the daily contact you have with pain makes it different. No kid enters the foster care system without enduring tremendous loss, often over a long period of time. So to be fully present in the lives of foster youth is to be fully present with suffering and its aftermath. And that makes it life-changing and mind-altering.<br />
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That doesn't mean that kids like E are sad and depressing. In fact, E is by nature a tremendously joyful person. He sings constantly and he lives to crack people up. But his reference points are painful. Just passed a Raleigh's burger joint? He went there once when he was living with a relative, for the only meal he ever remembers eating in a restaurant, and he really loved it, but he never went back because he was removed from her home shortly thereafter because she beat him. Want to know what his favorite color is? It's grey, because the group homes he grew up in had to give him $40 a month for clothes, which isn't much, and he found that if he bought everything in one color, whatever he had always matched. He's not trying to make anyone feel sorry for him when he says these things. He's just referring to what he has experienced, and a lot of his memories will make you really feel things.<br />
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Over time, loving and living with a young person with so much wisdom and experience makes me tender, although by nature I tend to be tough. At work lately I get jumpy. Casual banter and petty problems and office politics seem particularly soul-less. Dinner parties or book clubs feel hopelessly superficial. I get impatient more quickly. I covet and hoard the time I spend alone with my family.<br />
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I've been in this state before, when T was younger and new to us, so it feels familiar, and I know now that it's temporary. It's my way of being a mom, going a bit feral to better leverage my instincts to connect with and care for my kids. I treasure it. Such times suspend me in a state of emotional awareness and heightened consciousness, clear the bullshit and highlight my priorities. They wear me out, but they lift me up, high enough to catch a glimpse of life from beginning to end.<br />
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<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-81552877894235182622015-03-27T17:31:00.001-07:002015-03-27T17:32:16.862-07:00Stitched TogetherThese days, our time is more focused on E than on T, who, at 21, is living on his own and working full-time, not always doing what we wish he were doing, but doing it his way nonetheless. E, as I've described before, is very different than T and has never lived with us full time. In fact, he's lived in institutional settings for as long as we've known him, ranging from psychiatric group homes to juvenile detention facilities. In our early years with T, it was hard to get to know E; the boys had been separated by the foster care system many years before, and E moved so frequently and was so often in crisis, it was hard to even get permission to see him.<br />
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Eventually, he settled in a highly structured residential facility near our home. T no longer required daily parenting by this time, and we were able to work with the facility to establish a relationship. We started visiting E there every weekend, which led to eventually having him with us every weekend at our house.<br />
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E has suffered unimaginable trauma, abuse and neglect for his entire life. As a teenager, he's had many bouts of suicidal behavior, and it's not hard to imagine the desperation and rage he must feel and why. But he also has a rich, deep personality, a fantastic sense of humor, a real gift for music, and a lovely capacity for spontaneous affection. He and his brother couldn't be more different in nearly every aspect of their personalities and points of view. Very little that I learned in parenting T applied at all with E. I had long been intimidated by E's needs, and yet, when he started spending every weekend with us, we fell in love. He and Tim have a magical connection. They write music together, sing, laugh and even take little trips. Weekends with him came to feel like a totally normal part of our life, and the part we looked forward to the most.<br />
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And yet, however you want to describe it, E has formidable special needs. He is developmentally disabled, having suffered significant effects of prenatal drug and alcohol exposure, and he has had symptoms of mental illness throughout his adolescence. Since the age of 5, when he was removed from a relative's home, he has almost never lived or even spent much time in a regular home. In many ways, the environment of a regular family home, with its casual intimacy, lack of structure, and relative chaos is disorienting for him. I think being with us on the weekends and returning to his group home during the week was a good solution for him during this time. He could dip a toe in the water without having to fully rearrange how he is accustomed to navigating the world.<br />
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That sounds convincing, I'm sure, but I've had to work hard to convince myself to accept what feels like a partial commitment to him. Emotionally, I want him with us. His life often seems difficult and lonely. I struggle to trust the various professionals who help care for him, and often believe that Tim and I (and to some extent, his brother) know better. And recently, those feelings of mistrust intensified dramatically.<br />
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Over the summer, E turned 18. He elected to remain under extended foster care available until the age of 21, because he knew he still needed a lot of support. But the department of child and family services struggled to find appropriate services for him. His social worker was overworked and didn't know him well. The group homes that were appropriate to his needs only housed kids 18 and under. The transition-aged-youth programs are all full, and transitional housing available to only 4% of the transition-aged-youth who need it in our county. <br />
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One day, during an outburst, E kicked a worker at his group home and they called the police and he spent a weekend in jail before pleading to a misdemeanor. We were all shocked at this turn of events, and realized that the world for a mentally ill young adult over the age of 18 is a place none of us were ready for. When he was released, he was forced to leave the group home, and his social worker moved him through two totally unsuitable environments, where he destabilized terribly. We spent part of every week managing various crises, including having him hospitalized on an involuntary psychiatric hold on one occasion. During this time his social worker never returned our calls.<br />
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Then, two months ago, the worst happened: he got in a fight in a group home, broke a window, threatened someone, and was charged with a felony. He was put in county jail in the ward for the mentally ill. It was awful. We visited him every weekend, and longed to "fix it", but bailing him out would extend the resolution of the charges against him, during which time he would be vulnerable to extra legal consequences should he be picked up again. It's a scenario that I've learned is all too familiar to many parents and families of mentally ill young adults.<br />
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Finally this week, it seemed we had reached an agreement with DCFS that he could live with us full time. We sent what we thought was a reasonable list of services we would require to meet his needs in our home: wrap-around services, independent living classes for him, help getting him medical and psychiatric care. We were shocked when we were told hat he would have to emancipate from foster care in order to live with us, and that would effectively cut him off from various social services that are vital to his well being, including independent living programs, job training programs, access to psychiatric care, and more. Then the criminal court revealed that because of his mental health status, they would only release him if, as a term of his deal, he went into some kind of mental health care facility, rendering our whole fight with DCFS a moot point.<br />
