Redirect, Deflect, Protect

I work in an educational setting, and had cause to be in a meeting today with someone who works directly with public school teachers. In speaking about the student population she serves, she said something that stung: "In these schools, 57% of the students are Black. The population we're reaching isn't the cream of the crop. They aren't engaged, they are struggling. So we're really making a difference."

None of the people in the meeting were Black, and I believe that had she known she was speaking to the parent of a young Black man, she would have chosen her words differently. Not the cream of the crop? What a peculiar and peculiarly white metaphor to choose! She thought that she meant that her program is serving lower-income and at-risk students, not students already receiving a premium education. But she equated that profile with race, and expectations around academic performance, and expected us to regard that as a non-problematic equation as well. Black = poor. Black = at-risk. Black = not the "cream of the crop."

As foster adoptive parents of a child who is clearly not our biological child, our public lives changed when we became his parents. I have been regularly taken aback by the things that people say when they think there is not a Black person represented in the room. I have seen this sort of commonplace stereotype have an impact on our son, first-hand. I've seen teachers and social service providers alike size him up and formulate conclusions before he's had a chance to establish himself on his merits. For example, just a few months ago, we and he jointly decided under the influence of his mental health provider to enroll him in a "full service partnership program" which is really just a sort of wrap-around service. It offered medical advocacy, job placement and independent living services and it looked like it might be beneficial. But the coordinator assigned to his case, upon first meeting, just assumed that T did not have parents or resources at his disposal, and spent the first meeting urging him to enroll in a food stamp program for homeless youth. At the time, we were covering room and board for him, he was far from homeless, and we were actively supporting him on a daily basis. Offering him food stamps was neither helpful nor necessary. It was clear in talking to the service provider that he had taken one look at T and assumed various things about him without delving deeper. As a result, T got the services that the provider concluded that he deserved, rather than the ones he really needed and had enrolled to receive.

We need to work harder to ferret out those pernicious stereotypes in schools, in medical and social services, and in workplaces. We also have to be on our toes to deflect, redirect, and protect our kids. The challenges facing traumatized kids only make them more vulnerable to stereotypes, assumptions, and substandard services. And those stereotypes and prejudices can arise in the most innocuous or unexpected settings, precisely the ones where you think people know better.

Why Be Happy

Recently, on vacation, I read "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?", a memoir by Jeannette Winterson that a colleague, who is also an adoptive mom, recommended. "I should warn you, it takes a dim view of adoption, though," she said. "It makes it seem like a really terrible thing."

That's not how I read the book at all. It's a frank account of a traumatic childhood, beginning with being given up for adoption at six weeks old, and then adopted by a troubled couple, including a mother with a fixation on the Apocalypse. I read it as I think it was intended, as a non-linear, insightful memoir about an adult who survived and was formed by an extraordinary, stark, distorted childhood and went on to become an accomplished artist and a fragile, resilient adult. I was not tempted to draw any comparisons between myself and Winterson's mother, or to ponder whether T's adoption was or was not a "good thing", as my colleague had been. (As I often write here, parenting T has taught me not to worry about whether things are "good" or "bad". We have only the choices we have, when we have them.)

The starkness of T's pain, beginning with being abandoned by his birth mom, doesn't have anything to do with me and I never imagined that adoption at the age of fifteen would take that pain away. Winterson writes well about the feral, volatile, enraged, suppressed self that lives inside an abandoned child, developing in parallel with, and often sabotaging, the developing adult self. That perfectly suited my experience of T, and my sense of the demons with whom he's wrestling these days.

I often have the sense now that he is experiencing an unavoidable crisis, one that awaits anyone who has to work so hard just to survive (in the most literal and extreme terms) their childhood. The other day, T wrote (on Twitter, for all the world to see) "I wish I could just go back a couple of years" and I asked Tim what he thought that meant. "He doesn't want to be grown up and responsible for himself," he said. I think that's true, though I'd add slightly more nuance. I think he's not ready for his childhood to be over. It doesn't feel "done" for him yet. I can imagine that a soldier might not feel prepared for the end of war in the same way. He's not ready to look back and remember what happened - it would be easier to keep fighting than to reflect on everything that's been lost. Also, I think sometimes that he feels that it's easier to continue to live as a soldier (someone "in the system", as foster children are) than to join the civilian masses, where conventions of friendship and family that he doesn't understand are the norm.

