The United States foster care system has a higher turnover rate than most fast food industries.

I read an article today that begins with this statement: "The United States foster care system has a higher turnover rate than most fast food industries. Of the estimated 200,000 licensed foster homes, from 30 to 50 percent drop out each year...Why are foster parents leaving? Of all the reasons, the biggest by far is that they are treated poorly."

All I can say to that is, yes, indeed. We might have fostered and/or adopted a few times in our lives, these days we are inclined to think that we'll do it just this once.

Our main reason is that we connected with T so deeply and have had such a profound experience becoming his parents that we fear there will never be another T and we might just hang up our parenting gear when he no longer needs us.

But the other reason we aren't anticipating a repeat performance is that the bureaucracy is too punishing. Unless we managed to meet a child with whom we can establish the kind of connection we have with T, we would surely be adrift without the support required to address the needs of a child with complex needs. We became foster parents after meeting T and only because we found him so compelling and there was such unusual chemistry amongst us. Without T as my motivating factor I just don't think I would be able to tolerate this bureacracy.

It's on my mind this week because we recently attended a court hearing to decide the matter of noticing his biological parents regarding the adoption (a discussion they have waited 18 months to even initiate). At the hearing, the court had to fire his present attorney who hasn't shown up in court on T's behalf for several years. The court appointed a new attorney exactly three minutes prior to the hearing, and the hearing moved forward despite the fact that the attorney knew nothing about the case. When we asked to address the court (about the fact that T's caseworker has asked him to notice his own mother) we were told that we can't speak to the judge. After I got back to my office that day, T's adoption social worker called me to ask what is going on with his case, and ask me to straighten out a huge misunderstanding between herself and his primary caseworker. Then T.'s biological mother called him at home to ask him what is going on with the court case because she doesn't understand the papers she's received from the court and the confusing phone calls she's had from his social worker and they've just managed to get her worked up and anxious, despite the fact that she's been aware of and not expressly opposed to his adoption all along. I wanted to scream.

To be brutally honest, we have mostly been treated like low rent babysitters by the social workers and inspectors and court officials involved in T's case. Often, to this day, have the sense that the myriad caseworkers and inspectors and bureacrats involved expect us to fail in our endeavor to provide him with a permanent home.

In my imaginary better world, becoming a parent should feel sort of like joining the Peace Corps must have in the heydey of the Kennedy Administration. There should be recruiters, and the recruiters should help people find a way to view foster parenting as a noble and unique endeavor, not a poor approximation and substitute for bio parenting. The training courses should be hard, and they should take place somewhere fun. (How about luxury hotels, that donate the rooms and facilities for a long weekend as a tax writeoff, like a gift to charity?) The trainings should include a panel of foster children to speak for themselves and their peers. Perhaps they could rank potential foster and adoptive parents: "This foster parent gets an 8 out of 10 stars in reviews from 32 other foster children..."

When we met T. we received a two page form describing his personality and interests. It was 90% inaccurate, with large portions that were frankly erroneous. It managed to be both clinical and superficial, a disturbing combination. Virtually everything we know about his background, his needs and his medical and educational history we found out from him. He in turn received nothing about us except the packet that we put together for him of our own accord. At some point (when his adoption finalizes? it's never been clear), the social workers tell us that we'll receive a thick packet of papers documenting his history; by then, we will have no use at all for the information it contains.

Thank goodness we fell utterly in love with him, I say, because we have mostly had to parent him from the gut while he has helped us understand over time where he's coming from. Had we needed to be more strategic from the start, and had he been unable to articulate his needs, we would have had a very rough time indeed.

Our Second Christmas Together

Our second Christmas with T went a lot better than the first. We were smarter.

This year, we better understood that a lifetime of disappointment makes surprises very unsettling, and we let T make a wish list of desired gifts to guide our giving.

I didn't get a Christmas tree this year - I've learned that too much festivity just produces anxiety. We just had Christmas lights - like the frosting without the cake.

This year, I was better prepared for his...flawed etiquette around receiving gifts, and I didn't expect any display of happiness or gratitude. I just gave him things I wanted him to have.

And of course, in synch with my reduced expectations, T better managed his complex feelings about receiving gifts and even managed a polite thank you!