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In the end, the court transferred his case from DCFS to the department of mental health. If I look at the situation objectively, I'm hopeful. DMH workers have an average of seven simultaneous cases, we're told, whereas DCFS workers in our county can have as many as 50. DMH and their programs serve adults, so he will no longer be subject to the chaos of being a legal adult in a world organized around the custody of children.<br />
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And yet on a personal, emotional level, I'm sad. I'm sad that in his case love is not enough. I'm sad that our home, where, everyone admits, he is happiest and most stable, is nevertheless not structured or safe enough to protect him. I'm sad that Tim and I have to work during the day and can't attend to his needs. I'm scared that he'll be misunderstood and treated badly again by the people charged with helping him. I know that in order to have the greatest chance to survive and thrive, he needs more support that we can give him without the involvement of social services. Not even all the money in the world would change that - in my limited experience, the kind of support he needs isn't even available at a price. You have to jump into the cumbersome social services bureaucracy and just piece it together bit by bit and the process is sometimes rough and humiliating, no only for the recipient of the services, but also for the people who love him.<br />
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I wish I could get all of them to see the person we see in E: the funny, easy-going, double-jointed, artistic, warm-hearted, playful person he is. He stole my heart when I was, frankly, reluctant to give it because I was intimidated by his needs. If we could carry him with us and keep him safe, we gladly would. I hope that as he tries to find solace and safety with the cobbled-together network we've tried to help assemble for him, he carries with him the knowledge that we love him deeply and that he is much, much more than the sum of his circumstances to us.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-20723323605868941602015-02-24T22:54:00.001-08:002015-02-24T22:54:13.443-08:00Why I Don't Mind When My Kids Don't Call Me MomIn six years of foster parenting, it has never bothered me that the person T and E call Mom is not me. Other people in my life occasionally make a big deal of this. "Why doesn't he call you mom?" "When do you think he'll call you mom?" "Did you want him to call you mom?" Honestly, I never gave it much thought. I truly don't care.<br />
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To me, the question misses an essential truth of foster/adoptive parenting of older children in foster care: you are a partner for the birth family, you share in their family, support their family, become part of that family yourself, in admittedly awkward ways sometimes. And the kids most often already have someone they call "mom" by the time they bond with you. So they might call you something else. And that's fine, because it's not a competition. It is NEVER a competition. Love and respect for one person never reduces the amount of love and respect you can give to another person, do they?<br />
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I had the most stunning experience not too long ago, while talking to a colleague who knows me pretty well. She asked if T and E have other siblings, and I said yes, they do. Their mother has several children. She asked if any of the children were raised with their birth mom and I said, yes, the youngest is growing up with her now. And my colleague, someone I thought until that moment might be a casual friend, replied "Some people should be sterilized." It was unimaginably vicious, from someone I know to be otherwise gentle. Her comment left me absolutely stunned. I am rarely speechless, but in this instant I was totally unable to make a sound.<br />
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What I wish she knew is this: her words sickened me, because on some abstract level, I love the birth mom of the kids in my life. There are unique and beautiful things in each of them that have filled me with delight and wonder and they came from her, and from their father. To disparage her is to disparage them. To assert that she should have been sterilized is to suggest that it would be better if the kids I love so much had not been born. To sit in judgement of her is to avoid compassion and empathy, not to mention decency.<br />
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Many months later, I finally want to scream at her, and I would say this: we have NO RIGHT to judge her. We have NO IDEA what pain it must cause to carry and give birth to children who are taken away. There is no woman on the planet who could go through that without enduring a wound that won't heal. I have no idea how one can carry on after that. But she did, and not only that, she conquered drug addiction, and she pieced her life back together and put a roof over her head and her daughter's. I've achieved far less in my life if we're measuring on the basis of distance traversed and odds conquered. The boys spend time with her now, and it's complicated, but I'm glad - it is a good thing for them to feel the connection they have with her, to know her, as part of knowing themselves.<br />
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Neither my colleague nor I have any concept of what it is like to grow up extremely poor, developmentally disadvantaged, addicted to drugs, and without the backbone of family to emulate, as she did. Truly, we just have absolutely no idea and therefore no right to sit in moral approbation of someone in those circumstances. Like many foster/birth parent combos, with her I have a policy of non-intrusion: I have never met her, though I have spoken with her on the phone, I have stood by through many a conversation as she and the boys reached out to each other (not always kindly or successfully), and I have delivered cards and gifts on occasions ranging from Mother's Day to the death of her eldest son. I expect neither hostility nor gratitude from her for my role in her son's lives. In fact, I'd prefer she not feel any need to think about me at all; we are both pieces of what I hope might be a whole, and as such, we have no need to overlap, but just to touch lightly along the edges that define our difference.<br />
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<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-55438426277953929592014-12-04T23:38:00.001-08:002014-12-04T23:38:35.499-08:00Gone AgainNo sooner are we up than we're down. Just shy of the 60 day mark, T relapsed, and hasn't yet pulled out of it. He's not living with us anymore - he's staying somewhere, he won't tell us where. The relapse unfolded in melodrama, chaos, confusion, and conflict. In fact, our first whiff that things were taking a turn for the worse was a sudden bout of extreme belligerence and blame and bad behavior on everyone's part. What's happening? I asked myself. And then felt sheepish for not seeing it coming. When he took all his financial aid money, dropped out of school, and blew it in a weekend drug binge, we realized what we'd been sensing on the horizon. And that was only the beginning.<br />
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I admit, I didn't do a great job as a parent - not even a <i>good</i> job in those last couple weeks before he left. I'm worn out by the cycle, out of practice at parenting since he lived away from home for awhile, and unsure of my role, as he nears 21. Following him through treatment and participating in the family sessions at his program over the summer left me with some perspective. I know that my role is to live my own life, to let him know as best I can that I love and support him, and that I hope he returns to treatment--but not to throw myself off the deep end to try to retrieve him. Nevertheless, I feel badly that in my anger and confusion as he fell off the wagon I was less than the parent I strive to be. It is what it is.<br />
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A long time ago, my mom gave me this piece of advice: "Your home cannot be a revolving door," she said. "You are not a place of last resort, somewhere to crash when he has burned through all of his other options. If you let that happen, it will be very hard to regain your boundaries." That was good, harsh advice. I'm torn, feeling so keenly that if he could do better, he would, and that he is genuinely disoriented to find himself beyond childhood and yet unprepared. I would give anything to rewind time and let him linger a little longer. But that isn't possible. He is a young man now, with a desire to master his own destiny, and the obstinate, understandable feeling that he should live life on his own terms, coupled with a very formidable disease of addiction that keeps causing him to sabotage himself.<br />
