But Beautiful

Yesterday, we were in a requisite training class for parents of "severely emotionally disturbed children." It was a stormy, rainy day. The classroom was warm and bright and there were about ten other parents there, all of them parenting traumatized kids. When it came my turn to introduce myself, I cried. That's very rare. (As emotional self-expression goes, I specialize in righteous indignation.)

I said that we had been in T's life for two-and-a-half years, and that in that time, he had been arrested twice, expelled from two schools and a rehab facility, and that he had just hit his five-month sobriety mark. To my left sat a father of a 7 year-old girl who was in seven different foster homes before coming to him. Across the table sat a woman with two children who are receiving intensive in-home wrap-around services 6 days a week. To my right sat a couple who are parenting severely traumatized siblings with an emerging constellation of troubling and risky behavior.

In other words, I was in safe company. And I suppose that's why I cried. This year, I spend so much time explaining T to police, judges, therapists, social workers, teachers, administrators to try to stave off their anger and preconceived notions--but I didn't need to do that here. I didn't need to minimize his problems, insist on his personhood, or explain that I love him more than I even thought it was possible to love another person. Nobody thought I was an enabler, an apologist, or crazy. Every mom and dad in the room is living a variation on the same story. A lot of them cried as they introduced their circumstances, too.

The curriculum was relevant, a manual for navigating the aftermath of tragedy and trauma. After our time in the trenches, I find that some lessons hit me hard and others are familiar old friends (the section on appropriate discipline, for example, is old hat by now). I was particularly pained and enlightened by a section about prenatal drug exposure. The course material captured the straightforward observation that kids who have been drug-exposed in utero are at increased risk of abuse and neglect in later childhood. It explained that such children are usually born into already-fragile families or placed in infant foster care. Many struggle with impulse control, fine motor skills, executive function, anxiety, over-stimulation and self-soothing. The resultant behaviors then make them targets for adult frustration, impatience and anger, leading to a much higher incidence of abuse, neglect and abandonment. Alienated from peers and caregivers, they are also vulnerable to other forms of exploitation and manipulation, including sexual abuse, because they exist "on the fringe".

Reading that made me want to howl. T is one of those kids. Somehow I had never considered his story in quite that light. It was stark, and statistical. I felt shocked that such a narrative of misfortune could be so common as to have made it into a book in such plain terms.

Without minimizing that painful reality, I want to emphasize that the story has another part, one that is rarely understood: it is possible to make a difference, a huge and permanent difference. I want to add a paragraph to that section of the course material so the next parent or potential parent to read it will be reminded that you don't need a psych degree, a magic wand or a hazmat suit to be there for such a child. I want the course material to say: you'll never see the light of the human spirit burn so brightly as it does in a kid for whom everything conspired to extinguish that light, but who kept it alive in the hope that someone else would come along and recognize him. A child who infuriates one adult can delight another, and souls connect in a place beyond behavior. I know that's true, too.

When we got home from the class, we went out for dinner. I remember when T would only eat fast food, because he couldn't tolerate unfamiliar food, and he was too shy to order in a restaurant. But last night was relaxed and quiet. He ordered his food, choosing something from the menu that he had never tried before. He spoke directly to the waiter, and stated his preferences clearly and politely. He ate heartily. He appeared relaxed, and even chatted a bit in between sending text messages. It's a small change, probably invisible perhaps to anyone other than his parents. But beautiful.

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.

I love you I do this I'm sorry

I returned this week to Parenting the Hurt Child, an incredibly insightful book by Gregory Keck that I think every person should read regardless of who or whether they're parenting. His honesty and tolerance for complexity relax me.

Lately, it is more or less impossible to get T to go to all his classes, or to go to all of them without first stopping off to smoke marijuana. We do substance abuse counseling. We've tried escorting him to school. We talk to the administrators. We restrict privileges. We offer incentives. Nothing works.