This year, I kind of got a present from T. T told Tim to get me something. I bought myself some nail polish. Tim gave it to T and T gave it to me. He took great delight in taking all the credit. Making himself emotionally vulnerable enough to make a passing gesture at giving a gift is a big step for T.

This year we didn't let the chaos of his birth family compete with our time with him. Instead, we gave him his gifts on the morning of the 24th and had a nice breakfast together. This worked well for him and he announced that forevermore, the 24th is "our Christmas".

We arranged the same Christmas Eve visit to the birth relatives we facilitated last year, and stressed less about it. We knew the visit would be chaotic, disappointing and depressing and that we can not control or prevent his feelings. (SocialWrkr24/7 had a great post about the complexity of holiday birth family visits here.) We kept in touch with him by text message, made sure he got fed, but didn't freak ourselves out completely when the adults took off and didn't supervise the kids. Their chaos is familiar to him, and he can manage it for short periods, particularly if he knows we are nearby and available.

I'm particularly pleased that T let us take charge of his visit with his brother this year. He was a "parentified" older sibling for many years and it badly frayed his nerves. This year, we made the plans for him: we bought his brother a gift, drove out to a neighboring county to pick him up, and delivered him to the relatives house on Christmas Day. We decided on the timing and duration of the visit. When T got frustrated with his brother in the car, we soothed them both and got them settled down. I felt really gratified by his concession to let us be the parents - that indicates a great deal of trust on his part.

I didn't feel so badly about missing out on T's company on Christmas as I did last year. Tim and I planned Christmas Eve as a treasured date night and we had a blast.

This year, I had a better understanding that the best gift I can give T as his parent is to reduce the burden of my emotional expectations and normalize and help him balance his scattered loyalties and relationships.

This year, my mom included his photo in her annual Christmas card collage, alongside my nephew. He plucked it from the mail, stared at it for a long time, then set it aside in a prominent location. Thank you, mom.

This year, he hoarded all the Christmas cards that had his name alongside ours on the envelope. "They're addressed to me!" he exclaimed. It is hard to explain the significance of Christmas cards and packages to a neglected kid.

This year, my parents joined us for a short ski vacation the day after Christmas. This year, T. referred to my dad as his "grampz".

This year, my cousin's 4 year-old daughter approached T and asked him sweetly if it would be alright if she called him her cousin from now on, and he smiled and nodded.

In our own way, it was a merry Christmas.

Taken Away

A year into T.'s placement, we still have regular visits from social workers - an adoption worker, a caseworker, and occasional miscellaneous inspectors.

Right now, we have an upcoming visit from a social worker we haven't met before. Hers is a one-time visit to assess his ongoing eligibility for the therapy services.

We try to keep such things low-key for him. So last night I said, "There's a social worker coming tomorrow. She wants to ask you if we're going to therapy, and she might ask you how you're doing in school. She's not one of your caseworkers - she's one of the social workers who comes to check us out as parents and keep up on whether we're doing a good job and following through on their recommendations."

We were at a Korean spa (this is LA, after all) lolling around in the family area having a snack at the time. He rolled over on his back, put his hands over his eyes, and said in a monotone "They're the ones who come to take you away."

Uh oh! "I don't think so," said Tim. "She's just coming to check up on how things are going. There's some paperwork they have to do."

"Yeah," said T without uncovering his eyes. "I know the system. Those kinds of social workers are the ones who can take you away."

I said clumsily, "It sounds like what you're saying is that you've met this kind of social worker before, the kind who come to check up on the parents. You've been through that before, right?"

"Yeah," he said. He curled into fetal position and closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his head. He's 6' 4" and very much a regular sixteen year-old man-boy, but at that moment he was a much younger and more vulnerable kid.

He didn't really need for us to explain at that point that he isn't going anywhere. He wasn't really expressing anxiety that he'd be removed from our home - he was just remembering. He was removed from his relatives twice - around six, and again around nine. He told me that he cried when he was taken away from them, and he has never cried since. He worries about why he's unable to cry. He says nothing ever really carries the same weight as being taken from your family, so he has trouble finding the use in crying over anything these days.

I try to remember this when I'm low on patience or feeling intolerant of his anger and his need for control. Just the mere mention of an unexpected social worker visit was enough to make him nearly catatonic. That kind of fear doesn't subside quickly and in some ways it will be with him always, even as he grows into a strong, articulate, determined young man.

