T Day

A mid-week aside:

Early on, we established "T Day" - which came to be days on which he volunteered at a local hospital. Although he was interested in and agreeable to this after-school activity (because his ambition is to be a nurse), volunteering also felt a little nerdy to him and it often left him tired at the end of his shift. So we invented "T Day": volunteer days became "T Days"--days when his will dictates our other plans, within reason.

He has since stopped volunteering but the "T Day" tradition survives. Now that he's in twice-weekly therapy and grappling with difficult memories, he has decided that therapy is his official after-school activity (fair enough!) and that therapy days are therefore "T Days". (Often, his logic is irrefutable in this way.)

On "T Day", he gets whatever he wants. Thankfully, his desires are modest. He wants a fast-food snack en route to therapy. He wants his choice of dinner. Sometimes he wants to go to a movie later in the evening, though rarely. He wants to be allowed to stay up an extra half hour.

But most of all, he loves to remind us that it's "T Day". It gives him a sense of power. If I disagree with him on "T Day" he'll get in my face and say playfully "What day is today? Did you forget? Is it not T Day?"

He refers to it that way, using the third person. It's hilarious. For example, today, Tim forgot and balked at buying an after-school fast food snack on the way to therapy. I apologized to T for forgetting to fill Tim in. "I got it covered," he texted me back "I know how to work T Day."

Indeed. A friend once commented, "He missed out on a lot of T Days growing up. Probably every day should be T Day!" I don't think we could stomach that, from a nutritional point of view. But I certainly agree - T Day gratifies an unmet need for indulgence. It also takes the edge off the intensity of therapy.

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.

In Tribute to My Friends

My friends rock. Two of them particularly rock.

My Friend #1 is a private investigator who investigates the social history of people on death row. She worked in a foster group home for a couple years right out of college and her parents adopted an older child from foster care.

My Friend #2 is a licensed clinical social worker who supervised a program for homeless teenagers for many years, worked with traumatized kids in Kosovo, and now runs a free medical clinic.

They will both touch many lives in the course of their careers. But this week, I get the benefit of their wisdom. Tim and I are getting four full days off, thanks to them.

This is how it came about: I have a business trip to my hometown this week, and decided to take T with me. I figured I'd put him to work and pay him a bit for his time so I wouldn't have to worry about what he's up to while I'm away (winter school break is interminable this year thanks to LAUSD budget cuts). Of course that also means struggling to keep him occupied while I go about doing my job, being with him 24/7, juggling his needs with those of my coworkers. I booked a hotel suite for us with cable, video games and room service and hoped for the best.

Well, unexpectedly, T. announced that he'd be staying with Friend #1, who lives in the town where we're visiting, instead of with me at the hotel. This news was shocking and delightful, because he does not easily take to strangers nor to spending the night in unfamiliar places. Some months back, we had dinner with Friend #1 and her partner, and I guess he was captivated by her stories about her current case, involving a young man who grew up in a prison camp. I think he was also struck by her low-key compassion and hard-to-impress demeanor. So he decided to make himself her house guest. She loved the suggestion, and immediately got in touch to let him know that he should bring his xbox and come prepared to entertain her new pit bull puppy. His complete confidence and comfort about staying for five nights at her house is really touching to me.

Then my blessed Friend #2, who also lives in the town where we're visiting, offered to have T work at her health clinic for a day or two while he's staying in the vicinity. She knows that he wants to be a nurse, and arranged for him to shadow a male nurse at her clinic as he goes about his day. She isn't bothered at all that just three weeks ago I was ranting and raving to her about my problems keeping him in school, off drugs and out of trouble. Like Friend #1, she's pretty hard to impress and she's seen plenty of complicated teenage boys in her time. She has taken the time to listen to him and recognizes who he is, underneath the misbehavior. Like all kids, he rises to the level of expectation, and he responds to her respect and good humor.

One of the hardest things about becoming T's parent has been the isolation. We moved to Los Angeles just two years before we met him. That's not enough time to form deep friendships in middle age. We do pretty well, and we get home to our friends and families often, but I wish sometimes that we had stronger local bonds. It can be isolating enough raising a traumatized kid, because his intense needs and struggles have a way of drawing all of our time and attention and energy. Living in a town without close friends and family makes things harder and we almost never get even an hour off, much less a day.