Last night, we decided to take a night off. We made dinner, left it on the table (he was awol at dinnertime) with a note explaining our whereabouts, and went out. When we came home, he was asleep on the sofa in front of the front door. I tucked him in with our own quilt and went to bed.

This morning I heard footsteps. I opened my eyes and it was T. "Shhhh!" he said sternly. He bent over and kissed me on the forehead, patted the top of my head, and tiptoed out.

Sometimes his adorable gestures mean "Aren't I charming? Give me what I want!" (money, a ride, some slack). But in my half-awake state, it came to me immediately that this particular kiss on the forehead meant "I love you. I do this. I'm sorry."

That could be a tragic apology from a certain point of view, meaning something like: "I have a compulsive drug habit and no impulse control and I feel badly about it." Certainly we're up against one of those moments when you're just not sure the child is yet capable of changing old habits and destructive modes of thought. But from another point of view, he has made progress.

His responses to caring adults used to tend more toward silent statements like "I don't know you, who cares what you think?" From that point of view, "I love you, I do this, I'm sorry" is profound. In fact, it occurred to me that in this recent period of escalated misbehavior and delinquency, I've now received three gentle kisses--the first he's ever delivered.

He used to try occasionally to kiss me on the cheek - not at my request, but of his own volition (he arrived extremely physically reserved and we have always let him determine whether and how we share physical contact). When he began trying to show affection, he'd get close to my face and then he'd purse his lips and squint his eyes and say "Ew! Can't do it!" (I did find this totally hilarious.) But two weeks ago, I got a sudden peck on the cheek one day, out of the blue. About a week later, on a day when we were relaxed and had spent some time together, I got a tiny kiss on the tip of my nose. And this morning, a farewell peck on the cheek.

This is in marked and dramatic contrast to some of the other "feedback" we get from him, just in case it sounds like it's all sweetness and light at our house. Indeed, two nights ago, I asked him to work with me on his homework to get caught up in a class he's been cutting. He flatly refused to even try. I said, "what are you doing instead?" and he said, "I'm doing me. What the fuck does that have to do with you?" Obscene, yes.

I said as calmly as I could, "Wow I'm very sorry to hear that you feel that way," took his iPod, and closed the door. The next day I left a simple note on his door. It said, "The legal consequences for truancy are..(x,y,z). After 3 unexcused absences the court may place you on juvenile probation. You have more than 20 unexcused absences. This is your problem and you'll have to deal with it. We will withhold all privileges until you do. Love, Your Parents."

God bless Keck and others like him. Before bed, I re-read the sub-chapter "Children for Whom Nothing Works." I expected to see a description of our situation. T has none of the behaviors on that list, which begins with "injuring, mutating or killing animals on multiple occasions" (page 156, for anyone eager to check it themselves!). I rejoiced. We're not even there. T rocks our pet kitten in his arms and sings lullabies to her. Phew. His range of available behaviors is extremely broad, extending from frank delinquency to tender loving compassion for all the world's small creatures. That's the wonder and the challenge of him, the risk and the opportunity as he moves toward adulthood.

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.

Sorry

Oh what a funny duckie is T.

After a rough week and some rather steady decline in behavior since last month he came to family meeting tonight in a gentle mood. We wrote out an agenda. He grabbed the pen and added his two cents but kept his agenda item covered up. When it came his turn, he looked down at his notes and read his agenda item in a bashful voice: "Apology."

Apology is a concept he learned recently. Last week I wasn't being my best parent self and I let an argument with him go unresolved - I cut short a conversation and didn't return to finish it before bedtime as I try to do. I was just too exasperated with his escalating behavior at school and the chaos of it all. So the next day I texted him "I want to apologize. I should have come back and talked out our disagreement. Please forgive me. Let's make up later."

I saw him after school and he looked at me so oddly and said "I don't understand why you are apologizing?" I said, "Because we try to talk things out before bed and I left you hanging. I shouldn't have done that." He gave a surprised laugh.