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I'm not sure a kid like T could ever leave home in a smooth transition. I feel like this is a new era of being a foster/adoptive parent of a traumatized kid - navigating the messy, frightening process of disengaging from their daily lives, knowing they aren't ready but you have to let go anyway. Even kids whose developmental needs were mostly satisfied can be cast upon the rocks at this stage of life. For kids for whom prenatal drug exposure, trauma, abuse, and displacement produced formidable fault lines so early in life, it's a terrifying transition. If I'm this scared, I can only imagine how he must feel.<br />
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But if I want his life to be his, my life has to be mine. Ever day I ask myself, does he know we love him? Have we shone a bright light on a good option that is available to him right now (at the moment, it's residential treatment, and following up on a prescription for antidepressants)? Did I at least attempt to apologize for my own wrong doing? And if the answers are yes, I try to move on, and let myself be happy, and invest time in other people including his brother, and my friends, and Tim. It's a bittersweet moment, a mix of acknowledging the looming truth of the trouble he's in and not taking it on, because I can't, and it won't help either of us.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-42935229698513518812014-08-02T14:09:00.003-07:002014-08-02T14:09:42.333-07:00When It's TimeThis new episode of parenting T is fascinating. He just hit his 40-day sobriety mark and he's twice as alive as ever before, twice as awake and perceptive. The whole point, as he describes it, of getting and using drugs every day was to dull perception, to numb feelings and to cloud out painful realizations. It wasn't working so well, but it was the best he could do at the time.<br />
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I would have done anything to hasten his recovery, but I learned I couldn't do anything at all. Or rather, I could only refuse to participate in his self-destruction (not giving him cash, not putting a roof over his head when he was using, not bargaining with his addiction). When given the opportunity, I could also remind him that we would like to see him in recovery and that we would be there for him should he ever choose that path.<br />
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That strategy sounds logical and obvious, but as a parent, it was damned hard. It meant waiting months while he slept on the floor of his brother's crowded apartment, doing nothing except planning his next high and trying to figure out how to pay for it. It meant not seeing him during the times that he was angry with us for not letting him live at home while he was using. It meant maintaining the flexibility to respond when he was ready for recovery. It meant forgiving myself when I was sad and angry about our relationship and I let it show. It meant making sure that our own lives moved forward and that we did not let his self-destruction drag us off course from loving his brother, each other, and our own lives.<br />
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And then it was time. This round of recovery feels different from earlier attempts. He is all in. He is beaming love and gratitude and wisdom and happiness. He's living at home, going to out-patient treatment three days a week and meetings on the other days, so we have a very firsthand sense of his experience. He goes to group every night, and his treatment plan has required that he share his most intimate thoughts and feelings about being born addicted to drugs, losing his family, growing up in the foster care system, feeling disappointed that his relatives didn't maintain a connection to him during that time, and finding adoptive parents during his teenage years. Everyone else in his program has their own story, and they embrace him in his struggles and celebrate his progress with him. Whereas he once believed that nobody could love him if they knew the truth about him, he has begun to see that his life story is part of what gave him the wisdom and compassion that draws people to him.<br />
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We go to family group for three hours on weekends. With each passing week, he gets stronger and more authentic. We see the effect of his charisma on the friends he's making in treatment, who turn to him for support, humor and wisdom, despite his young age. Often during these sessions, he expresses profound gratitude - to us, and to others.<br />
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I used to shy away from his expressions of gratitude. I didn't want him to feel thankful to us for adopting him--I felt that all kids deserve parenting, and I hoped it would be something that he learned to take for granted.<br />
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But I realized recently that I was being selfish in downplaying or not welcoming his gratitude. The gratitude he expresses to us is gratitude to the higher power in which he believes, to the great force of life for giving him another chance. It's an expression of his optimism and faith in the world and in other people. My own tendency to shut it down was not humility, as I thought; it was an expression of my mistrust of myself and of other people. Far beneath the surface, I think I declined gratitude because I felt like I wasn't a good person. I believed that if I wasn't screwing up <i>right now</i>, I would probably screw up soon, so his gratitude made me feel guilty. I thought it was my job to be perfect, and if I could just achieve perfection, he would get better. Falling far short of that goal, I felt he had nothing to be grateful for. I felt sure that I was going to disappoint him.<br />
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That was all a bunch of fearful, selfish anxiety. Lately I try to just sit back and follow his lead. Whatever he has plugged into, it is an awesome force that is propelling him forward in leaps and bounds. It's finally time: time for him to expose what was hidden in his heart through all the years that he clouded his experience with drugs. It's time for me to step back and accept that he knows me, he loves me, and he's thankful that I'm in his life, and just <i>let that be</i>. There is no flip side, and the universe isn't playing a trick on us, where we might turn the page and find out I'm a fraud and I couldn't come through for him after all.<br />
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In place of my previous quest for perfection and absolution, which led to an eternal dance of guilt and exagerrated responsibility, lately, I find myself thinking: I am so fucking lucky! I have this crazy, loving family that connects me to what is true and profound in life. I'm able to mirror his gratitude with my own, for once, and that feels great.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-19057993696888147162014-07-14T22:12:00.002-07:002014-07-14T22:12:53.062-07:00Not So BigRecently we went through a rough patch with E (T's younger brother, see below). He had a few days with us during which he was a remarkably different person, totally beyond any of our abilities to manage him. It ended without disastrous consequences, but it was a close call. (At one point, we had to involve the police and file a missing person's report and spent hours looking for him before he resurfaced.) We're trying to work closely with his group home now to try to develop some strategies in common for helping him manage his behavior, and get him the ongoing services he's going to need to help him into adulthood. The problem is, he's big on the outside, and not so big on the inside.<br />
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I'm relieved that his current group home obviously understands kids like him. We couldn't parent E full-time on our own. We would be in way over our heads and unable to provide the constant supervision he requires. E is turning 18 this month, and we're trying to work with them to secure his situation there until he's 21 to give him more time. We're hoping to get a conservatorship and disability services to help support E into adulthood and minimize the risk he poses to himself. T is part of that equation, and we've talked about the importance of the three of us working together, taking time-outs from E when he is too much for us, supporting each other so that no one of us burns out, and maintaining realistic expectations about what E needs and can manage.<br />
