Now

We are making the rounds of mental health professionals at the moment. We have a great substance abuse counselor whom we love and who has proven a good match for T. We had a family therapist who wasn't a good fit for us, with whom we recently ended our relationship, and a psychiatrist who has seen T intermittently and still oversees his prescription. Since hitting a really rough patch a couple months ago, we've been looking for a trauma specialist to do some cognitive behavioral therapy, in addition to the substance abuse counseling. And coming up a bit short.

I value therapy and I've been impressed by providers who really know what they're doing with traumatized kids. But those providers seem pretty few and far between. I'm a little exhausted by the convoluted mental health bureaucracy and the general difficulty in finding experienced providers who are comfortable with a child of T's age and experience. At the same time, I find myself grappling with what, for me, feels like a very personal, very maternal instinct, to protect my kid, and make sure he is surrounded by people who love and "get" him. This instinct is almost feral, it's so strong and instinctive. I didn't expect to feel this fiercely protective, and it's exhilarating and exhausting. T is very smart and self-aware, perhaps painfully so, which makes it all the more difficult to endure the awkwardness of finding him the right therapist. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the right thing in promoting therapy at all - he has a very strong spirit, and occasionally I wonder if I ought to just focus on cultivating his relationship with me and Tim, and providing him with the time and peace to heal on his own.

I've written before about how I sometimes feel intimidated or just undermined by mental health professionals and social workers who seem to me to treat me like a paid babysitter, rather than a parent. When Tim and I are really overwhelmed, I've found it useful to ask "What would we do if T were our biological child?" just to be sure that we aren't being swayed by the system into anything less than parental authority and judgement.

I think what I'd say today is that I'm conscious right now of a certain toll that T's pain takes on me. At times I even follow his lead, taking his advice on when we "don't need to talk about it right now." I don't generally focus much on my own discomfort. The role of advocate parent suits me well and I enjoy it. But at the moment, perhaps because T is stable and calm and introspective and therefore doesn't need me so much, I feel bruised. I feel very aware that I feel some level of grief for the times I could not be there for him - for the things that happened before I met him, and for the suffering he endured when he didn't have any parent advocating for him. I respect him tremendously for the hard work he did to survive and raise himself in those circumstances, and deep compassion for the symptomatic behaviors that plague him to this day. I love him the same or more than I would if I had given birth to him myself, so the blunt fact that I didn't arrive in his life until it was too late to help him with his many traumas pains me greatly. It pains me all the more because he trusts me now and has recently started to refer more freely to what came before. I want so much to be worthy of his trust. It's a tremendous responsibility. My career, my relationship with Tim, my health, all struggle to compete with the obligation I feel to be available and worthy of providing stability for T. But I also know that it's extremely idealistic to subject oneself to that sense of obligation, and that if I fail to take care of myself and Tim, I'm sure to fall short.

Tim calls this vicarious PTSD and I think he's right. I am sure that if you bond strongly to an older, traumatized child, when you bond with them, you open yourself up to absorbing some part of their pain and some part of their difficulty navigating the aftermath of what they've endured. I like to think that in absorbing some of their suffering, you are lessening their burden, but I'm not sure that's really true.

It's a juggling act, with a whole bunch of needs and sensitivities up in the air, all of the time. I suppose that's how any parent feels.

Just Words

After the massive meltdown I described in my last post, things moved rather quickly. We got an intake appointment with a cognitive behavioral therapy program specializing in child trauma, and we also got T into an alternative school that seems like it's going to be a really good place for him.

The principal of the new school took the kids on an orientation tour. She showed them the restrooms and explained that they are a) safe, b) extremely clean and c) always locked, only to be unlocked by a hall monitor when you have been officially excused for a break. This sounds like a small thing, but for complicated kids coming from a large urban high school where the bathrooms are a shadowy setting for drug deals, gang graffiti and filth, this is a big deal. Safety is everything to kids like T, as are clear rules and calm enforcement.

The principal also explained that the teachers have all been instructed never to agitate the kids, to find something positive to say in every interaction, and to call the parents whenever there is a disciplinary issue. She explained that she never suspends kids from school (hallelujah - I have been incensed by "trash cleanup in lieu of suspension" at the old school, which seems to turn at-risk kids into unpaid janitors). Classes have no more than ten kids, sometimes fewer.

I'm also grateful for the child trauma therapy program we found (and for the advice of people who commented on my last blog post who helped me clarify what we were looking for). We had a two-and-a-half hour intake interview. In layman's terms, I feel like this therapy program is hardcore. I appreciate their clear focus on core trauma, over behavioral symptoms.