Drinking

Long time no blog, because the back-to-school season and a busy phase at work kept my fingers from my keyboard.

Back-to-school: a mixed blessing for sure. We don't need to fill T.'s days. On the other hand, he's a junior in high school in a big city with lots of opportunities to get up to his business and a certain fragility in terms of his self-esteem.

Last Monday, we busted him leaving for school with a Coke bottle full of vodka and orange juice. How did we find this out? Well, we read his text messages. Imagine my horror when I discovered a text letting his friends know he'd be bringing some vodka 'n orange for an early morning rendezvous. Imagine how much I kicked myself for even having vodka in the house! Until now, he has been entirely averse to alcohol (but not marijuana), but it was stupid to have it around.

Had this happened last year, we would have freaked out completely. We're becoming more seasoned. After he left the house, we actually kind of shrugged and sat down to our morning coffee before thinking about whether he needs rehab or just a good grounding. In part, we've learned to manage our reactions better in order to preserve our own health and sanity. Adopting a teenager can be like going from zero to 100 mph without a period of adjustment and the g-force occasionally leaves us limp. Panic is the enemy, and no good for our partnership either.

I still didn't have the answer when I got home from work that evening. T was playing video games quietly in the tv room. I decided to just wing it. I went it, sat down close to him, and said "I think you left for school this morning with vodka in your orange juice. I don't want to argue about whether that is or isn't true. I just really want to hear from you why you did that. I'm worried and I need to understand what's going on."

He turned to me with his huge round eyes. He had a gentle sad expression. "I don't know why I did it," he said. He's not a particularly good liar, nor a particularly manipulative child. He looked genuinely quizzical. I said, "Were you angry? Have you been drinking before school? Did you hope that I'd notice?"

"I haven't been drinking," he said. "This was the first time. But my behavior has always been a problem. I don't know why. I do good in my classes, but I behave badly." He really does talk like this sometimes - in part, the "system" as he calls it taught him to be self-critical in this way. But it's also part of his personality.

"Why do you think that is?" I asked.

He made his puzzled face. Then he said softly, "I think about so many things. Like my mom is never going to talk to me again. And my brother, he's still in the system. We came in together, but now I'm out of the system and he's still in it. I think about it all the time."

Nobody planted this idea in his mind, and it's rare that he refers to his various tragedies - he despises the idea that anyone might feel sorry for him. He and I have talked about his mom and his brother a few times over the past year, but not often, by his choosing. We tried visits with his brother, but T. shut it down - the dynamic between them is extremely complicated and painful. For awhile, he had polite contact with his mom (and so did I, to a limited extent) but she flew into a rage last spring and cut him off. There is no easy obvious "fix" in this situation. It will take a lifetime to make sense of it.

We talked for awhile about the difference between teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol and using drugs and alcohol to cover up feelings that seem unmanageable. I told him that if I feel that substance abuse has got him by the tail, I am going to step in because I love him. T. and I have gone many rounds trying to make progress on reducing his use of marijuana. Consistent limits are a necessity, but the only thing that works so far is when we ask him to modify his behavior just because we care about him. No other consequences or rewards have made one lick of difference. I offered that instead of punishment, what I'd like is a quiet evening without television or video games, and for us to spend some time talking a bit more about what's going on with him.

It was a bumpy conversation. We sat together in his room for awhile and he stared at the floor. He told me how he hasn't been able to cry since the last time he was removed from his family. I told him how I think about his birth mom a lot and feel badly that she missed out on his childhood (they didn't meet until he was twelve). We talked about how maybe his mom doesn't know what to say and how to make it right between them. By way of helping him depersonalize his mother's rage, we talked about how using drugs for a long time change someone's personality and make it very hard for them to control their anger. He told me that there's a "secret reason" why his mom doesn't want to talk to him or any of his siblings, a reason he can't share with me. We talked about some options for rebuilding his relationship with his brother, and he offered that he thought he'd like to start with regular phone calls.

I also asked him what he would do if he were the parent and he found out his most-loved child was taking vodka to school in the morning. He got a very serious look on his face - he slips easily into the role of parent/counselor and he really likes this approach. "Well," he said, "I would ask him. Did he drink it? If so, I would treat it very seriously. Did he sell it? That would be very bad, and he would have to lose his privileges and be in big trouble. But if he took it and gave it to someone else, and he didn't know why, and it was his first time, I would talk with him and try to understand him, and I would let him know that if he EVER, EVER does this again, there will be very serious consequences."