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As we've pieced together our understanding of how to help him, I've done some reading about fetal alcohol syndrome. I'm not a professional, but by this point, I am a well-trained foster parent, so I feel qualified to say that I have some knowledge of the impact of fetal drug and alcohol exposure. (Important to note: while E has traits associated with fetal alcohol syndrome, he also has a lot of other traits that are his own unique god-given personality, that have nothing to do with FASD.) Among the consequences of FAS that I see in E: he has poor impulse control, unusual difficulty making and keeping friends, a tendency to embellish the truth, and a need for near-constant supervision in order to stay safe and calm.<br />
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In these, our first months with him on a regular basis, we've found a few things by trial and error that help him manage:<br />
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1. He does best at our house, where things are quiet, relaxed and comfortable. He likes the garden, and knowing he can go someplace and take a time out or a nap when he needs to. He needs a lot of down time.<br />
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2. We have a (very) sensitive, snuggly dog, Monte, who works wonders with E. Monte greets him with wild enthusiasm, and they spend hours snuggling. E comforts Monte when he's nervous, and it makes him feel good to be the caregiver. Consistent with what I've read about FAS, E has a lot of trouble making and keeping friends, because his social development and sense of appropriate behavior is underdeveloped. He feels a lot of pain about this. But his bond with Monte is true and steadfast and reciprocal.<br />
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3. E sucks up the energy in any situation, so it is a bad mistake to expose him to environments where there is too much excitement, of any sort. He needs LOTS of quiet, fewer people, less noise and activity than other kids.<br />
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4. We need to know when we are in the danger zone where his behavior might exceed our ability to protect him and ourselves, and have and execute, quickly and consistently, a safety plan, which involves getting him back to his group home, or, if necessary, involving the police or taking him to a hospital.<br />
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One one very helpful website, I read this: "Children with fetal alcohol syndrome are vulnerable, naive, immature, and prone to getting
into trouble with their poor communication skills, lack of impulse
control, underdeveloped conscience, and poor judgment." That is pretty much consistent with what we see with E.<br />
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When E crosses a line, it feels unfair to discipline him for behavior beyond his control. By the same toke, to the extent that he's able to learn, we do want to try to teach him appropriate behavior, and hold him accountable. The trick seems to be to match that to his level of emotional development.<br />
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T was such a different kid; he was always supremely rational, and rational consequences worked with him on a lot of occasions. T's issues were post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, guilt and shame, and a lot of suppressed anger about what had happened to him. He always made sense to me, even when he was driving me crazy. He responded to love, high expectations, and tough, fair discipline appropriate to his behavior, combined with lots and lots of love and occasional, deserved indulgence.<br />
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E is not that way - his brain seems to be more injured and his development much more delayed. He needs an entirely different sort of guidance and support. But beyond the difficulties I'm describing here, he is such an easy young man to love. He is guileless and artistic. He's incredibly funny, a real comic genius. He's quick to demonstrate affection, and when he's comfortable, he's naturally friendly and outgoing. His smile and his laugh light up the room. He is absolutely worth everything we can give him and more.<br />
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Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-10930072962356803322014-07-09T23:00:00.003-07:002014-07-09T23:00:23.338-07:00FrankT got in the car tonight when I picked him up from his treatment program and said, "My group says I should express myself more." Oh boy!<br />
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Turns out, he felt we'd left something unresolved yesterday: upon finding him lying on the sofa watching a movie and glaring at me around midday on a weekday, I suggested he find something to do, and perhaps get out of the house. I may have phrased this in a way that was less gentle that it sounds now that I'm writing about it. :)<br />
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He did do what I asked, actually. He left without saying good bye and went for a walk over the hill, to the park, where he took a nap. He came back a couple hours later, apologized for being moody, explained where he'd been, and said he was doing his best to learn to fill his time constructively.<br />
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I explained that his behavior - bored, sullen, restless - had, basically, frightened me and made me tense. I dislike admitting fear, but his mood caused me to remember in an instinctive way countless days when he would hang around the house, increasingly listless, until he finally bolted to get high, often with some ensuing chaos.<br />
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"Okay, now we're getting to something," he said. He explained that he needs time while he's in treatment to adjust and build up to his reentry into the world. I explained that I was tolerant of that, yet vigilant, because I felt that his long-term reliance on drugs had left him a bit confused about how one might otherwise fill one's time.<br />
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From there, we moved on to another topic. I don't remember how it came up, but we turned to the subject of our relationship to him. He said his recovery group had asked if he calls me "mom" and he had replied that he calls me by my first name, which made them wonder why. I said that this had never really mattered to me - that I considered myself part mom, part friend. "That's crazy," he said. "I said the exact same thing!" I explained that "mom" seemed to me a loaded word, and that since he had a "mom" when he met me, I had always been fine with being referred to by name. I said that I figured I was one of his moms - the others are his biological mom, and the cousin he lived with for several years when he was young, who is now part of our daily life. "Mom can be sort of a possessive word," I said. "Don't I know it!" he said. "I respect your mom, because she made you," I said. "That's the only thing I respect about her," he said. "That's understandable," I said.<br />
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We also talked about his cousin who parented him when he was young. Recently, I asked him to reach out to her for some paperwork we need for his brother. "I would prefer that you guys handle it," he explained tonight. "We will - I needed you to do this one favor, because sometimes she feels badly about what happened when you guys were taken from her, and I thought she'd have an easier time listening if you asked her," I explained. "She should feel bad," he said, quietly. That's a first - until now, he's been protective of her and reluctant (if not entirely averse) to admit that he was badly hurt and disappointed when she let him go back into the foster care system instead of fighting to keep him with her.<br />