Winterson describes a moment in her adulthood when, confronted by some bit of information related to her adoption, she found herself reduced to an infantile state, most unexpectedly and dramatically. It comes on her like a physical illness. T has that vulnerability as well. It's not the same thing as the sort of fissures and flaws that mark most personalities. It's more elemental and all-consuming than that. A shock or an extreme disappointment can reduce him to a pre-verbal, infant state, and it always strikes me at those times that babies are very wild things. They just happen to be small - when a person isn't small anymore, and they are still subject to the overwhelming sensations of need and want and frustration of infancy, they can be scary, even to themselves. I worry most that his youthful romances will trigger the howling agony of his early childhood abandonment. There's nothing I can do about it. They either will, or they won't. Most likely, they will, particularly because he is drawn to young women who help him reenact the drama of abandonment and rejection. I hope he'll survive and achieve some wisdom and comfort. At one point in the book, Winterson writes about how she not only had to learn to love, she had to learn "not to punch love in the face" when she saw it. I laughed out loud with recognition. I think in that sense, I might have had my love for T punched in the face by him quite a few times. I can take it, and I "get it". But I hope that as she did, he learns how to invite love in and not fight it some day.

Looking for Yes

In T's first year with us, we were puzzled by the difficulty of getting him to school. More specifically, being first-time parents, we were puzzled by the fact that he would set off, apparently calm and prepared for the day ahead, only to diverge from his path somewhere en route. I remember talking to my mom (he was a sophomore in high school), and her saying "Well, it's kind of like he's three years old, and you wouldn't put a three-year-old on the bus alone in the morning and expect him to arrive at school without a mishap."

That struck me then and now as exactly true. Intellectually, T has always been his chronological age or well beyond. But like other traumatized kids, his development stalled or circled back on itself at critical junctures.

And why wouldn't one put a three year-old on the bus to school alone? For one thing, of course, they would be physically vulnerable, which T is not. But you also wouldn't do it because they would be too easily distracted, readily exploited by others, incapable of independent judgement, and prone to wander off on some escapade of self-gratification and self-endangerment. Which is pretty much how one might have described the daily risks that pertained to T being out and about in the world.

Upon reflection, it strikes me that he has not yet learned to accept "no" as an answer. He won't accept it from himself and he won't accept it from others. "No", in almost any form, often makes him very angry, sometimes vindictive. With us, in good times, it made him confused. We once had a stunning conversation; he came to me puzzled, after some disciplinary discussion, and said this: "Having parents is hard for me, cuz I used to not care what anyone said, but now I do care what you guys think! That makes me feel controlled and that feels weird!" Wow. Yeah. He was doing okay with that struggle until his substance abuse worsened, and then it was as if he decided to hell with the discomfort of attachment and self-governance, and sank into a craven cycle of pursuing short-term sensations.

I watch my young nephew, and the toddler-aged children of friends. I see those little kids asserting their willpower, trying to get a "yes" - whether by charm, willpower, or force - to whatever they want in the moment. And I see their parents giving them calm redirection, and "no"s, for their own good. Not only did T not attach to anyone in early childhood enough to accept their discipline; he also received very confusing attention from adults. He was in an extremely abusive environment, so much so that to this day, he still had very noticeable physical scars on most parts of his body, including his head. Over the last few years, I've come to understand a little better the wounds that abuse inflicted on the inside.

Whereas one might think that an abused child hears "no" all the time, that is not necessarily the case. I think he rarely heard "no" in any sensible way. Rather, it seems like he rode the rollercoaster of extreme ups and downs of the adults around him, hanging on by his fingernails. In our foster parent training classes, we learned how a human being develops along a timeline that begins with intense dependency and therefore attachment, and that such attachment is vital in many ways. Beyond mere survival, attachment builds the basis of trust and dependence on which a parent can later construct discipline. Those raging toddlers of my friends hate hearing "no" and yet, they love and need their mom or dad, and so they begin to accept limits and, eventually, to set those limits themselves. A kid abused as T was lacks that vital attachment and trust, and therefore lacks the opportunity to move beyond a cycle of craving and self-gratification. It strikes me as a most pernicious form of neglect, to fail to teach a child how to delay gratification and accept appropriate "no"s. Abuse is not discipline, and is, in many ways, its opposite.

All of that is extremely fertile soil for the type of compulsions he has now as a young man. This is part of why I feel resolved that we have to hold strong to the loving "no" we've given him. He is raging against it, pulling out all the stops to try to persuade himself that he can continue to have what he wants, and that anyone who tells him "no" must not love him. That is, of course, the cycle of addiction. He's now beginning to hear a firm "no" from the handful of other people in his life who truly love him, people that he thought he could fool in order to continue to get what he wants.