I feel good about all this. I feel we have tapped into options that have been set up by knowledgeable people to help meet the extraordinary needs of kids like T. I commented to my mom today that I don't feel hopeful, per se; hope would suggest being attached to a particular desired outcome. I try to stay very aware that we are not trying to "fix" anything. Instead, I feel satisfied--that we are doing the best we can, that we are seeking out environments where T has the opportunity to develop and evolve, and that there are people out there who understand kids like him. In a weird way, we have achieved the only desired outcome we ever really had, which was for T to have a home with people who love and understand him, and to feel sufficiently secure that he can begin to sort out his past and define himself (which is no doubt going to continue to be a very messy and occasionally frightening process).

I realized through all this that I have been somewhat deferential to some of the professionals we've encountered along our path, and that T benefits when I am a loud, proud, assertive, knowledgeable advocate. I am reminded of Advocate Mom and her binder. Although I am an advocate mom myself, I have sometimes allowed the counselors and social workers we deal with to minimize or ignore his needs, leap to conclusions or recommend hasty solutions without paying enough attention to his abuse history. I thought that they knew better than I did, and to be honest, I also feared that they would judge me unfit in some way. His behavior can be very difficult, especially in public, and I can fall into an attitude of begging forgiveness for his misdeeds. In addition, becoming his parent has involved an obstacle course of home inspections, certifications, and other bureaucratic intrusions, and on some level, I reacted to that scrutiny with a certain defensiveness.

I am reborn after the last few weeks. I realize now that there are no answers, and that nobody has a more certain knowledge than I do about what T needs, even when I feel profoundly uncertain. I live with him, care for him, listen to him, argue with him, empathize with him, and I probably know him better than anyone has ever known him. To get him what he needs, I need to cut through the various agencies and bureaucracies involved by educating myself about their language and using their words to connect him up to the best quality services that are available. I had the help of a very good friend in doing that recently, backed up by some very thoughtful comments on this blog, and it really made a very big difference. Asking for "an elevated level of care" rather than just "help", for example, or knowing to request a "trauma-focused program" rather than just "therapy" makes all the difference in the world. At the end of the day, either words obscure, or they pinpoint complexity, and wielding them properly is very powerful.

Help

Well, it’s been quite a week.

As T unravels these past few months, we’ve experienced dramatic truancy, daily marijuana use (before and after school most days), and stealing, culminating with an arrest, for petty theft, on his birthday no less.

This week, we hit the wall. He was accused for the second time of stealing (from a teacher!), disrupting the classroom, and expelled from school. At home he was vengeful and full of rage, or withdrawn and disconnected. It’s hard to encapsulate in words, but the most alarming thing is that T is not a kid who is routinely delinquent – his nature is to be sensitive and soulful. His misbehavior has an aspect that hits you right in the gut – it feels wrong on an instinctive, animal level. Something is wrong! it screams. I suppose that’s a distinguishing quality of crisis.

Yesterday, in a tizzy, and with the help of a friend who happens to be an LCSW, I wrote a letter and emailed it to his past and present therapists and social workers. “I need help getting an elevated level of care for T” I said. It ended “We are committed to T but we urgently need help meeting his needs.”

By evening, we had an emergency psychiatric team on our doorstep. (Thanks, by the way, to his FORMER social worker, who was the only one who responded in a helpful way—we have yet to even hear back from his primary caseworker.)

I thought the problem was addiction and substance abuse. But last night I learned that I might be wrong.

They spent four hours here, talking to T, talking to us, searching his room, and formulating an opinion. Then they called us all together. It wasn’t what I expected. They said they considered hospitalizing him, because it’s clear he’s in crisis, but decided it wouldn’t help. He has PTSD and a hospital environment is likely to be overwhelming and frightening for him. They said that we are dealing with serious confusion stemming from sexual abuse, combined with puberty, and that kids like T often have their first major mental health crisis right about now. They said that his emerging sexuality combined with his abuse history lead T to fear he may hurt people and become a bad person. And so he is acting like a monster to try to save people from the harm he imagines he might do—and to try to get us to pay attention to what he can’t put in words.

I did not see that coming, though of course, as soon as they said it, it made perfect sense. They walked in and put their finger right on the raw nerve that is causing daily convulsions right now. Their skill and clarity were truly awe-inspiring. He has never discussed sexual abuse with a therapist before, and I'm the first adult he confided in about it. And yet it took these two doctors less than half an hour to identify the problem and open it up.

They had spare, direct advice for us. First, they said he feels safe with us and our home is the right place for him. He feels loved and secure here, they said, and that is part of why he is confronting his demons now. Second, they told me to adjust my expectations. “But he’s facing criminal charges!” I protested. They said yes, and there’s very little you can do about that. This is who he is and where you are right now. Deal with it.