So tonight he came with his own apology. He's sorry that he has been getting high after school. He wants to do what we ask, but he's having trouble resisting temptation. Consequences aren't really working for us right now - our life was turning into an unholy mess of consequences upon consequences. So I just probed for a little more information.

"Do you know why you smoke marijuana?" (we talk about this all the time, but it never hurts to see what today's answer is going to be.)

Awkward silence.

"Do you enjoy the way weed gives you a chance to hang out with certain friends and be cool and have a certain image?"

"No."

"Is it the effect it has on your thoughts?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell me a little bit about why you started smoking more frequently? You were doing really well getting that under control since you moved in with us. It seems like something changed."

Tentative, "I don't know. I guess I just like it."

"Oh really? That's interesting. It seems like something changed around spring break."

Here we got some adorably bad acting - totally fake gesture as if to suggest a new thought had just occurred to him. Then he said in a very soft voice, "Oh, there is this one thing. I think maybe it was when my mom stopped talking to me. She won't call me back anymore."

And there it is. I know kids can be manipulative, but sometimes you just know in your gut that the kid just spit out a kernel of pure truth and things suddenly make more sense. We have been struggling to figure out how to explain his recent spate of unusually angry behavior. Of course!

Mom is mad at him because around spring break (at his request) we took him to see the cousin who raised him for several years, and his mother found out and felt jealous. Complicated. I won't go into the whole backstory. Suffice it to say his mom has five kids who all grew up in foster care and none of them have ever spent a single night with her.

I told him that I respect his mom, because he came from her. And that I know how much it hurts when your mom isn't talking to you. And that I wanted him to know that it isn't his fault that she's angry. He listened. I asked if I could do anything to help. He said no. Then he squealed "This is like therapy! Don't ask me any more questions! Can I go play video games?"

The change was immediate. His eyes are warm. He's more relaxed and playful. He asked to go back to the gym - one of his coping strategies that he's been dodging lately.

We'll go through cycles like this for as long as he's with us, I'm sure, and substance abuse is a bitch. But I sure do appreciate the tiny bit of self awareness he's achieved.

On on unrelated note, here's another funny and some recommended reading.

My dad gave me Nurture Shock for my birthday. A short while later, T. and I were having an argument. I said, "I don't want to argue with you." He freaked and said "I hate it when you say that! I'm not arguing - I'm trying to talk to you!" I said, "You know, you're right. My dad gave me this book for my birthday. There's a chapter in the book about teenagers and it says that teenagers' brains are different. Sometimes what adults think of as an argument is just their way of saying something important. So the book recommends that you hear them out." Moment of stunned silence, then a HUGE grin spread over his face. "YES!" he yelled. "Thank you! And now Tim needs to read that book too!"

Insisting on the Right to Parent

Well, we had high hopes for the wrap-around service we were referred to by our beloved adoption caseworker. (Wrap-around is a model for counseling and support for foster and adopted kids. There are different tiers of wrap-around and it can be very intense - a team of behavioral specialists who support the parents and the kids, often through crisis periods.) We aren't in a crisis, but we thought it would be good to be proactive and get involved with some of the support services available to us through the county, and our social worker thought this program (through a reputable mental health organization) looked like a good bet. (The county only funds certain mental health models - due to budget cuts - so getting a family matched to services is tricky and our caseworker was being creative.)

Mostly we were hoping for a good in-home family counsellor to help us sort through issues like birth family contact, past trauma, and the day-to-day parenting stuff like how to get T. to eat something other than a cheeseburger. We've never been parents before, and we want to rock it.