Observing his struggle from a distance is like watching someone in a fun house full of mirrors trying to steady himself while surrounded by distorted reflections. He keeps looking for "yes", mistaking it for love, or at least love's cheap substitute, while all around him a chorus of voices of people who love him is getting louder, telling him the opposite.

"It Didn't Work"

One thing that saddens me a bit as we adjust to T being out of the house is the degree to which Tim and I refrain from telling friends and family the truth, almost unconsciously. Our reticence stems not from grief or lack of anything to say, but rather from the simple fact that most people we know don't understand our choice to be this type of parent in the first place and so, over time, we've grown tired of being misunderstood, or of lengthy explanations and awkward silence. (I have mostly found resonance and true empathy from the readers of this blog.)

This sense of alienation started well before we were T's parents, as soon as we announced our intention to be foster/adoptive parents to an older child. Everyone had a story. One acquaintance felt compelled to tell me about her neighbors who adopted a child who later got arrested. My mom told me quite a few times about the woman at church who decided to fill a void in her life by foster parenting a teenage girl who eventually brought her to her knees with her habit of running away and dating much older men. A longtime client told me a long, rambling story about a friend-of-a-friend who grew up with a foster/adoptive brother who later left home and never talked to the family again. The stories all had a pernicious similarity; the enduring theme was "it didn't work out."

Somewhere deep in our culture, we want to hold fast to the belief that hurt children just need love and opportunity, and that, given enough of both, they will be magically happy and resolved, even grateful. When a traumatized young adult finds a stable home, but then continues to struggle, we say that "it didn't work out".

Such stories are warnings. Warnings about children who are too wild, damaged, angry or remote for parents to "make a difference." Such warning stories make it hard to be honest when things are rough. I have grown wise and cynical enough to know that in casual company, answering a question about T's whereabouts and well-being is more likely to lead to a polite expression of pity and regret than genuine friendly compassion. And so we simply sidestep the subject, in order to avoid the great implied "I told you so".

(Occasionally we encounter another type of response: overblown admiration, as in "it's so amazing what you've done for him." This response strikes me as the flip side of the same coin described above, because the implication is that we have somehow been radically charitable, rather than simply parental.)

I'd like to think that I am being paranoid and cynical, and leave it at that. However, the other foster/adoptive parents of older children that I know have all acknowledged a sense of isolation similar to what I'm describing here. I have thought long and hard for the last few years about these dynamics. I understand that the thought of thousands of children who cannot return to their parents and are caught up in a dehumanizing child welfare system is very uncomfortable. It disturbs one's sense of justice. Stories about well-intentioned foster parents for whom "it didn't work out" serve as a justification for remaining distant or disengaged from the problem.

I also think that we understandably resist accepting that some of the wounds of child abuse can be psychically disfiguring.  There may be no ready "fix" for such pain. Depending on your own relationship to suffering, that can be hard to accept. I think as a culture, we often believe that therapy and a change of scene should be enough. As a result, we shy away from children like T who are like dazed war veterans.

I wonder if discomfort with mixed race families also plays a role. I have heard so many times, from colleagues and acquaintances, variations on the "I know someone who knows someone who adopted an African American child, and...." What follows is a variation on the "it didn't work" theme described above. The implication, sometimes explicitly stated, is that "it didn't work" because the child was of a different race than the parents. I find that to be a superficial and uninformed explanation, usually given by someone who knows little about the complexities of older child foster/adoption, is uncomfortable with biracial families, or both.

Here is what I have to say to all of this: it is unfair. It is unfair to the kids, who are not a problem to be "fixed".  If our kids crawl out the window at night, struggle with impulse control, bury their feelings and memories in drugs and chaos, that is an expression of the overwhelming despair they are feeling. They can't just STOP because someone loves them, or because they live in a nice home, or because they have adoptive parents who look like them. Nevertheless, they are more than the sum of their behavior. Our job isn't to control them or stop the madness; it's just to be there and be clear-eyed and calm, and bear honest witness to their experience. And of course, to love them.

And I really wanted to write this, because I hope someone who is thinking about being a foster/adoptive parent of an older child will read this and realize that all the warning stories they are hearing and all the skepticism they encounter from friends and family just might be misplaced. You could easily read this blog and take my story as yet another warning story about a foster/adoption that "didn't work out". But I want to make sure it's recorded here that I don't feel that way - at all. If you can read my blog and understand why I feel otherwise, and why I would do it all over again, then I hope I'll be a helpful counterpoint to all the warning stories and perhaps you'll consider being a foster/adoptive parent yourself.