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Having him in treatment is interesting. We retread old ground, and ease into some new territory as well. He's brutally honest, both by nature, and as he is encouraged to be by his program. As he gets better, he becomes more like an adult housemate and a little less like a child. He speaks frankly now about things I've often interpreted on his behalf. I don't need to read his behavior to know what he's thinking anymore; he tells me. It's an adjustment, and a wonder.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-65651318507115625842014-07-02T22:42:00.001-07:002014-07-02T22:43:06.748-07:00Good at Family, Part TwoEvery family is good at something, and ours is good at therapy. Growing up, my mom and dad and my brother and I were good at tennis, tourism, and slipping into church late. Tim, T and I are good at therapy.<br />
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With foster/adoption of an older child, you don't have much choice. Inundated from the start with third-party "helpers" and various forms of therapeutic support and intervention, you gain a certain comfort in that climate. When T first came to us, we had a wrap-around service (read: intensive in-home case management) and out-patient services at a local university. Later, we had family therapy, social workers, and multiple court systems to contend with. As his substance abuse issues deepened, we also had out-patient and in-patient treatment programs with all that that entails. Suffice it to say, at times our life together was like living in a shoe box without a lid, with interested parties peering in at us all the time. What's more, as the white parent of an African American child, most everyone had an "opinion," spoken or not. Many, many people have been overt or covert with their skepticism, criticism, or bias. We've gotten used to navigating other people's intrusions, misapprehensions, and questions.<br />
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So family therapy, with its inevitable airing of the family laundry, isn't so startling to us as it is to some. We go into it like some families go into team sports: we're ready, we know our positions and our respective cues. We even have a bit of a schtick. Usually, T takes the lead. He's our "alpha" in family therapy. I remember once, in a family group setting at an in-patient treatment program, when T announced to the room that our family likes to go to Korean spas together during happy times. All eyes were on us. I'm sure no other 17 year-old had ever announced a love of Korean spa-going with his parents. Knowing that he had command of the room, T went on and on about it, detailing how I enjoyed the salt scrub, while he preferred acupressure massage and Tim liked to read a book in the sauna. Even the group leader was at a loss for words. "It must be nice," the woman next to me muttered. I was both proud and red with embarrassment.<br />
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We also have our in-jokes. Witness: long ago, T and I thought it would be funny to flip each other off during family therapy. I'm sure you're appalled, but to us, it's terribly funny. When the therapist isn't looking, one of us subtly shows the other the finger. Maybe it's the rub of a nose, or the apparent scratching of an itch, but it's unmistakably the middle finger. This private signal has persisted for several years, through many rounds of chaos and recovery, through many different therapists and mental health providers; remarkably, none of them have ever noticed, or admitted to noticing. During our darkest moments, and our brightest, we've found the occasion to flip each other off. It's what my British colleague used to call "taking the piss": a way of deflating pretenses, having a laugh. Just the other day, T snuck in a raised middle finger in the midst of some serious family conversation. It's like we're aliens, as if the standard greeting on our home planet is to flip someone the bird, by way of signaling mutual membership in a private society.<br />
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So anyway, we're back in family therapy, this time as part of his Twelve Step program. We started our Saturday group last week. Personally, I don't like to call attention to myself in group settings, but sometimes we have to follow T's lead. He's not someone to hide his light under a bushel basket. First of all, he's very beautiful, with large eyes and long curly lashes, and extra long thin limbs. People stare at him wherever he goes, simply on the basis of the way he looks. Second of all, he doesn't care about other people's opinions of him, or of us. He's been through far too much to fret over a few uninformed assessments. He flies his freak flag high, and encourages us to do the same.<br />
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One of his favorite things to do is to make eloquent speeches describing the point of view of the parent, as he did last Saturday. He'll say things like "Sometimes the parent blames herself for the child's problems, but it's not her fault - she has to let the child learn things for himself, and that can be really hard, because she doesn't want to see him get hurt." Of course, the other parents in the room are usually somewhat taken aback. His eloquence, neutrality, and (occasionally condescending) compassion for the parental point-of-view are captivating, amusing, and odd.<br />
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Sometimes in family group, I cry. I rarely (very rarely!) cry at home, and I can see that my open display of vulnerability is gratifying for T, besides being a much-needed release of pressure for me. The presence of other people takes some of the pressure off that I might feel in private. We can "leave the emotions in the room", as T likes to say. We can allow each other a moment of candor and of raw feeling that would be too much to manage at home.<br />
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Tim has his role too. He is the patient, unconditionally supportive, less sensitive parent. He's the one who gets us to our family group on time, and takes everyone out for breakfast afterwards. He's the one who scratches his head and looks puzzled when too much emotion starts to fly, and the one who can sum up our meanderings and emotional emissions to arrive at some practical plan of action. The therapist usually looks relieved when Tim starts to talk. He's the straight man to T's clown, the much-needed gravity to balance the levity and the tragedy.<br />
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In T's current program, so far, we are the only two-parent family group participating. We are the only bi-racial family, and T is also by far the youngest. But we've slipped right back into it. He is more eager to participate than ever before, and we are so glad to have him back.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-35716378714415620232014-07-02T15:26:00.003-07:002014-07-02T15:26:37.294-07:00First Steps As I mentioned below, for most of the past year, T was living in another city. At first, he was attending community college. Then he left school and he was working. Then he lost his job and he wasn't doing much of anything except getting high. During this time, we continued to pay his rent (he was renting a room from a family friend) and agonized over whether to cut that off. Eventually, that problem solved itself, because he was evicted. When he was evicted, we refused to let him move home. He crashed for awhile at the home of his older brother. Eventually, he wore his welcome there thin as well.<br />
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Having run out of options, he agreed to enter an addiction treatment program. Our insurance wouldn't cover residential treatment, but they did offer intensive out patient treatment. And thus, he has ended up living with us again. He goes to group 3 nights a week for 3 hours, and on other days, he must go to at least one meeting. On Saturdays, we go to a family group.<br />
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The program is wonderful and the facility is comfortable. It's a classic Twelve Step program. This is his fourth attempt at sobriety. He was in residential treatment when he was 17, and later did two different out-patient programs. But he has never embraced recovery as he is doing now.<br />
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I know, and he says himself, that the difference this time is that he really scared himself. His life fell apart and he saw that he had lost control. And he feels that this time, the decision to seek treatment was entirely his own. That said, he acknowledges that we let him "hit bottom" and made a hard choice not to enable him so he could reach that point. He says he's grateful to us for that and knows how hard it was. As I have been so often, I'm amazed at his ability to recognize and appreciate our point of view.<br />