Like many aspects of the foster/adopt process, the wrap-around program sounded good and turned out to be quite awkward. I think the problem is that the wrap-around team had a one-size-fits-all approach. They kind of stormed in, with a "parent advocate" (someone to counsel us); a "behavioral specialist" (someone to counsel T.); a "team lead" (a CSW to head the team), and a therapist. They brought flip charts. They told us they had 30 days to work through various "assessments" and that we'd have to commit to weekly 90-minute meetings and some interim appointments. They started out with a "strengths assessment", asking us all to identify what each of us brings to the family - that part was fun. I thought, hey, this is going to be great! Then they moved on to the "safety plan" - that's when things started to veer off course.

I started to suspect this wasn't going to work out one afternoon about two weeks into it. T. had a root beer and it exploded in the car and got all over his clothes. He totally unraveled - rocking back and forth and moaning "I'm going to lose my mind!" He REALLY cares about having a neat and clean personal appearance, but his reaction was out of all proportion. Our conversation eventually came to the wrap-around appointment we had later that evening. Finally he burst out, "I don't need wrap-around! It's not for ADOPTED kids! It's for kids in GROUP HOMES! I KNOW what wrap around means! It's for PSYCHOS!"

T. is never melodramatic, so this outburst was most unusual. Although his perceptions of wrap-around might not be accurate, they are informed by a brief, terrifying stint he did in a group home before he was placed with us, where he was surrounded with kids with very serious problems with crime, gang involvement, drugs and truancy. He knew that wrap-around was an attempt to stabilize those kids, and he felt deeply insulted and worried that he was being addressed in what he saw as a similar way.

I am all for safety planning. Traumatized kids often have dangerous behaviors and identifiable triggers. And T. DOES have behaviors that concern us - a marijuana habit we've been working on, a tenuous connection to school, and some "friends" who use him. But he's in a good place right now. He's getting good grades. He's abiding by our rules. He's communicating with us openly. We gave him a crystal clear set of rules when he moved in with us, regarding the teen triumvirate of drugs, violence and sex, and he has done an astonishing job of working with us to make smart decisions for himself. The safety plan involved meeting with the whole team (three professionals, plus the family) to fill out a form where we were to fill in the blank for categories like "dangerous behaviors" "triggers" and "resources - ticking off whether we'd call the police, the fire department, or the social worker in response to whatever dangerous behaviors we came up with. It made T. feel like everyone thought he might hold a knife to our throats.

When we tried to guide the process in a way we knew would secure his buy-in, the team lead implied that we were naive and that they knew of "certain information" in his case file from his adoption worker that "raised red flags for them." They wouldn't be explicit about that information unless we agreed to come into their office with T. to meet with a "supervisor". I hate this sort of innuendo and veiled threat. We are hand-in-glove with his adoption worker, and there is nothing in that file that we don't know, and very little that we didn't unearth ourselves. None of us felt like they could hear what we were saying.

We cut it short. Our caseworker completely backed us up. In the end, it came down to a simple realization: we are his parents. We still share guardianship with the county until our adoption finalizes, but that hardly matters in the day to day. We feed him. We counsel him. We sit with him when he needs to talk. We take him to visit his birth family. We tolerate his annoying attitude during holidays when he feels confused about his relationship with us versus his birth relatives. We know his friends, and whenever possible, their parents. We talk him down when he's upset, and we laugh with him when he's being hilarious. We play tickle games, we snuggle on the sofa, we wash his clothes, and we call his teachers to check up on his progress. He calls us his "fam bam" and his "peoples". Nobody is going to come in my house and tell me they know more about what he's up to and what he needs than I do - especially before they take the time to know him.

I expect that other foster/adoptive parents feel some days like they're being second-guessed by social workers, mental health providers, teachers, counsellors, etc. No disrespect to those who labor in the trenches to help abused kids - I am the first to sing the praises of our absolutely amazing DCFS adoption worker. But these kids can come with a small army of well-intentioned "experts". Sometimes I find I want to please them - sometimes (I'm embarrassed to say) I find that secretly I want to impress them. But the only thing I have to do is be a good parent to T.