They told us to let go of our desire to have him graduate from mainstream school. They said not to worry about the fact that his friends are dropouts and delinquents. “Those are the people he feels safe with, because he feels like he can’t hurt them or freak them out,” they said. They told us to let go of our attempts to treat the substance abuse, because it’s a symptom, not a cause. They told us to learn with him about the aftermath of sexual abuse and let him show his ugly bits. They said we must find ways to talk about what happened, and about sexuality, and help him do the same. They told us that “the human condition is to have both good and ugly feelings and thoughts” and to teach T that we are all complex in that way.

I learned so much last night. I learned that he wants help and he will comply. I learned that he trusts us. I learned that my expectations and sense of “normal” are getting in the way of recognizing his needs. We talked this morning, and he was calm, receptive and even grateful—I explained that the doctor talked to us about PTSD, that abused kids and soldiers who’ve been in wars often have PTSD, and that for now we need to make sure we reduce stress and avoid situations that are chaotic and noisy. He felt understood. He said he felt it might be best for him to be in a different school.

(As a side note, I have also learned this week that there is a HUGE difference in Los Angeles between Department of Mental Health programs and DCFS. That sounds like a bureaucratic distinction, but when you need somebody to help your troubled kid on a very bad day when the shit is raining down on your head, it’s a visceral thing. By using the right language, thanks to my friend, we got tapped into DMH, and to these two superhero ninja therapists in the middle of the night, after months of struggling with inadequate therapy and inattentive social workers.)

I don’t regret one moment I’ve spent with T. This week was horrible. I don’t know how we’ll find him a new school and a new therapist next week. I’m not sure I can stomach the external consequences that are being levied on him by people who know nothing of his story. But I understand that this is where we are, and I know that our job is to be his family. We are honest and we stand by each other in ways that I didn’t know were possible before. I am much stronger than I thought, and he is much more vulnerable than he realized. This kind of extreme parenting is exhausting, but I also find it to be soul-satisfying in its honesty, unpredictability and brutal acknowledgement of humanity in all its frailty and resilience. I find that happiness, for us, is not the avoidance of pain, but the acknowledgement of truth.

The Weather in Our Heads

I tend to observe T. like a scientist, though I often act rather non-objective as a parent in the day to day. Several months of study suggest that he has a definite cycle. He's pretty compliant and communicative, for about three weeks at a time. Then a mood comes over him and for a week, or two, or three, he's stormy, somewhat compulsive, generally defiant and harder to reach. On the one hand, that's probably typical of many teenagers. On the other hand, we're grappling with a history of trauma, a marijuana habit, and some birth family drama. So his cycles are complex beyond those of the average teen.

I've decided to regard his cycles (and mine, because lord knows I have my own moods) like the weather. My mom's family is from North Dakota, where the weather is a daily drama. I have been there during clear spring days that ended in a blizzard, summer storms that delivered hail the size of grapefruits, and winter white-outs that leave you wondering if you're still on planet Earth. I think T., like a lot of kids in long-term foster care, grew up and grew accustomed to the emotional equivalent of life on those open plains. The fact that a day started out sunny and warm offered no guarantee that you wouldn't end up wind-whipped and disoriented that afternoon.

As a result, he's like someone who, having lived through a hurricane without any place to shelter, now prepares for disaster when he hears a few rain drops. How exhausting. Physiologically, the consequence of living that way is that he can only go so long before his system needs to power down. But life taught him that doing so is not safe, so he has trouble letting go. He can't relax himself; instead, he spirals into quasi-nihilistic episode of self-destructive behavior. It's as if he's telling himself "If I can't protect myself, I better just throw myself to the wolves."

The weather metaphor works for me too because it's as hard for me to control the factors that impact his mood as it is to control the weather. I can't prevent a call from his birth mom, stave off the intrusion of yet another social worker, deny a visit to see his relatives, or keep him from feeling let down when his best friend blows him off. Circumstances in his life are so complicated, he rarely goes more than a few weeks without a triggering incident. He is a deep, soulful person by nature and he absorbs these blows and processes them in a private place I can't always access. I try to protect him, but sometimes the elements catch up to us nevertheless. I'm making it a goal to teach him over time that the weather in our heads doesn't always have to reflect the weather outside. It is possible to build up internal resilience. You might open a door or window and let the rain come in, but when and for how long is up to you.

No-Strings-Attached Parenting

Recently, I wrote about "no strings attached" parenting: trying to remind myself that I have no claim on T.'s feelings, and need to parent him steadily no matter what he gives back. I'm still knocking this train of thought around, holding it up to the light to see what's up with it.

Here's my new thought: maybe parenting with no emotional strings attached is particularly important with severely abused kids, because so often abusers have sought to control their thoughts and emotions earlier in life. Maybe they need safe space to learn how to have their own feelings - and to learn that feelings won't kill you.