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To be honest, it's (mostly!) a joy to have him in the house, although we were nervous about it at first and we still worry that things might take a turn for the worse. But we also really missed him. It's been so long since we have seen him sober, so long since he was able to focus on anything other than the pursuit of his next high, that we are marveling at all the wonderful qualities that we haven't been able to appreciate during his downward spiral.<br />
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I'm also working on not being co-dependent - on recuperating and reinforcing my boundaries. That's been a lifelong project for me - I was bad at it long before we met T. And once we became his parents, and his substance abuse began to take over his life, I found it really confusing to try to parent him while setting limits with him around his addiction. Through the program that he's in right now, I've got the opportunity to talk to other parents and family members of other addicts and reset my own priorities. Last weekend in family group, I cried for the first time in years, and realized that our struggles with T's substance abuse have been harder and more confusing than I've allowed myself to acknowledge.<br />
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A Twelve Step program and the close community of recovering addicts that the program creates seem so apt in terms of meeting his needs. In the program, he's able to share his whole life story in a way he's never done with anyone other than us. Many of the other people in the program have had significant struggles of their own. Nobody else grew up in foster care, but there are certainly people there who have been abused or abandoned by a parent, who have struggled with depression, or suffered profound losses. One man who befriended him lost his young son in a tragic accident. Among his new sober community, T is not marked as the kid who is "different", the one with the painful past or the tragic family history. Everyone there has a narrative of chaos and pain. He is able to exercise his natural well of compassion and welcome the compassion that the community extends to him. His recovery plan includes several extended writing exercises, in the form of letters to us and to some of his birth family that he reads at his group sessions. Like me, he has always worked out his feelings in writing, more so than talking, so this approach is something that works really well for him.<br />
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He talks a lot about how guilty he feels for the suffering he caused us and the ways that he manipulated us into inadvertently enabling his drug use. He's easy to forgive. I try to remember that it doesn't help him or me for me to minimize his wrongdoing in my rush to embrace his recovery.<br />
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All of this sounds unfortunate and upsetting, perhaps. But it's actually a time of profound joy for all three of us. In the same way that another parent might wonder at their child's first steps, we are amazed by his rapid development, his sudden maturity and bravery as he makes this foray into sobriety and, for the first time, accepts genuine compassion and support from a community of friends. He is thoughtful, funny, loving, and emotionally engaged with us and with himself. He feels good about himself for the first time in years.<br />
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Once, a long time ago, I wrote a post where I mentioned that a social worker once told us that an infant must go through<a href="http://lafosterblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/age-is-just-number.html"> ten thousand cycles</a> of need and gratification with a parent in order to form a secure attachment, which is the basis for growth and development. We felt we were starting so far behind with T - that he had missed those ten thousand cycles, or at least most of them. In this latest chapter of our relationship with him, we see a huge leap forward that we had begun to feel might never happen. I think he finally reached those ten thousand cycles. He was finally ready to take the risk of respecting himself and moving forward in pursuit of a healthy independence. It's a beautiful thing.Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-16955538616955592732014-06-20T13:32:00.001-07:002014-06-20T13:34:59.497-07:00E is not TWhen T came to live with us, it was unclear exactly which birth family relationships were important to him. But we knew that he had lived for several years with a younger sibling--whom I will call "E"-- from whom he had been separated about four years earlier. They were in separate group homes in separate counties when we met him. He also had three other siblings he had never met.<br />
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E had bouts of violent behavior, and was considered by his social workers to have an elevated level of need that we couldn't meet. To be honest, I didn't think we could meet his needs either, but as I came to understand the shared history between him and T, I felt increasingly guilty that we were adopting one boy and not both.<br />
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E spent holidays with us, or we visited him at the holidays, depending on his situation. These visits were usually tense - he wanted all of T's attention, and T found him exasperating. They triggered each other's agony.<br />
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Meanwhile, E was going through a period of chaos. He was thrown out of one foster home for breaking the windows and cutting himself, and in another he tore apart a kitchen. After one such bout, he was charged with a crime and went to juvenile hall. In juvenile hall, he sank into a deep suicidal depression, resulting in a placement in a high security probation department facility for emotionally distressed kids that was horrifying and heartbreaking. We visited him there. He had scars where he'd cut himself. It was a seemingly endless nightmare.<br />
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Fast forward. After nearly a year of that, and various placements, E was transferred back to child protective services and he was moved (after some lobbying by Tim) to a therapeutic group home near us. By then, we had been the only people to visit him and the only people to go to his court dates for many, many months.<br />
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During this time, T was living in another city, so we had time to spend exclusively with E. Seeing him apart from T was an eye-opener. We got him dusted off and reacclimated to the world. We went to the movies, and to his high school graduation. On his own, and with the benefit of a little more maturity, medication, and therapy, E was a different boy, more self-possessed. We were able to get to know him as an individual.<br />
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One day, he looked right at me and said "I am so afraid I'm going to do something to disappoint you." I realized that he thought our visits were a reward, or a privilege that might be taken away as punishment. We explained that wasn't the case, that we consider him family, that we visit him because we love him, not because he's been good or bad.<br />
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After that, there was a subtle shift. He was a little more relaxed, a little more honest. And then suddenly, there was a great leap forward! He started to refer to us as his adoptive parents. He started asking for things, reasonable things, things that kids need and want from their parents. He got permission to stay at our house on weekends. He sulked sometimes, and at other times, he was wildly entertaining. He started coming over every weekend, both days. He started taking long naps in the second bedroom, bringing his dirty laundry to be washed, and staying until late Sunday night.<br />
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And lo-and-behold, it turned out that his pain and rage and suffering had been masking something more nuanced: a fantastically funny, laid-back, honest personality. And an incredible gift for music. He is the polar opposite of T. Where T is refined and graceful and controlling and repressed, E is silly and sloppy and snuggly and uninhibited. Where T struggles to let go and express himself, E sings his heart out and spills the beans at the slightest provocation.<br />