So this week, I'm exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to distribute the wonders of T.'s company across the safety net of my two friends. He trusts them and feels he can be close to them because he knows how much they are a part of me, and that makes me feel good. Visiting with them gives him a chance to grow and experiment, and it gives me a chance to relax.

I hope every foster/adoptive parent of a traumatized child out there gets a break like I'm getting this week. Knowing that someone you trust who "gets" your precious, complicated child is going to stand in for you for just a little while is SUCH a huge mental and emotional relief. And for T., finding surrogate parents who are willing to open their homes and lives to him sends a profound message about belonging to a family, growing into an adult, and the value of strong friendships. They are my family, and now they are his as well.

Quoted

Tonight just a quick post to capture a conversation we had tonight. We were out for a late night walk - I pay T. $3 to "train" me by jogging around the neighborhood before bed a few times a week. I get my exercise, and he gets to chatting. Rather like driving in the car, being side by side in the dark, rather than face to face at home frees the tongue.

So tonight, we were talking about why I'd like him to get involved in activities. But I was also trying to explain that this is a goal, not a criticism. So I added something like, "You know, you've accomplished a lot. You found yourself parents and got adopted your freshman year. That's huge. That's bigger than any high school accomplishment I've ever heard of. That's just so impressive."

And that's when he said: "You feel me? You know what the social worker said? Back when I was living at Ms. (former foster mom)'s house? The social worker came and she and Ms. (former foster mom) were sitting in the living room. I said I wanted to be adopted. And they said "Oh, people don't adopt teenagers. People want to adopt LITTLE kids." Man, I just went in my room. That made me feel so bad. Like, I'm gonna be in foster care forever? For my whole life? Like I'm gonna die in foster care. That just makes a kid feel, like, so hopeless."

Yes, exactly.

Fun

There are so many meaningful things to say about being a foster/adoptive parent to a teenager, but its also just really fun:

- I currently have a command of the lyrics to popular songs that defies most members of my demographic.

- It's fun living with someone who still watches cartoons but also knows how to read a subway map and navigate in the car.

- Thanks to T., I can do the dougie and the charlie brown, and I even invented my own dance move, which I call "the scarecrow".

- I love Monday nights when we go to the movies in our matching pajamas that T. bought for us for Christmas.

- I really like shopping with him. He has great taste and his teenage obsession with switching up his style now and then is great fun. Adults should try it more often.

- When he's happy and wants to show it, he tickles my feet, bites my nose, or pulls on my hair. I grew up an eldest and I'm not used to being teased. It makes me feel great.

- I am a total jock, and I finally have a live-in competitor who keeps me striving. So far this year I broke one finger playing football with him and another when we took snowboarding lessons; we also tried surfing, rockclimbing, bowling, hiking and this summer we've planned to try indoor skydiving and waterskiing.

- I know how to play Fight Night, Madden 10 and Wii tennis now.

- Taken with the right amount of humor and distance, the ups and downs of teen social life are like having a soap opera play out right in your own home.

- We always have Doritos and ice cream in the house now.

I think there's a lot written about the difficulties of fostering and adopting teenagers and perhaps not so much about the joys. I'd love to hear from some other parents about what you do for fun.

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.

T. Gets a Life

Wow. A posse (actually there were just three of them) of teens just rolled through. They're on their way to a party down the block at the home of a cute kid I see around the neighborhood. T. finally has local friends! This is a momentous occasion.

He did six months of weekend visits at our house and spent every minute with us. (Because of our age - relatively young to have a teenager - and the fact that we've only lived here two years, we don't know any families with kids his age, so we couldn't offer him social contacts and he didn't seem eager to seek them out.) Then he moved in and it's been four months of slow acclimation since. Occasionally he's gone to hang out at a fast food restaurant with someone from school, but he hasn't really made friends or gone out at night except when we take him to see friends in the suburb where he used to live, an hour from here.

And then tonight, suddenly he walks in here with two baby-faced boys at least one of whom is so clearly adored by his mommy that he loves mommies of all sorts. The boys are all sixteen, but due to his height and slightly world-weary air, T. appears about ten years older than the others. Seeing him with his friends, I was surprised how young they all appear!