That's some childish logic, and not the final word on the subject. Obviously giving alcohol to other kids at school is totally unacceptable. But I do appreciate the progress he's making toward recognizing a connection between his use of mood-altering substances and the pain and confusion that come from the losses he's sustained.

Since our conversation, we've had nearly two weeks of much more moderate, relaxed behavior. Recently, he asked me to fire our therapist. "We do our own therapy," he said. "She doesn't know me." (In another post, I'll write about our frustrations with therapy and the general lack of services for teenagers like him.) T. makes me realize all the time that all that keeps us from falling off the edge sometimes is knowing that we don't want to hurt or disappoint someone who's opinion we care about, someone we feel really knows us. We can't fix what's happened or stop T. from feeling deep grief about everything he's lost. But we can sit with him, know him well, be honest with him when he's off-track and let him be honest with himself.

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.

The Storm Has Almost Passed

Having T. and his younger brother in the same room is like touching the wrong cable to your car battery. I believe Advocate Mom saw this coming and gently warned me a few weeks ago, explaining that her boys tend recreate the drama of their early life together. Yes, exactly.

Things did calm down since my last post. Birth mama drama died down. Younger brother played video games with Tim and T. came and curled up behind me on the sofa like a cat and fell asleep with his feet in my armpit. Later we went to the movies (we took the boys to separate movies, T. to the teen requisite Eclipse and younger brother to Toy Story), and T. and I snuck off to Macy's for a few minutes to buy jeans. It's craven, I know, but hey, I have been known to distract myself from difficulty by going shopping so why shouldn't he?

Their conflict remained at a simmer rather than a boil. We came home and had cake and opened gifts. T. came into the room briefly, just long enough to hear his brother softly exclaim "This is my best birthday ever." (I swear, it's the little offhand tragedies that will kill you.) Satisfied or else plagued by horrible guilt (probably both), T. retreated to his computer and we sat and ate cake and helped younger brother load up his new iPod Shuffle with music.

I understand a few things better now. First, I have long wondered about T. where the pain is hiding. He's very strong and very private and generally doesn't bring things up for discussion until he's already resolved his feelings on the matter internally. This weekend his pain and frustration were on full technicolor display. I don't fear that kind of pain and I was grateful to see it.

Second, I have often wondered if he gets lonely here, because he's the only child and we don't know a lot of people with kids. I'm not worried about that anymore. I see that we are a built-in ever ready audience of two and the exclusivity of our attention combined with the general orderliness of our home (meals are served regularly, people behave predictably, if we say we're going to pick you up we arrive on time) is a respite for him.

Third, I have always loved his gentle touch with younger kids but it has dimension I didn't appreciate before. He volunteers at the hospital, where he plays with little kids who've just had surgery. He soothes and plays with my baby nephew like an experienced nanny. He is generous and gentle with his friends' younger siblings, letting them come over and borrow his things. I always assumed that this nurturing streak must reflect the way he cared for his brother. But I see now that it has a quality of atonement. He isn't capable of expressing that gentle side with his own brother: a deep, cutting irony. My guess is that he feels he failed when they were young and bad things happened. At the same time, he believes that, had his younger brother been a different, better child, things wouldn't have been so hard.

I often think with T. that nothing is all good and nothing is all bad. There is pain and anger in his good behavior: if I'm perfect, then people will see that and finally love me. There is honesty and resourcefulness in his bad behavior: see, this is who I really am and this is how I get by - how ya like me now? He intended for this weekend to be about the first part of that dichotomy, to impress himself and his birth mom with his generosity. It turned out to be about the second part, about showing us who he really is and where he comes from.

All weekend, he's been checking my eyes. While he's on the phone with his birth mom, while he's haranguing his brother, or threatening to punch him out, or twitching with frustration as if he's got a bad case of emotional hives, he keeps checking my face. His expression, a half-smile with a wince, is hard to describe. It's part claustrophobia, part desperation, part humor, part shame. Most of all it's a very intense question mark. "What's happening to me?" I spent a lot of the weekend just looking back at him with an expression that I recall. It's the way my mom used to look at us when we had the stomach flu. It means: Nothing is wrong. I'm here and it's okay. This moment will pass.