When I listen to T.'s stories, it sounds to me like the adults who mistreated him had emotional objectives. They craved whatever state they felt they could achieve by using him to their ends. Maybe they wanted to feel powerful, or relieve stress and self-hatred by raging at a child. Maybe they lacked emotional self-control, and that was amplified by substance abuse. In any case, it sounds as if there was no distance between internal objectives and external rules - "rules" were made up on the spot in order to justify abuse. Listening to his descriptions of what happened in his early childhood, I feel utterly suffocatingly claustrophobic.

Moreover, I think he was so overwhelmed as a young kid - with hurt, shame, shock and loneliness as he cycled in and out of relative and foster homes - that simply HAVING feelings feels potentially life-threatening to him, as if he might fall into a bottomless well of unhappiness.

So I think in this musing about no-strings parenting, I'm trying to check myself, to be sure that I'm not pressuring him to give me something back for my own self-satisfaction. I want to leave open space for him to think and feel...whatever, when he's ready. I want to ask him to observe certain guidelines regarding what he DOES, but assert no restrictions or expectations of what he should FEEL.

This came up recently in family therapy because in one of his temperamental moments, T. told us that he wasn't sure he could abide by our rules and he thought maybe he should return to foster care. We were very calm and said, "No problem. You're welcome to talk to your social worker about that." I knew at the time that it was a test, and also an authentic expression of pent-up emotion: the alienation and anxiety that are a natural result of the adoption process. I wanted him to have room to air that and understand that the world wouldn't end.

Later in therapy, we went over it together. The counselor likened our relationship with T. to the early stages of marriage, and I think that's apt. On the one hand, "getting adopted" is supposed to be cause for joyous celebration, and T. avidly pursued adoption as a way out of what he saw as the depressing realities of long term foster care. On the other hand, it's a HUGE adjustment, acclimating to new parents and new expectations at the age of 15 or 16. So who wouldn't have a mix of strong feelings?

When T. was a young child, he learned that it was never okay to be mad, or to speak rudely, or to have a bratty meltdown. The abusive parent's moods ruled over everything, and subsumed everything, and the child catered to the adult. Foster care, unfortunately, reinforced the lesson that he must keep his feelings under wraps; he and his brother were both turned out of one home after years for being argumentative and disrespectful. So it's no wonder that today, he regularly denies having feelings. He was not allowed to develop a habit of expressing his feelings and learning how to do so within reasonable limits. Healing means giving ample space for him to be mad, rude, selfish and bratty. He may not hurt himself or someone else, but beyond that, most other things are okay and his internal state is his right. I want open communication, reasonable compliance, and general kindness - but I don't need him to feel a certain way.

It's so interesting to watch him learn this lesson. He looks deeply into my eyes when he's got strong feelings, and I often have the sense that he's trying to figure out if I'm making him feel the way he does, or if I'm feeling the same way he's feeling. I look back and try to help him understand by my expression that I'm not controlling his feelings, and by the same token, he isn't controlling mine. He's having his own feelings. And I'm not going to stop him. We aren't puppets ruled by a common master. It's the beauty of being human.

Doing the Best He Can

No week is easy with T., though they have a certain amusing rhythm, but this one just kinda sucked.

I've written often about T.'s ability to bond, which is extraordinary in a child with his background. He has a strong capacity (and even longing) for intimacy at home. Building and maintaining that bond is a first priority for us. It can make life at home a lot of fun. However, when we're all out in the world going about our daily business, outside our family life, things get messy. T.'s ability to bond does not extend to adults outside his most intimate circle.

This shows up in a pattern of defiance at school and he has conflicts with every male teacher he's encountered in the time I've known him. For a hurt child with PTSD whose been through 16 homes, school is a horror shop of noise, chaos, inconsistent authority, lax structure, social anxiety and occasional threats of physical violence.

His vulnerability does not, of course, manifest as such. It shows up as what I call peacock behavior - busting out the colors. The first time I attended his parent/teacher conference, I hardly recognized the kid that some of his teachers were describing - a defiant show off who pushes buttons. Then I realized that the teachers who describe this "other" T are all men, and tend to be the ones whose approach to discipline is to challenge him in front of other kids or threaten punishment they don't necessarily deliver. They trigger his most difficult behaviors. He doesn't even know what's happening - they set off a physical, limbic reaction in him.

All this leaves T. in a highly stressed state much of the time and he self-medicates by smoking - marijuana when he can get it, and it appears one can readily purchase it in the hallway between classes. The school is so short-staffed that lunch and break periods have turned into an anarchic sort of bazaar of vices. (And this high school is in the top 3 in the entire county.) So we are addressing that too, and it kicks his already tenuous situation at school up a whole other notch.

None of this is new, and we were more or less prepared for this when we started this whole journey. And I love him so much through it all. The thing I'm learning is that it's necessary to settle in to the rhythm of it - to stop responding to the drama and turmoil of the school week as a series of crises and just accept that it's where we are right now. I need to be a fierce advocate but I also need to maintain the endurance to advocate for him for a long time, so I need to weed out any desperation or self-deception that creep in. That's essential to my own well-being, of course. But achieving that resilience is also necessary in order to show him that we accept where he's at right now, and while we insist on a few really important rules and expectations, we never, ever change our minds about him. That's hard to do when you're exhausted.