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And what's even WEIRDER: it turned out that T and Tim have a magical chemistry. They fit together like puzzle pieces. I love him too, no less than Tim does. But just as T and I have a natural chemistry, an ability, based on a similar sensibility, to intuit each other's thoughts and feelings, Tim and E fit together in their own way. They even share certain body language that makes them look alike! I was behind them at the mall the other day and they had a way of walking side-by-side that made them look unmistakably connected.<br />
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You could bowl me over with a feather about all this. I always felt guilty and obligated to be there for E, and afraid that we couldn't provide what he needed. I totally missed the joy of being connected to him, the pleasure of his company and the brilliance of his personality.<br />
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He is with us every weekend now, and he calls frequently during the week. "Um, we have two kids...." Tim said to me one Sunday night.<br />
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Truth be told, a part of my heart tries to hold itself in reserve. I'm afraid of attaching even though it's too late, of failing to protect him (from himself, among other things), of losing him. I understand T a little bit better, I know where he's at on the scale of risk, and I trust my instincts with him. E is more elusive to me, and his history of self-harm makes me vigilant and fearful of what might happen if I misjudge. But I love him, in such an uncomplicated way.<br />
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<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-5575567483809920582014-06-14T15:01:00.003-07:002014-06-14T15:01:53.680-07:00Vicarious GriefI haven't kept up on this blog for quite awhile, mostly because T was away (living in another city, with a friend of the family, and going to school) for the past year, and, while we were still involved in his life, parenting him wasn't a day-to-day activity.<br />
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He's back. His first foray into independence ended badly. He's staying with one of his older brothers in a neighboring city for a few weeks and we're helping him work through his options. Meanwhile, his younger brother, E, finally got out of juvenile detention and moved into a therapeutic group home near our house. We have him with us every weekend and he's proven to be an absolute joy. So right now, I have a lot to say! But the main thing that is on my mind is vicarious grief (I'll write more about E later, he is his own weird and wonderful story).<br />
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After T dropped out of college and ended up unemployed and deep into daily drug use, we decided to enforce strict boundaries with him. We would pay for therapy, medication, residential treatment, and job training, but until he got sober, he could not live in our house, and we would not give him money for any other purpose.<br />
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It hurts my heart to be strict with him. A part of me always wants to bundle him up and have him back at home, to give him time and love, and keep him safe under our wing.<br />
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Since he moved back to our area about four weeks ago, he's come to visit on two consecutive weekends. During those visits, he was withholding, angry, sullen, and occasionally verbally viscous. He's too thin, nervous and unsettled. He talked angrily about his birth mom, and, on two separate occasions, almost seemed to confuse me for her. He seemed to want to punish everyone around him.<br />
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Finally last weekend after he badly hurt the feelings of his younger brother, I was driving T home and I pulled the car over on the side of the road. I told him that he was hurting the people he loves, and that I would not move the car until I got a respectful, meaningful response from him. He admitted that he was really suffering, and that he knew he was taking out his rage on the people around him, pushing everyone away, and he didn't know what to do about it. He agreed to talk more, soon, when he was ready.<br />
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Four days went by, until he hit me up at work on instant message. He said he was signing up for the army. I asked him if he'd be interested in going to a 30 day residential treatment program near our house that accepts our insurance and told him that we thought it might be good if he took the time to get himself on steadier footing before he set off on his next life adventure.<br />
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He replied with apparent relief. He said he had only planned on joining the army "to run away" and that he would love to go to rehab. He said he needed help, he wanted to make positive change, and that he's be ready for us to pick him up whenever we decided to come get him. He wrote "I surrender myself completely" - a statement most unlike him. This is not a tone he's ever taken before.<br />
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It was a happy/sad moment. We've been supporting his efforts at sobriety for five years and this will be his third stay in residential rehab, so in many ways, we have worked out our thoughts and feelings about it. Tim and I both felt good about how we handled this moment, in that we were able to stay consistently loving while refusing to let his addiction draw us into chaos and confusion. But it is always harrowing to wait out his down times and hope that he'll be ready for a moment like this one. We always struggle with letting him feel the pain of his mistakes, and with the conflict between our desire to care for and protect him and the necessity of waiting it out until he is ready for help.<br />
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I found that I was temperamental and sad this week. I was happy that we found a loving option for T and relieved that he accepted. But I felt withdrawn and sad, too. When he is punishing, I'm protected by a certain measure of self-righteous self-protection. But when he is vulnerable and suffering, I feel a depth of vicarious grief that sneaks up on me.<br />
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I never experience grief as an entirely negative emotion. I experience it as a great openness to the truth of life, an awareness of risk and loss, the profound unfairness of fate, and the beautiful forbearance and fortitude of human beings under duress, and of these two boys in particular. I am humbled by their endurance and unlikely optimism in the face of the cascade of loss and pain that life has handed them, so early on. It is both enlightening and excruciating.<br />
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When other people in my life are grieving, I feel empathetic. But when T's grief returns, I feel vicariously connected to it myself. I feel as if it is happening to me. I don't know why - perhaps it's evidence of some clever evolutionary trick to keep parents connected to their kids. Perhaps when he has a share of suffering greater than he can bear myself he transfers a bit of it to me in some uncanny way. I don't know. In any event, I hope the weeks ahead are a time for him to step away from the chaos and confusion of his present life and tend to his grief and treat himself with tenderness and compassion.<br />
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<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-11304579400142150052013-08-27T00:16:00.006-07:002013-08-27T00:16:42.726-07:00Happy SadT was home for a visit for a long weekend. The visit was pre-arranged, and it was just going to be a fun one. But five days before he was to arrive, I got a call. He was sobbing and couldn't speak. Eventually, it emerged that his younger brother (we'll call him "E") who is disabled, and has been on probation for two years now, had gotten into a fight, and was headed back to court and had cut himself in an agony of frustration. This is the latest chapter in a gut-wrenchingly tragic childhood for E. T managed to reach his brother's case worker and arranged a visit. So that's what we did on his weekend at home.<br />