Running Away From Home

When I was young, maybe 7 or 8, my younger brother and I were bored one rainy day. We announced that we were "running away from home." We got the boy next door involved. We packed little suitcases and put on rain coats, and then we went out and walked around the block by ourselves with our luggage in tow. After a block or so, my brother got fretful and melancholy, but I insisted that we keep going. We made it all the way around the block before going home. I look back and admire my mom and the mom next door for treating this all with good humor, and letting us live out the "all on my own" fantasy for the duration of one very long, wet suburban block.

Sometimes lately, I feel like T is "running away from home" in a similar way. He calls now and then. He's picked up clean underpants a few times. Today, he called to ask us to retrieve his resume from our computer, add a line, and email it to him. He has always excelled at little sonar messages designed to check for sustained connection, and now is no different, really.

Of all the places he could land right now, I don't much mind where he is. He's with an older half brother whom he only met a few years ago. The brother had a very different upbringing than T, having been adopted as an infant. To be sure, he's had his struggles and as T's parent I'm not 100% comfortable with the young man's judgement. But he's a father himself, doing his best to raise his son with the boy's mother, and he takes being a father very seriously. I admire him, knowing a bit about how hard he's worked to get where he is and what it means for him to raise his son, having been abandoned by his own mother.

Most of all, my gut tells me it is necessary and instructive for T to have this time with birth relatives. I think every child who spends time in foster care longs for blood ties, for the sense of place that comes from shared ancestry. I also think that denied that opportunity to forge connections with relatives, kids like T romanticize such relationships to excess.

What's more, given his addiction, T needs to learn that blood ties are not enough to justify exploitation. In other words, even his brother will grow tired of being used and expect him to clean up and contribute to the household. As a young child, T witnessed adults using one another in the name of "family" and he suffers some confusion about how far familial obligation extends.  I think right about now, his brother is probably beginning to ask what the heck he's going to do with T in his house, not working, not going to school, and not contributing to household expenses. If T had a grip on his drug use, I'd give the brother living expenses to help offset the cost of having T in the house, but I can't right now. And it's good for T to see that no matter who you're with, no loyalty overrides daily necessity.

In a way, our present state is not unlike having a child away at college, except that T has chosen to school himself in a different way: a difficult, potentially dangerous way. But the way he's chosen, and perhaps the one he needs right now.

Other Mothers

Only one day later, and I find I have something else to say. Well, to share really, this time on the topic of relationships between adoptive family and birth family.

T has a relative with whom he was placed when he was a little boy. He was removed from her home, and the history there is complicated and I am not going to share anything about it because it's not mine to share. Nevertheless, from the beginning, it was easy to see that T both loved and respected her, and that his happiest memories were of the good times he spent with her. As I have written before, his ability to attach to me and to others owes everything to her warmth.

Gradually, I came to know her. We took him, and sometimes his brother, for family occasions with her and her kids. Both parties were reserved at first. Eventually, we got close, in the way that people do - you show up, you mark the passage of life together, and that makes you family.

When T started to fall prey to addiction, I told her honestly what was going on. I wanted T to be surrounded as much as possible by a consistent message from the people to whom he was most attached. She was great. We shared many late night text message exchanges using maternal shorthand to shore each other up. She talked about her worries and regrets and I talked about mine. We agreed to urge him to treatment and we both did our part like halves of a whole. She is his other Other Mother.

We check in regularly, so I wrote to her today to let her know that he's not at home, that he's staying in her vicinity, and that he's not doing well. She said exactly what a mother would: we can pray for him, and we can love him, but we can't help him until he wants to help himself.

She also said what any mother who has had to set limits with an addicted child needs to hear: Don't you worry, he'll come when he's ready and know that you have done all you could for now.

And then she said what a foster adoptive parent might only hope for: I hope you will still be part of our family because that's what I consider you and that's what I want.

Amen to that and bless her for saying it.

I wanted to write about this, because I  know that when we decided to be foster/adoptive parents, we found little advice about how to approach birth family relationships. I imagined such relationships would be fraught. I don't have any advice to give, but I can say that what I thought would be terribly complex and awkward turned out to be deep and sustaining. I am tremendously grateful for her. Being united in our love for him and our expectations of him has been a great gift. I remember the day over a year ago when he first realized that she and I were as one, like a two-headed Mom Machine extended over the distance between us, and he felt the web tighten around him and realized he could not play one family off the other. He was enmeshed, but in the same way that a baby wrapped in a warm blanket might be.