Mary the Mom turned me on to a writer who said something so memorable. "Assume that the child is doing the best he can." To be honest, some days, I recite that to myself and think "Oh wow, really?" And he is. He absolutely is. He gets up and goes to school every day and mostly goes to his classes and he either gets As or Fs. He frequently acts out such that he is nailed for "cleanup in lieu of suspension" which in my book means "let the troubled kids substitute for janitorial staff because we don't really want to deal with them." And this is the best he can do right now. So my job is to talk to continue to get him to therapy, to talk to his counselors and the principals and vice principals and deans and teachers and try to work out the right equation for him so "the best he can do" can eventually grow just a little bit better.

We have an upcoming summit that we requested with one of the vice principals and his counselor. His intellect needs to be fed and challenged, and his anxiety needs to be soothed. He ought to be in a special school for kids with unusual emotional needs and behavioral challenges. He needs teachers who are cognizant that they are dealing with a CHILD, not a man, and that he will give back what he sees reflected in their eyes. Finding that in a large urban public high school system is tough.

Parent the Need, Not the Behavior

In our MAPP training, the instructor often repeated the refrain "Parent the need, not the behavior."

I find myself chanting that over and over on the treadmill sometimes.

It's alot harder than it sounds, like most things to do with parenting an older kid out of foster care. I mean, it's one thing to parent the need rather than the behavior when your three-year-old is having a freakout. It's another to sort out a 16 year-old boy.

Nevertheless, I find it a useful, somewhat meditative thought. When I'm overwhelmed by the behavior (skipping classes, for example, is this week's hot topic), I switch my focus to the need for awhile. It gets me out of policing mode and puts me back in touch with the love and the fundamental bond. It doesn't necessarily make me more effective, but it reminds me why I'm doing this and alleviates the feelings of futility that sneak up on me occasionally when the behavior feels out of my control.

I've learned never to ask him "Why are you doing this?" It sounds desperate and ignorant. (Gentler versions like "Tell me how you felt when you decided not to go to class?" are okay, but rarely result in a meaningful response because he doesn't have that self-awareness yet.) Anyway, one can pretty well guess why he's doing most things.

You only have to look at his life to figure that the realm of unmet needs is so huge you can kind of aim in a general direction and be pretty sure you're gonna hit something significant. I'd say his list of needs goes something like:

- the need to know you have a place to sleep and food to eat every day and nobody is going to come take that from you today

- the need to have one adult you can call for help when you are in trouble

- the need to be safe at home, to not be violated or hurt

- the need to be recognized for who you really are

- the need to make sense of your life and your story at your own pace

- the need to be allowed time and space to change as you're able

- the need to feel you have some control over your life

So when I get tired I aim for at least one of those needs.

He's twice had foster parents who called in the notorious "7 day notice" (a demand that must be met for the county to relocate him within a week) for infractions similar to what happened this week. In those earlier situations, he came home one afternoon, a social worker was there, all his belongings were in garbage bags (no time or money for suitcases) and he was driven to another county and dropped off at a new home in a place where he knew nobody.

Now, let me say that I understand what drove those foster parents to do that. They felt they could not parent him effectively anymore, that his behavior was disrupting their lives and their available attention for the other kids in their homes. But I also understand that T. felt that they "threw him away." It reinforced his belief that he's bad, that people grow tired of him and want to get rid of him, that he matters to nobody and nobody understands him.

When managing his behavior is wearing me out, I find it relaxing to remember that there are PLENTY of other adults on hand to help with the behavioral aspect - including his social worker, our new therapy program, certain teachers and his school counselor. But when it comes to addressing his deep underlying needs, it's mostly just us. We are the only people who can be there in that way right now.

Some days I'm afraid I won't live up to the promise - he'll do something that I just won't be able to handle. But as my mom says, what parent of a teenager hasn't felt that way?

Shame and the Game Plan

One of the hardest things we grapple with is T.'s internalized belief that he's a bad person.

It's been apparent since some of our earliest conversations with him. In the beginning, he had an odd habit of opening up during happy times and merilly recounting "bad" things he'd done as a young child - school fights, stealing some candy from a store - on a "just thought you should know" basis.

It gradually became clear that he was a) testing us by seeing how we'd respond, b) letting us in on a history of misbehavior that weighs on his conscience, and c) sharing the logic he uses to make sense of what's happened to him. Like lots of traumatized kids, he believes - and has for a long time - that the abuse that was directed at him happened because he was "bad". And then, like lots of abused kids, it became cyclical, because the abuse made him feel shame and caused him to act out in ways that reinforced his belief that he's bad.