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It was a happy/sad day of a sort of which we've had several over the years. The circumstances could not have been more distressing. The probation facility where E lives is harsh: a county facility (known as a "camp" though it's in a far-from-idyll industrial inner-city neighborhood) where children come and go in orange jumpsuits, with their ankles and wrists in shackles. It is, in short, a prison. E is obviously disabled, with a long, long history of special education and intensive mental health services, and yet his "crimes" (all of them panicked acts of self-defense as he's made his way through various foster, and then probation, group homes) have led him to spend nearly two years now in probation department custody. He is easily led, a frequent target of bullies. He is trapped in a downward spiral, as his weak capacity for self-control mitigates against "working his program" to the satisfaction of the authorities. He is also a clown, and he has the most beautiful singing voice I've ever heard in person. You could go crazy thinking about it.<br />
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T and I went in together, and the visit was supervised by E's therapist. T, who is "parentified" to use the clinical term, launched into his usual bossy lecture, posturing as an expert advisor to his brother, his nervousness and sadness adding to his agitated energy. But E loves T so dearly, and he is protected by a supreme sense of humor. At one point, he got restless from being lectured and rolled his eyes. "I think what T is trying to say is that he loves you," I offered. His laugh of recognition lit up the room.<br />
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The boys visited for over an hour, until the therapist said she had to sign off. E asked if he could sing us a song before we left. At first, he was shy, and T was embarrassed. We stumbled through a Temptations song. Then E stood up, in order to sing better. He asked us to give him some rhythm by snapping our fingers. Then he sang a version of "Lean on Me" so beautiful, the self-consciousness of both boys evaporated on the spot. T dropped the pretense of adulthood and rocked to the rhythm and sang along softly.<br />
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E is one of those unusual people whose physical and social awkwardness disappears completely in the grip of his gift. It was like watching an amphibian that lurches on land slip into the water to reveal a fluid, graceful second self. That was how we ended the visit. T squirmed and chattered with relief all the way home. He saw and heard E's soul, intact and it made him whole again. Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-25548840678457075612013-05-23T19:27:00.005-07:002013-05-23T19:27:54.666-07:00MomLately, and rather suddenly, T has taken to referring to me as his mom. I truly never really cared - my role was clear enough, regardless of how he referred to me. But I did find it interesting, and wondered what was going on inside. <br />
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After all, he has been living away from home, taking community college classes in another city and living with a friend of our family, for six months now. He's stretched and emphasized new aspects of his personality in that time, in magnificent ways. He is wearing new clothes, doing new things, eating new kinds of food, and thinking new thoughts. He is going through a confident, happy phase. At the same time, he talks openly about his pain regarding his younger brother, who is caught up in the probation system. And he calls me now and then when he has an anxiety attack. We chat, while he walks it off, gets something in his stomach, waits it out. I see him becoming all of himself, finding ways for the pain and the happiness to accommodate each other in the day to day, growing into the profound honesty and awareness his life requires of him while allowing himself to have fun. He amazes me.<br />
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I thought perhaps his choice to use "mom" of late was made casually. He has always referred to us as "parents" - a word he chose deliberately, when he first came to live with us. He would even introduce me that way: "This is my parent, Lulu." It made sense - he knows his birth mother, and I've spoken to her myself. He's always referred to her as his mom, although he's never lived with her. But "parent" was a role nobody had really played in his life for quite some time.<br />
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But anyway, lately, we'd noticed him referring to us as "mom" and "dad" in conversations with other people. This was new. Perhaps it was just easy, now that he no longer lives at home, and he's meeting new people and doesn't need to explain his back story. However, T is rarely casual about anything, and on Mother's Day this year, he gave me a peek inside his heart. He sent me a text that read: "Happy Mother's Day. Thank you for filling the spot my mom wasn't able to. You have been doing a great job of being my mom and I thank you for that. I love you so much."<br />
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I was beyond touched, of course. I was dizzy with love, not only because this was an exquisite expression of appreciation and totally unexpected; I was also so awed by him, as I often have been, for choosing his words so carefully, expressing himself so clearly, and for showing his birth mom so much respect, in the same gesture that encompassed me. We are his moms, and I love him for understanding that she simply could not be present for him. That is a source of unspeakable pain, and yet he refers to it so gently. There is really so little rage in his personality, sometimes he astonishes me completely. Where you expect to find it, often, instead, there are bottomless pools of wisdom.<br />
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My grandmother always told me you should never date a man who didn't respect his own mother. If that's the sign of a good man, then a man who can respect ALL of his mothers must be truly great. Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1595859314129335086.post-77979921104563849102013-04-02T22:53:00.002-07:002013-04-02T22:53:29.154-07:00In BetweenFor awhile, recently, T was mad at me. I turned his phone off, because he was abusing the privilege of having me pay for it. I gave him a week's warning, gave him a clear way to rectify the problem, and when he did not, I shut the phone off, leaving him clear instructions about how to resume service under his own name, should he choose to pay for it. I explained why I was doing it, and that I loved him and what behavior I wanted to see. I felt okay about it, as a decision. But I did miss him, because for awhile, he was mad at me. <br />
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He's over it now. I sent him an "Easter basket" of his favorite candy, which I ordered
delivery from the local grocery store. He loved it, and photographed it
to post on Facebook. He takes pleasure in us knowing him so well. We had a nice talk last night. He's started work, and he's using his first paycheck to get a new phone. (I pay his rent and his groceries, so I feel like that's fair.) He's going to a formal dance later this month and he'd like me to come visit to help him get ready for the dance. He's excited about us picking out his tie, his socks, the corsage for his date. <br />
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I thought I'd be kind of lost when he went away to college. I wasn't--I was happy to have time to work late, go to the gym, eat more carefully. But I do miss him, and think about him every day, and he misses us at times too. It's interesting to learn what it means to maintain attachment across distance, for me and for him. For me, it means that I have to let go of so much, even though I still worry about him every day. For him, he's got to figure out what it means to have parents once you are a legal adult no longer at home.<br />
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He kind of got robbed, finding permanent parents so late in his childhood, after 15 years in foster care. I'm not sure he was quite ready to grow up, but it happened anyway. To make matters more complicated, I imagine that growing up in multiple foster care placements, it was traumatic to try to maintain attachments to those you could no longer see on a daily basis. I think he tried hard to shut down any feelings of longing or absence while he endured those many years bouncing around in foster care. This new situation is a big one for him--the first time he has ever had the freedom to choose his destiny, including where and how to live. I know he can feel its gravity, and his own uncertain promise while he adjusts to this place in between childhood and adulthood.<br />
<br />Lulu McCabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10002084871872201948noreply@blogger.com1