In the beginning of the placement process, it's complicated - you're getting to know the kid, his history and his needs. But there comes a day when you've made a total commitment to this kid, and you have to insist on your right to do your job as the parent. If someone offers him the wrong kind of "help", or forces him to fit a model that isn't aligned with his behavior, they have to contend with me. Getting between him and adults whose attention isn't benefitting him is part of how I show him what it means to really have a parent.

In the end, we said to him over dinner "We don't feel like the wrap around service is working out and we're ready to call it off. How do you feel?" He rolled his eyes and said, "I could have TOLD you that last week!" And that was that. That evening he was visibly relieved, resting his head on my shoulder while we sat on the sofa and chatted with Tim about music. We were alone, at home, doing regular stuff, and that was just fine.

Adoption Isolation

Sometimes I have the sense that adopting a teenager is so unusual, it makes us a social oddity and a subject of speculation. I had a breakfast meeting this morning, and a client asked the inevitable "do you have kids?". I said yes; he said, how old?; I said 16; he said he was suprised; I said, we just adopted him, and then....well, you know how it goes. The conversation kind of dies while the other person tries to figure out how to make sense of what you just said. Awkward.

Life in a fishbowl makes me acutely aware of what I call adoption isolation: the feeling that you're in uncharted territory and while everyone seems to have an opinion, very few actually have any idea what older child foster-adoption is really about.

We're a biracial family now, and the difference in our physical appearance is probably one factor that gives people pause, but the predominant reaction is to T.'s age and, secondarily, to the fact that ours is an open adoption, meaning we know and spend time with his relatives.

People ask us outright all the time why we would ever want to adopt a teenager. I tell them teenagers still need parents. There are 12,000 kids in long-term foster care in Los Angeles, and 7,000 of them are over the age of 12. Of all the kids adopted out of foster care in LA over a ten-year period, only 3% were T.'s age or older. One in three kids in long-term foster care who "age out" end up homeless. One in five end up in prison within two years of leaving foster care. T. knew all that and he spent two years searching for adoptive parents against the odds, going to adoption fairs and trying his painful best to make a good impression on strangers in the hope they'd rescue him from the odds.

Kids in long-term foster care who can't return to their birth families need parents. Is that really so hard to understand? Even though they aren't "little" anymore, they are still children - they can't work, they don't have the full cognitive capability necessary to make adult decisions, they are vulnerable and malleable. They want, need and deserve protection and guidance. They aren't gross; they aren't damaged beyond repair. They have special needs, and satifsying those needs can be really profound and...fun!

Those who don't balk at the idea of adopting a teenager balk at our choice to be in contact with his birth relatives. I believe in the merits of open adoption, particularly for older kids. It's very difficult - there are enormously complex issues of divided loyalty, unresolved trauma and loss, cultural differences and more. T's birth mom probably hates me, but we talk. We do our best, so he can integrate his past and present. I want the stability we provide him to be a home base from which he can explore his feelings about his birth family and understand where he came from and make sense of his history. But the idea of a family that combines blood and adoptive ties confounds people more than I expected.

Here are a few other juicy questions we commonly field:

Why would you want to adopt a teenager?
Read: Teenagers are gross.

What happened to his family?
Read: There must be a sordid story here and I want to hear it.

What do you call yourselves? Foster parents? Adoptive parents? (This from his school counsellor, prompting me to reply "We call ourselves parents" in my best don't-fuck-with-me tone of voice that made T. laugh with delight.)
Read: You're not his real family.

On some level, I probably like to be different, to make unusual life choices - and I know I have to accept that doing so implies some degree of self-isolation. But if I were advising someone else who wanted to foster/adopt an older kid, I'd tell them to get ready for a lot of intrusive questions and grow a thick skin. And I'd tell them to seek out other adoptive parents of older kids, because some days it feels like there are three other people on the planet who understand that this is just another way to be a family, and that parenting is parenting, no matter where the kid comes from.