As we've bonded more deeply, I've tried suggesting that behavior is not identity, that I love him and know he's not "bad", and that young kids often indicate through their behavior things they can't explain in words. Such a suggestion often results in both a denial that he has or has ever had any feelings, coupled with further information about things that happened to him as a kid. It's a strange sort of "No, but here's another thing I should tell you that proves your point..." response.

We recently had such a conversation. He made an unwise choice at school one day. We were talking through what happened. He told me I shouldn't be surprised by his behavior because he's "always been bad." I said something like "You know, I've heard you say that a few times - that you were a bad kid. I don't think you are or ever have been a bad kid. I think you've used your behavior to send a message sometimes, and now that you're older, it's a good time for us to talk about what triggers that kind of behavior so you can make smart choices."

This time, his face contorted. He said "Sometimes people don't have a choice about how to behave." I asked him for an example. He said, "I didn't have a choice about whether to take care of my younger brother when we went to foster. I had to do it." There was real rage on his face. That happened when he was about six, and that's about the age his stories of being "bad" begin.

He told me that he thinks he's "rotten". He stopped making eye contact and curled up in fetal position in his chair. He asked me not to say nice things about him anymore. This is a painful place for him - he feels he failed to protect his little brother from some harrowing mistreatment they both endured, and at the same time, he resents his brother, who suffered from serious behavioral issues that overwhelmed T. when he was just a little kid trying to keep things under control.

He stayed quiet for a long minute. Then he snapped up, looked me in the eye, and said "Everything happens for a reason! If I hadn't been in foster care, I never would have met you guys!" He didn't smile when he said it, and he wasn't flattering me - he said it with a fierce fire. He was diverting me and changing the subject, trying to wave me off from a sensitive topic. But he was also telling himself a story that matters to him - one where fate works for him.

We came back to the topic at hand. I asked him what he would do if he were the parent and his kid were cutting class, as he's been doing. He thought for a minute, then said, "I'd observe, to see if it's a pattern. If it continued, I'd take away the things he loves most: his cell phone and the computer." I said, "Interesting, that sounds very wise. Now, how would you know for sure if it were a pattern? Would you check on him at school?" He said, "I'd ask him directly. He usually tells the truth. He told you about it in the first place." I said, "That's true. He is very honest and that's one of the things I like so much about him."

These role-reversal conversations tend to work really well with T. because of the pseudo-parental role he played as a young kid - he slips easily into that frame of mind and can parent himself quite effectively. They also crack me up.

The intensity of the moment passed and we chatted a bit longer. We invited him to let us know if there's anything we can do better as parents, to help take the spotlight off him as we wound down. He loves this question and I often use it to help him end an intense conversation. "Yes," he said in a thoughtful way - at times, he can be quite professorial. "You went too far with my consequences today," he said. "My behavior isn't that bad. We should try to compromise." We did. Then he rose from the table. "Well, that was a very mature conversation," he said, "I'm glad we had this talk." He danced around for a bit, tickled and poked us, then put himself to bed.

Before I became his parent, I thought we'd have a lot more control over how and when we parented. I thought you kind of organized your talking points, sat the kid down and delivered them. I laught at myself now. I didn't know there are all these little doors opening and closing all the time, and you kind of have to lob your parenting wisdom at them and hope to hit the mark. Two parts love - BAM! A quick shot of discipline - POW! Uh oh - incoming negative peer influence. DUCK! Pop back up, articulate reasonable limits. Hope for compliance. Dodge hormonal theatrics. That sort of thing.

It's hard, but it's fun.

Age is Just a Number

The other day, we were out to eat and T. (who can be extremely controlling about food) announced that he didn't like the choices at the Mexican restaurant and he wanted a burger instead. I said, "Great, I'll give you $10 and you can go across the street to the diner and get yourself a burger."

"I'm only 10!" he yelped. "I can't cross the street by myself!"

In earlier days, I would have been completely confounded. I might even have teased him. Now I know, although he's just hit his 16th birthday, if T. says he's ten, today he's ten.

He didn't pick that number at random. He was ten when he was taken away for the final time from the relatives who were caring for him. He was ten when some of the worst things that happened to him in his life had just taken place. He was ten when he realized he'd be in foster care for the rest of his childhood.

He probably didn't even think when he said it. The unconscious - especially when we're playing - has a way of telling the truth.

I suppose one could be spooked by a 16 year-old who occasionally thinks he's ten. I take it as an indication of where his needs are coming from. When we were fulfilling our county-mandated parenting classes before T. came to live with us, I recall the teacher saying "Parent them where they are, not where you think they should be."

There was an interesting model in the class. It showed the cycle of need and satisfaction that attends to early infancy. The teacher explained that an infant lives in a constant cycle of need and gratification, and that the average infant goes through ten thousand cycles of need and satisfaction before developing a secure attachment to its adult caretaker.