I dragged T. in his bedroom and gave him a quick rundown of the rules. No drugs. No drinking. If the party gets loud or crazy or someone starts beefing with someone else, go out a back door and text me and I'll pick you up no questions asked. He rolled his eyes and patted me on the head, but he acknowledged. He also said, "What kind of people do you know? I'm not going to any party that's crazy like that." Yeah he just doesn't know yet, I thought to myself.

The boys were quiet and polite and beelined it for the video games while they were here. They hit the x box, the computer, the refrigerator (consuming nearly a gallon of juice in less than a minute) and had an ogle at T.'s pet lizard before rolling out the door to continue their evening. Before they slipped out, I told T. his curfew is midnight and we'll be there on the corner to pick him up and I asked his friends if I could offer them a ride home too. "My mom is picking me up," his friends chorused in unison. Cute.

I think in some ways, T. held back from socializing until now, because he didn't want to blow it. He's been an avid if covert socializer in previous foster homes and he hasn't always made good choices. He also wanted a lot of time with us - to bond, yes, but also to check things out, see what's out there in the world with us at his beck and call in case he felt overwhelmed and needed to reverse course (he has what I might summarize as PTSD).

I also expected he might delay bringing friends home because we're white, so any friends who come over are gonna know he's not with his bio parents. Over the months, I've broached this subject with him a few times - I've offered to support any story he'd like to tell about our coming together, and offered him the example of the way I explain "chosen family". But he's straightforward by nature and he kind of shrugged me off and told me he'd already explained to his friends that we're white. I've heard him proudly refer to us as his "adoptive parents" in phone conversations, and he's not been shy about introducing us to old friends. I think our whiteness is a little geeky, but T. is also very chuffed that he set out to find adoptive parents and succeeded, so the embarrassment is offset by his pride in being self-determined.

I feel so old! I'm somebody's parent and it's Saturday night and I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs and waiting to pick him up. I'm nervous and of two minds about letting him go, but I know that part of adopting a teenager is accepting that bonding and differentiating all happen simultaneously in one big whirl. Mostly I'm happy to see him happy, to see him in the company of people who like him, experimenting with a reasonable degree of freedom that makes him feel like a "normal" teen.

I Spy Like That

I spy. I'm an unrepentant paranoid password-cracking narc of a parent sometimes. I finally confessed to our adoption worker that I spy on his AOL Instant Messenger, his cell phone text messages, and his MySpace profile. I occasionally peek (okay, dive) into his school backpack, and I am pretty familiar with the nooks and crannies of his bedroom, especially that spot behind the curtain he doesn't think I know about. I once hid inside a Best Buy across from a movie theater for over half an hour to see if he really bought a ticket and went into the theater like he promised. At this point in my career as a spy, I'm very familiar with the phenomenon known as teen "sexting", the teenage social importance of one's AOL "away message", and the symbology in MySpace profile pictures.

When I confessed my compulsion to spy, our adoption caseworker laughed and said, "Of course you spy! That's what smart parents do!"

Spying has kept me a step ahead on a number of serious issues. I found out by spying about the adult half-sibling T. had never met who was offering him pills via text message. I found out that some of his "tough" friends are actually a great support and encourage his best sense of himself. I got a peek, via his MySpace page, inside his agonizing loneliness back when he was in a respite foster care home last year when we first met.

I would encourage any parent of a complicated teenager to spy. The main reason is that adopting an older kid means coming late to a battle that's already raging, and spying can help you catch up to events. Occasionally it also provides you with an awe-inspiring appearance of omniscience. Once in a while when we nip an ill-advised plan in the bud, he looks at us like "Dang! How did they KNOW?!" He has no idea we spy, so he just thinks we can read his mind.

The flip side of that advice is that I tell myself that I must spy with respect. T. is not a habitual liar, and he mostly follows our rules. I spy lightly. I've learned that I don't need to police him - I spy to understand him and to gain some insight so I can be prepared to offer rational guidance or a welcome distraction when he needs it. I've learned not to panic when I unearth important information. Not all weather patterns that gather online materialize in a real-life storm.

I'd say I try to spy with an open-minded desire to see inside the mind and heart of my kid. I try to let my rabid curiosity be tempered by regard for his privacy and let him make certain mistakes within the bounds of safety - not all knowledge requires action. And I try to cross-reference what I learn online with real-life observed behavior lest I be led astray by braggadocio.