BFD

So see previous post, where I expected this weekend to suck big apples. It didn’t take long for the BFD to kick on (birth family drama).

1:30 Younger brother arrives T. covers his face with his hands, yells “get away from me” when his brother tries to hug him. Looks at me and says “Can you buy him some clothes?! Look what he’s wearing!” Younger brother looks at me with his gentle smile, a little bit of heartbreak in his eyes.

1:32 Younger brother says to T. “Have you talked to mom?” T. says no, she isn’t speaking to him right now (she stopped speaking to him four months ago because he was visiting some other relatives he grew up with and didn’t go to visit her). Neither boy has ever lived with her, and T. only met her for the first time when he was around twelve. Younger brother turns to me and says “I told her I didn’t want to live with her and she told me to get out of her house and I haven’t talked to her since.”

“It’s good that you’re able to talk about what you want, even if it’s not what she wants to hear,” I say. “I know you guys will be close again some day.” I’m about to pat myself on the back for finding anything to say at all, when T. ruins the moment: “NO! She’s got problems!” he yells.

2:00 we go across the street to get McDonalds for the boys and return to find that T. has phoned their mom and left her a message. In turn, she called back and left an angry insulting message on his voicemail. He’s wound up, in the high-anxiety trauma place he goes when he panics. He wants to play the voicemail for me but finds he deleted it. I suggest that he let things go and focus on enjoying the time with his brother. He walks away – he’s not listening.

It suddenly dawns on me. That’s what this visit is about. He wanted to have his brother over so that he could show his mom that he’s a good son, and that he’s keeping the family together. Then maybe she won’t be mad at him anymore. Oh crap.

2:10 I go in the tv room to find T. has called his mom again. “Just listen to me!” I hear him saying. “Stop yelling! Can we at least come visit you? We’re here together.” I stop in my tracks. She hangs up on him. I quietly wave him into the other room.

2:11 I try explaining in a quiet loving way that we aren't going to take the boys to see their mom this weekend – although I’ve spoken with her on the phone, I haven’t met her. I don’t know whether younger brother is allowed unsupervised visits with mom, and T. hasn’t seen her in years. The situation is too volatile today because he and his mom are upset. I try to say all this without implying any disrespect or unwillingness to facilitate a visit some other time when we’ve all had a chance to plan it together. Of course, T. shuts it down, tells me he’s not listening to me, it’s none of my business, and he means me no disrespect, but he doesn’t want to hear my input on this topic. He storms out.

2:30 Tim gets both boys playing video games. By sitting his considerable presence between them, he’s able to get them off the phone and settled down a bit. If the first hour of this weekend is any indication, I’m going to need a week to recover.

I generally have a ton of compassion for T.’s birth mom. But today, I’m out of patience. I feel like telling her that these boys are not her boyfriends. They are children. They aren’t equipped to play this game with her where she accuses them of not loving her enough, leaves them nasty voicemail messages and hangs up on them when they call. It’s not fair at all to expect them to chase her and win her over. She wasn’t there, and they needed to survive and they have done the best they can. If she would free them to feel good about that, it would do them a whole bunch of good.

T.’s younger brother is the one with the more obvious behavioral symptoms. But it’s T. who, because he has a capacity to deeply repress things and extraordinary skills that make him high functioning in many respects, is far more volatile than his brother. His younger brother shows his pain on the surface and a lot of people help him through it. T. keeps his buried deep inside and when it bubbles to the surface – when his life catches up with him – he unravels and gets completely manic. He tends to be an utter control freak even on good days, and the chaos of his relationship with his birth mom pushes his controlling tendencies right over the edge. He tries to use his cognitive skills to solve the problem on his own and he can’t. It won’t ever be fixed. As that dawns on him, you can see him swept up in a vortex of horror as he realizes that all that pain didn’t go away after all – it’s sitting right there waiting for him.

P.S.
3:06 An old friend of Tim's calls out of the blue. His art framing shop is overwhelmed with business and he wants to offer T. a job for the rest of the summer. The mood lightens. T., excited by the prospect of making money, comes back to the present. I am flooded with gratitude. Kindness and support in parenting T. come from the most unexpected places and at the oddest times.

Parenting Kids Who Parent

So this is the weekend T.’s brother comes to visit. As happens from time to time, it turns out my intuition on this has been mostly wrong so far – or at least one-dimensional.