I know there are so many situations where birth family and foster/adoptive family are not able to come together, where one party or the other can't or won't extend themselves to build a bridge or where the opportunity to have any relationship at all just isn't there. It's just sheer luck that we experienced otherwise. Sometimes it takes more than one mother to mother our kids, and I love T's other Other Mother.

Good-bye, for awhile

T came by to get a suitcase of clothes today. It's good-bye, for awhile, though I've learned never to count on any one reality remaining so for too long. He is going to stay with a half-brother for a bit having shorted out of his substance abuse treatment program. That may last a week, a month, or a year. Last time I wrote, he was doing well in recovery - but that came to an end when he went missing for several days and started using again, descending into a relapse worse than what preceded treatment.

He's been staying with a friend for the past week figuring out what to do next, as we would not let him move back home unless he got himself some kind of help. We tried a few things - an intervention with his long-time counselor; setting up (and paying for) sober living housing; reaching out to a local reverend who met with us to see if T might be ready to take some steps toward recovery; a wrap-around service through his psychiatric provider that would offer transitions to independent living, and even offering T terms under which he could move home. He is not willing to accept any of the options we've been able to present. Over the past year-and-a-half, he's moved from smoking weed most days to pursuing a high nearly every waking moment, sometimes via harder drugs. He insists that his drug use is not a problem, despite the fact that it has resulted in expulsion from school, arrest, probation, the loss of two jobs, the end of most of his friendships, and the evaporation of virtually every penny he's ever earned or been given. The path he's on may take his life, or it may eventually drive him into recovery, but there's no telling how long that might take.

It's very hard to reach the conclusion that a child can't live at home anymore, and I am sneaking up on acceptance by telling myself that we'll take this week by week for now. Our goal has been to show love and consistency, avoiding anger or attempts to shame him into compliance, while still enforcing firm boundaries. I feel a lot of grief at losing him (losing him in more ways than one), but I truly believe I have done my best for him and I have not added to his pain by shaming him or making him a backboard for my anger and frustration. I have certainly felt a lot of negative feelings, and I've taken them out on unsuspecting mental health providers, random colleagues at work, and other drivers during my morning commute (not to mention Tim). But we've managed through much self-education to keep our relationship with T focused on two things: love, and boundaries. I will always be his adoptive mom, and I will always stand on the side of sanity and sobriety so that someone who knows and loves him deeply can, hopefully, be a beacon if he decides to try to make it ashore.

This gives me a chance to reflect on a new aspect of older child foster/adoption that I haven't experienced yet: the inevitable parting with a child. We will always be T's parents, but given his age, even without the level of drama we've sustained for the past year or so, a transition to parenting him from a distance was unavoidable. I have a deepened respect for all foster and adoptive parents who are willing to open their hearts to a traumatized child--especially an older child--whom they know will one day leave, often in complicated circumstances. It is not the same as parenting a birth child who grows up and moves away, because (amongst other differences) it is unlikely that the child will take a linear developmental path such that they transition out of the home in a way that leaves everyone feeling resolved and satisfied. (Because of his age, unsuspecting friends keep asking us if T is headed to college this fall, and if he's happy with his girlfriend. It's like they come from another planet. If I had a penny for every time someone has said to me this year "But he's doing well, right?" I'd have enough to buy a nice dinner. I don't even know what "doing well" means anymore!)

This kind of parenting is crisis parenting, with very bad odds of "success" if you care about conventional definitions. It is a set up for pain, especially the pain that comes of deep empathy with a child whom life has handed a shovelful of bad luck, and who struggles with the behaviors and fault lines that trauma produces. Even setting aside the realities of addiction, kids like T have terribly complicated issues with attachment--and so, by the same token, their detachment (a normal part of late adolescence) is likewise complicated. Add extremes of substance abuse and underlying mental health issues to the mix, and it has been easy to see for quite some time that whatever transition he eventually made to living outside the home would be very turbulent. Nevertheless, I would make the same choice again to be this kind of parent. I love him for all the things that I've been able to recognize and appreciate in him, all the qualities and characteristics that are his very own, beyond the pain and the distracting behavior. It is profound and it is necessary; T could be a young man in crisis with no parent to love him, or he could be a young man in crisis who can raise his head above the chaos now and then and see that he is loved. I do think it makes a difference.

I may blog less often for awhile, but I will still be here, and I do intend to stay involved with kids in foster care. We might even parent a second child someday, though Tim says it will have to be a girl next time. :)