T. was born premature and drug-addicted, and he went through eleven foster homes as an infant before a cousin took him in. It's hard to imagine he got his ten thousand cycles of gratification.

I think about that when he's annoying me now. He calls out for snacks when he could easily get them himself. He asks to be picked up from school when he could easily take the bus. He wants us to be close at hand when he goes out with friends.

The other day he announced hopefully "You can clean my room." In different circumstances, it might have been annoying or just lazy. It felt different. When T. was little - around five years old - he did the ironing for a household full of adults, and if he didn't do it well, he was brutally punished. He told me that if he didn't clean the whole house properly, he had to stand in the corner facing the wall, and often the adults would get drunk and go out and he'd eventually fall asleep standing up and awaken when he hit the floor. When I met him, he lived in a home where there was little affection but lots of chores. One of his most familiar words was "mandatory", as in "Is it mandatory?" I laughed the first time he asked me that - I think I had suggested we see a movie.

So I clean his room. I love doing it. It's a way of taking care. No one has ever cleaned his room for him. I also wash his clothes. When he started doing weekend visits, I told him he could drop his dirty clothes in the hamper anytime and we'd wash them. He didn't acknowledge. After a few consecutive weekends, I found one pair of socks gingerly resting in the hamper. I washed them and left them for him the next weekend when he returned. That weekend, I got a pair of socks plus an undershirt. A few weeks later, his favorite washcloth. I knew we were on track when he started leaving his undershorts behind to be laundered between visits. By the time we all agreed to adopt each other, it was raining dirty clothes - he brought clothes from his weekday foster home and piled them in the laundry basket, deliberately leaving more and more clean clothes behind in what would be his room. It's such a simple thing, but it's a give-and-take rhythm of being cared for that was most unfamiliar to him.

I don't want to let him control the household. But there's an aspect of his behavior that I think is driven by unfulfilled early childhood needs. If he needs to be ten, or two, today, then I'll parent him like a ten or a two-year-old. He saved those parts for someone to satisfy, and by some miracle of personality, he is still largely receptive to having those unfulfilled needs parented.

Nest

We're coming up on T.'s sixteenth birthday soon. Milestones can be tricky things and this one has him in a reflective mood. We were bracing for some difficult behavior - Christmas, in retrospect, was really rough, as he processed all sorts of emotions and divided loyalties. But T. is a regular mind-blower and he's in a different frame of mind lately- one more befitting of an 80 year-old than a 16 year-old.

Last night, we fell into a most unexpected conversation. I was trying to head off some brewing mischief he's concocting for his birthday, and he was trying to earn a little money by finding extra chores he could do. In jest, I said, "You can tell me the secret you're keeping and I might pay you for that!"

He loved that and agreed immediately. I said, "Okay, we'll cover our eyes while you tell us, so you don't feel embarrassed." Somehow that opened the most astonishing floodgate of confession.

It began with a pretty ordinary sort of teenage secret, related to his birthday. Apparently that went so well, he moved on quickly to some huge and long-impacted private torments. One minute we were clearing the table and joking around, and the next, we were listening quietly to some harrowing details of his younger life. He followed with a strict instruction "Just listen and don't SAY anything!" We stayed quiet, and just showed him warm eyes and a soft expression. A little further down the conversation road, we offered a few quiet compliments about his exceptional wisdom.

We all came away happy, rather than sad - most unexpected, because his early life is a study in every conceivable kind of child abuse. Sometimes for traumatized kids still reeling and in pain, I think telling means reliving - but in this case, the telling of it was different from the living of it. He and Tim reorganized the kitchen cabinets afterwards, and that sort of mundane togetherness seemed the right transition back to everyday life. He was able to release what he needed to tell and we were able to show him, by staying calm and warm and quiet, that he can set those burdens down and nothing about our life together will change.

He's nesting now. He's incredibly long and lean (more than six inches taller than me now!), and when he winds his long limbs around us or moves in for a quick hug, or to touch foreheads as we do now at bedtime, I find myself holding my breath sometimes as if trying not to startle an exotic wild animal. He's taken over the house with his teen detritus, and established his own strange patterns of feeding and other daily routines. He brings little bits of his past now and then - a photo of his mom, a fact about what happened to him- and adds that to the insulation he's building around himself.

It's humbling to watch. Sometimes I think we are like the stagehands in his life. He is like a great actor, the star of his own life, but he had no reliable place to perform and nobody to pay consistent attention before. We construct a comfortable, intimate place for him where he can act out what needs to be aired. When he's done, we appreciate. And then he rests. My favorite times are when he rests peacefully, knowing he spoke and was heard.

On the Other Hand

Heading into month three of full-time pre-adoptive "placement" as the county likes to call it - which just means "parenting", really. And we're doing pretty good...depending how you look at it.