I thought T. might secretly want his brother to come and live with us. At the moment, I think he’d like nothing less.

It started like this. I said something like “What shall we do when your brother is here?” And T. said something like “Shut up and don’t talk to me right now!”

Interesting. I tried again “I thought we could plan something fun for his birthday and it would help me to know what you have in mind.”

“It’s up to him,” he said. He went in the other room and sent me a text message. It read “goodbye.”

He is generally a sensitive and responsive, if strong-willed, kid. It’s unusual for him to shut something down so completely, or to be so abrupt. It actually struck me as funny, which perhaps says something about my ill sense of humor.

Tim and I gave it a few days, then tried again. We started with logistics. “So we got permission to pick your brother up at his group home on Saturday. What time do you want to head out there?”

“I’m not going,” he said.

“Okay, wait a minute. You INVITED him, right? Do you still want him to visit?” I asked. He said yes. Mistaking his refusal to do the drive for common teenage laziness, I said “You absolutely are going with us to pick him up. He’s your brother and he doesn’t know us very well. It’s his birthday and he’ll be happy to see you.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’ll stay home and clean the house to get things ready.”

An offer to clean? MOST unusual. “Let’s talk about this.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” he said. “He bugs me! He really bugs me! Just DO NOT make me go pick him up!” He started pacing, making tiny tight circles on the floor.

I laughed. “Well, great, now I understand a little bit better. It sounds like he’s annoying to you.”

“He’s so annoying! You don’t even know. Sometimes I even want to hit him.”

I said, “Well, yeah, that’s pretty normal. This is going to be an interesting weekend. Let’s come up with some ideas for things to do so he doesn’t get on your nerves.”

“I don’t have to entertain him,” he said. “He can just be here and do stuff. I don’t have to do everything with him.”

Uh oh. I got an inkling. After all, T. has recently mastered the art of having a social life of his own - something he was mostly unable to cultivate in his many years in foster care. “But you will be here this weekend, right?” I asked. “I mean, you’re not planning to go hang out with friends, right?”

“Um,” he said. “I’m NOT going to just be here in the house with him. I'm a teen. I need to get out and do things. And he makes me REALLY MAD. I’m not his parent and I don’t have to take care of him all the time. I did that. I had to take care of me AND him when we went to foster. He gotta do things for himself now.”

Well, there it is. There are these moments when he says something – usually when he thinks he’s ranting and raving in a sort of casual bratty way when these nuggets of pure truth pop out. You just feel it in your gut. Bingo.

“Oh!” I said. “So let me see if I get this right. You had to take care of him for a long time and you were just a kid yourself and it must have been really hard. And probably you felt like you had to be a parent and you didn't want to. So now you want to make sure you don't have to be the parent again.”

“Yeaaaaaaaah!” he exclaimed.

I said, “Okay, great. We’re the parents here, right? So he’s coming to visit, and you’re going to be kind to him. But you're right, you don't have to act like his parent. You have your own life. We'll be here and we'll be in charge.”

Home run. A flood of relief. Singing, dancing. Came and flopped on our bed and wouldn’t stop talking at bedtime. Next morning we both got huge bear hugs before breakfast. Crazy love.

This is so counter-intuitive. I know it sounds like I’m letting him get away with murder. I know he’s being slightly cruel to his brother and we’ll have to manage that. I know he’s being outrageously impolite. But I also know it’s the right thing to do in the way I know most things with him, right deep in the middle of me for no rational reason.

We’re buying a cake and an iPod Shuffle for his brother and wrapping it up with a card with T.’s name on it. I feel like we’re supposed to take away the burden of parenting, grease a sticky emotional situation with a good present and a cake and a sleepover. And the whole weekend will very likely suck big apples. But in the big picture, this is exactly what he needs – he needs to experience the common order of hierarchy in the family where everything isn’t his fault and his responsibility. He dreamed of this and longed for it for a long time and almost got too old to get a chance to turn over the burden of parental responsibility to actual parents. But he managed to get himself some proper parents and by god, he’s going to grab every minute he can get to be the kid. He's going to be jealous and immature and express his guilt and sadness about what happened in their early lives in really awkward ways, and that's okay, because it's the best he can do, and it's a whole lot better than the overly compliant, parentified, repressed kid he used to be.

But this weekend is still going to suck big apples.