When I get something really juicy, unless it's a five-alarm fire (the unknown elder half-sibling headed our way, for example) I try to sit on it for at least a few days. Quite often I just file it under "Good to Know." I also have a fairly fat mental file labeled "Wish I Didn't Know."

To me, spying is a little like knowing your kid's friends. It's getting familiar with how and where they spend their time, and with whom. I look forward to being a retired spy someday, to no longer cross-referencing slang dictionaries to decode text messages. The longer I parent him, the less I feel the need to spy. But for now, it's a useful, often amusing, mostly enlightening habit, and I try to do it gently.

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.

The Truth About Adopting A Teenager

Is it wrong how much I want T. to go back to school? He was placed with us in a "pre-adoptive" placement just over a month ago, and he's been on Christmas break for the last two-and-a-half weeks. We owe DCFS for the brilliant timing and total lack of support around that set of circumstances, but that's a matter for a future blog post.

Mary the Mom, one of my favorite bloggers and most supportive foster/adopt resources, recently told me I make adopting a teenager look easy. I'm philosophical by nature, and I think that inadvertently inclines me toward a reflective wisened tone. But I just want to be clear that I'm not that way at all in real life. I don't want to mislead. This isn't easy.

Yes, adopting an older kid from foster care is incredibly rewarding. It's the most significant thing we've ever done in our lives. It's incredibly profound to intervene in someone's destiny in that way. And I'm sure I'll feel particularly good about it decades from now when I reflect on the meaning of my life. Meanwhile, there are plenty of times when it seems like a terrible idea.

For example: as a result of a severely disrupted childhood and multiple placements, T.'s social skills...well, frankly, they suck. Half his friends are thugs. He constantly tries to buy friendship, unsure that anyone will like him beyond the perks he can provide. He's clingy. He's annoying. And he has no idea how to make constructive plans with peers. My incredibly patient partner Tim, who models unconditional love nearly all the time, referred to T.'s social life as "disgusting" and "repulsive" the other night. I have to say, that was the source of a good hard laugh. Now when we want to run away to Tahiti, we just ask each other "are you disgusted?" and it cracks us up all over again.

Here's more: T. is also rude. I love him, but let's not lie. Once he relaxes (which in our case didn't happen until after about four months of weekend overnight stays in our house) he's utterly rude. Other parents of teenagers that they've raised since birth assure me that all teenagers are obscenely inconsiderate. But he's the only one I've got and, lemme tell ya, living with him is a pain in the butt some days. He blasts his headphones and shrugs when we talk to him. He interrupts important conversations to send scandalous text messages to girls. He refuses to eat most of what we serve and usually gets up and walks away from the table halfway through dinner. Yesterday he gave all the money we gave him for the bus to a homeless man, then called us to come pick him up.

We aren't letting him get away with all this - we usually respond with a calm correction and sometimes a consequence. We're learning that you have to set up the consequences in advance, or you can really find yourself in a pickle. T. is remarkably self-correcting, and even when we think our explanation of expectations have fallen on i-Pod-deafened ears, he often returns and models exactly the behavior we asked for within a day or two. NEVERTHELESS. Having to explain and deliver appropriate consequences and make sure they are implemented is enough to make you want to take a long, long unannounced vacation some days.

We were more or less prepared. I've known a bunch of foster kids over the course of my life, and I've also had quite a few friends who were raised in chaotic circumstances and acquired feral behaviors similar to T's. But that doesn't mean it isn't majorly irksome - after all, alot of the behaviors are expressly intended to be irksome. Maybe all teenagers tend to provoke, but I'd say emotionally distressed teenagers coming out of long term foster care excel far beyond the cultural norm in their total mastery of provocation. They have way more anger to release. They have a compulsive need to try to destroy connections in order to test their strength before they get hurt again. They are hugely confused about loyalties and boundaries and what love really looks like.

So there, I said it. It's working for us - in part, I think, because all along this is the kind of parenting we wanted to do. We didn't want to have babies, we wanted to adopt older kids. We didn't expect immediate gratification- though when we get those unexpected bursts of pure affection from him, it's totally blissful. We waited until we were older - until years of experience at work and at home and with friends and with each other tempered our personalities and taught us that most conflicts eventually blow over. But it's still hard - hard to be patient enough, to be warm enough, to complement as well as criticize, to choose battles wisely and overlook the things that there isn't time to address. I'll try in the future to write more about those parts, because I think it's important for adoptive parents of older kids to be honest about the difficulties so we can be a resource for each other!