On the one hand, T. got caught (by us) getting high at school last week. His behavior tipped us off, but we had to insist on searching his backpack and school clothes in order to catch him out in the open so we could deliver a consequence. He was extremely upset and angry for about twenty-four hours. (As a quick aside: although we were upset that he'd lied to us and used drugs at school, we weren't too shocked, as we've been working with him on his marijuana habit all along, and we were more or less ready to respond.)

When he's upset, he often stares into my eyes with an incredibly mournful expression as if to transfer his feelings to me. The day after our confrontation, he was doing that and he looked utterly heartbroken. I took a guess and said something to the effect of: "I know right now you dislike our rules and the consequences. But I want you to know that even though we're arguing, we NEVER, EVER feel differently about you, and you are very dear to us." After that, his grief and rage started to subside. I find every act of discipline needs to be accompanied by an expression of commitment or he thinks his world is coming to an end.

Oddly, it turns out that he adores being grounded. He lost all priveleges for two weeks, including: going out without us, having friends over, playing x-box, using the computer, and using his cell phone. And we've never seen him happier.

My mom nailed it. She observed that he's overwhelmed by his social life right now. Deciding what to do and with whom every weekend means choosing between old friends and new friends, and between following our rules or reverting to old behaviors. He's got a crush on a girl and she's reciprocating, which means managing a host of expectations around what comes next. All of this makes him anxious, and being grounded simplifies his life and gives him a reason to hang around the house with us contemplating but not acting upon his options.

In addition to the security of being sequestered and secluded, I have a hunch that his happiness in the midst of discipline has another dimension: we didn't tell his social worker what happened. She visited a couple days later and we didn't lie, but we didn't offer the story either. He noticed. Our feeling is that we're the parents and we've delivered a consequence and discussed our expectations with him and that's the end of it. Now he gets a chance to try to meet those expectations without an atmosphere of lingering resentment.

T. hates his primary caseworker. She took him out of more than one home over the years, moving him from place to place without warning. She has a tendency to belittle and berate him, and to say disparaging things about his mother. (His adoption worker is a different story, and we tell her pretty much everything.) Usually, in her wake, we experience a prolonged bout of sullen angry behavior because she insults him so deeply. Not this time. He bounced back immediately after she left, chatting and playing with us.

He was utterly loving all weekend. He voluntarily cleaned the bathroom for me. He opened his arms on Sunday night and gave me a huge unprompted hug - something he's never done before. He confided in us about some problems some of his friends are facing right now. Yesterday he told me proudly that he's not getting high at school anymore. He did decide to sit out his PE class "instead" which I don't love, but I'll take a failing grade in PE (he gets Bs in everything else) over drug use at school.

T. struggles with symptoms you might call PTSD - he's overwhelmed by noise, crowds, physical proximity - and I understand why he tries in his own immature way to regulate his experience so he can get through the day. We'll grapple with these issues for as long as he's with us.

So as unpleasant as busting him was, it's been a good couple weeks. Finally he has evidence that we truly will not "give him away" when he misbehaves, that he has one set of rules and one pair of adults who offer both discipline and unconditional love, instead of a committee of bureaucrats who tear apart his entire life for infractions real and imagined. He's somehow managed to remain receptive - to love, stability, reason, and hope - and it's when he's made a mistake or misbehaved that his receptivity is most evident.

Some Kids Are Orchids

I was hanging out with a colleague who has two really great kids this week and I had a thought. People are like plants. Her kids are like daisies. They grow where they're planted, they need regular amounts of sun and water, and their faces turn toward you with straightforward openness. They're great fun to be with and it always cheers me up to see them.

T. is an orchid. He's been through several homes searching for the right conditions in which to flourish. Sometimes he barely eats and on other days he has the exclusive desire for peculiar foods. He's beautiful and complicated, and when he comes and goes he rarely says hello or good-bye unless you dance around and manage to position yourself where you can catch a glimpse of his face as it turns slightly away or down toward the floor. But when you do catch his eye, there's usually so much to see and study there. When he does open up and talk, he's so funny and wise and the things he says are so often unexpected.

People are always telling us about their perceptions of foster kids - many think they must be difficult, dangerous, disturbed. In our experience, some are, some aren't. It's more complicated than that. But I will say that of the foster kids we've known, very few are daisies. Some are cactuses. Others, like T., are more like exotics: unusual, complex, fragile and possessing strange exaggerated abilities and uncanny strengths.

Sometimes I catch myself shoving him into the sunlight and expecting him to grow, and instead he wilts and fades. But listen closely, switch up the routine if he's showing subtle signs of stress, keep the temperature constant and the air in the room from getting stale and he settles into being himself. An orchid never turns into a daisy, but it can be a very beautiful orchid.