A 180 Turns Into A 360

I've been offline lately and here's why:

- T. got into some serious trouble in his foster placement (he's been living in a foster placement and spending weekends with us while our adoptive placement is pending).

- During that time, T took a ride with another kid in his foster mom's car (he wasn't driving, but I'm pretty sure it was his idea). They crashed, left the scene of the accident in a panic, and eventually got picked up by police. (They are 15 years old and their foster mom left them at home alone that day, forbid them to go out, and left the keys on the kitchen table...as he put it "It was wrong, but it was just so tempting!")

-In response, his foster mom called in a 7-day notice, meaning that DCFS has 7 days to get him out of her house. Of course, he had no idea she's given notice, and continued to go about his life until his social worker showed up and told him to pack his things. She drove him to a town 100 miles away, dropped him at a group home and then left us a phone message telling us how to contact him.

- That made us absolutely furious - nobody called us to ask if we would take him before they moved him. And we've been pursuing an adoptive placement since August and we're licensed foster parents. In another post someday, I'll explain the hideous DCFS politics that have caused this situation to drag on and on.

- This whole experience made T. frantic and re-traumatized him - he has PTSD-type symptoms stemming from early mistreatment and abandonment on a rather grand scale. He immediately started running away from the group home, staying out all night and otherwise demonstrating his suffering.

And here's the good news:

1. We all got through it. This weekend, we were back to "normal" - he spent the weekend with us and we had a lot of fun. As he got in our car, he sighed, slumped back in the seat and said, "This feels like a family reunion." Tomorrow we're picking him up for a five-day Thanksgiving holiday.

2. It showed us the strength of T's bond with us. Finding himself in a group home in a strange city and knowing we didn't know where he was, he took matters into his own 15-year old hands. He went to the park, challenged a group of men to a game of dominoes for dollars, won $20, took the money to WalMart and bought himself a cheap text-only cell phone that he now uses to text message us from morning to night. If you don't think that's funny, you probably wouldn't enjoy parenting an older foster kid, but I think it's hilarious and ingenious. He calls and writes to me in the middle of the day, with questions like "I'm thinking of getting a tattoo. What do you think about that?" and "I met a girl at my new school today. I think I've got game! Can I go hang out with her this afternoon?" As I've said before, open invitation to parent, albeit from afar.

3. We experienced a serious moment of doubt in the midst of all this, which I'm pretty sure is an unavoidable component of older child foster adoption. I fully admit that for a period there, we weren't sure we could continue to pursue this adoption - we felt inadequate in the face of his behaviors and totally unsupported by DCFS. I'm not proud that my commitment to him flagged for a moment. But it's done and it taught us that we need to find support wherever we can so we're prepared for the next crisis. Even as I tried to convince myself that it would be okay to admit defeat, it made me feel utterly sick and heartbroken to think about letting him down. We just couldn't do it. It was interesting to realize that even if we thought this was the worst decision we ever made, we wouldn't give up for anything. My mom tells me that's how ALL parents feel sometimes.

4. Because he got in trouble and got moved without notice, he was separated from some dangerous peer influences in his previous placement. He knew he wanted to leave those friends behind, but had he not been yanked out, it would have been hard for him to separate.

5. Our relationship as a couple stayed intact. We stayed friends through all this drama. We weren't always in the same emotional place at the same time but we did a good job of letting each other be honest. We made decisions together quickly when we needed to, and laughed at the situation whenever we could.

Now we're picking him up tomorrow for a 5 day trip to Northern California. He's never been outside of Los Angeles and he's never spent Thanksgiving anywhere other than in a group home. We're trying to keep things low-key because the holidays can be overwhelming under the best of circumstances. Thankfully, he's met some of my family before, so he won't be entirely among strangers -and everyone has been briefed: don't throw your arms around him, don't say "welcome to the family", don't ask him questions about why he's in foster care, and recognize that this is a stressful situation for him. If all else fails, we'll take him out to practice his driving, which never fails to make him feel good. Fingers crossed.