Boomerang

Well, T's back home. Perhaps to be expected. What's more surprising is his giddy glee. I might add another g-word: gratitude. I expected it to wear off after about 24 hours, but it's been a couple weeks already. It's partly relief. His whole experiment living with his brother was a little rough: sleeping on a pull-out sofa bed for months and buying his own food. And partly it's the warm feeling of familiarity: despite the kinship, he doesn't know his brother very well (they didn't grow up together or ever live together), so living with him these past few months required that he build and maintain a new and perhaps sometimes strained relationship. By contrast, at our house, he has undisputed insider status; he knows the rhythms, the in-jokes, the household routine.

But I also think something more profound and unique to kids who've spent time in the foster care system is at play; he's having the experience of leaving and then returning home, finding that home is still here, even when you are living elsewhere. That you can go away and come back. His experience, like that of too many kids in foster care, was that life is a series of leaving various "homes" (16 in his case), never to return; sometimes leaving family members, and being separated from them for years without any control of the situation.  I think he found it disorienting during his time with his brother that we were still connected to him, and that nobody forced OR forbid him to come home. He made a choice, and we let him.

He came home under somewhat amusing circumstances. We had been visiting him on weekends, down where his brother lives, doing regular family things like Sunday dinner and a movie. During these visits, he was alternately sheepish and confused and warm and self-absorbed. Gradually he started to talk about going to community college this winter, and to reflect on the dead-end that lay before him if he stayed on his present path. He seemed to be struggling to figure out what to do next. One day, I said something I often say to him: I asked him to sit up and look me in the eye and ask for what he needed with confidence. We thought he might ask for help in getting enrolled in school, paying tuition, etc. But he squirmed and fidgeted, and then looked at us like a little kid and said sheepishly "I want to come home! I need you guys to help me figure stuff out!" We were so convinced that he planned to continue staking out his independence that we were taken completely aback. We had to step outside for a parent conference, and we spent the first half minute staring at each other blankly. What about the romantic vacation we'd just planned? What about the fact that I have happily been storing all my extra clothes in his closet? How did he manage to surprise us? By the following evening, T was back at home in his own bed, my clothes were out of his closet, and we were negotiating a visit from grandma and grandpa to preserve our romantic vacation.

His substance abuse issues haven't gone away - this isn't a fairytale ending. They are less extreme right now, for sure, for whatever reason. But it is nice to see him in this happy state, and to witness the dramatic burst of maturity he recently underwent. I didn't really know before I was his parent that kids develop that way - not at all, for long periods of time, and then seemingly overnight.

Right now, he's in the car with Tim on his way to the northern part of the state to look at a college option. He left me a note. It says "Since being back home I learned that you have a bad habit of not locking the front door. That is not good. You should start locking it. Sincerely, love T." That is him, in a nutshell, and that is the bossy, loving behavior that means he feels the warmth of belonging. And that makes me feel good.

The Darker Side of Me

I don't like to use "psycho-babble" but I do want to try to capture a thought I've had as we transition to being the parents of an adult. I've long thought that, in the way all of us have a dark side, mine is so-called "co-dependence". I'm very sensitive to other people's suffering, I have a habit of trying to "help", and I get frustrated when the target of my "help" doesn't respond as I hope they will. I put other people's needs first, downplay my own, and allow myself to get overextended until I'm at the point of illness and/or resentment. Not pretty, and not unusual. You probably know the type. I suffer an excess of objectivity in my awareness of my faults. :)

As a foster/adoptive parent, I sometimes worried that my desire to parent in this way could be reduced to a grand act of co-dependence. Perhaps from a certain perspective, it can. But I prefer to think that being T's parent has been the single greatest opportunity in my life to become fully aware of my unappealing tendencies, and my gifts, in equal measure. My natural, totally genuine--and largely unexpected--love for T is a force beyond myself, and helped me overcome some of the limitations in the way that I love.

If you tend to want to "help" and "advise" others, being the parent of a teenager is pretty great. They need a lot of help and advice! Up until I was a parent, my desire to "help" and "advise" generally found unsuitable targets. But I learned with T to ask "would you like my advice?" and "would you like my help?". To my delight, the answer was often yes! But sometimes it was no, and learning to ask and accept the answer was good practice.

I think T and I came together so we could both work at and learn through things unique to us: in his case, he needed to learn attachment, and I was a good choice for him in that way--I'd venture to say that my more dysfunctional personality traits actually helped a bit in terms of attachment, because some of his anti-attachment behaviors are so extreme, being slightly off-balance myself probably caused me to hang in there beyond reason.

I know I needed to learn to give up control, being a classic type A control-freak prone to trying to fix the world, and he has been and continues to be a brilliant lesson to me in that regard. In the abstract, I would have thought that my control-freakiness and my love for him would coincide, causing me to be EXTRA controlling when it came to him. In fact, what I found is that the thing that most trumps my desire for control is parental love. It causes me to be gentle. It causes me to empathize with the struggles he's having, in such a way that I am forced to recognize that they are not "fixable". I am on his side, not my side. It causes me to accept him as he is at his moment, simply for the pleasure of his personality, without asserting an ego-driven need to "improve" him. I truly treasure who he is, regardless of behavior.

My relationship with him is also unusually honest, which is an antidote to the narcissism of co-dependence. I think perhaps this stems from the fairly radical confrontation with truth required for a child of his age to find adoptive parents. There are things we can do, and be, for each other, and things we cannot, and we've spoken about that boundary many times. Both parties went into it with our eyes pretty wide open.

And of course, the irresolute nature of his substance abuse problem means that I've had to accept that things simply are what they are. I cannot change it, I cannot fix it, and I cannot live with it in my house. That probably sounds like a simple realization to some people, but I had resisted reaching it in other relationships in my life, and it took parenting him to bring me to greater clarity.

Perhaps I was unwittingly drawn to parent him because of my darker side, and perhaps he was driven to bond with me because he recognized a co-dependent that he could "hook". But I found the experience of parent/child attachment to be perhaps the one thing I have experienced in life strong enough to force both the clarity to recognize the weakness in that dynamic, and the commitment to try to allow both people to grow toward something freer and more genuinely loving. In the way that all parent/child relationships evolve, ours has evolved toward greater day-to-day distance and, paradoxically, greater recognition. Both counter my darker side, and, I hope, serve his true needs.

Up and Away

We've had some nice visits with T lately. I'm not sure what that means. Maybe it just means we've had some nice visits lately.

None of the problems that led to him living away from home have resolved, and we didn't expect them to. It's just nice to see him. I would characterize his attitude as sheepish, and ours as tender. I love to see him. We have a flow. He's a sweet kid. In a way, by moving away and making a point of not needing us, he needs us more. He's regressed. He's having a rough time now, of his own making, and he knows it. Out of the house, he has to confront that his life is what he and he alone makes it. That's a big idea to absorb, and he doesn't need me to drive the point home. That leaves me free to just show my affection for him. I trust his strength and his right to lead his own life.

He knows I'm a high-strung, demanding maniac, so he knows that my low-key approach really does mean "I love you and I'm going to let you learn in your own way" and "I release you from my control, and I am here as your witness and your friend." As I've often noted, that's a big lesson for any young adult, all the more profound for an abused child who has been marked by an adult's violent misuse of power, as it is for someone struggling with substance abuse who knows that everyone around him wants his behavior to change.

He held out for about four weeks with only an occasional email before he got in touch to say he missed us and wanted to get together. His voice on the phone had a transparent joy that he's always had when he's feeling attached.

When we got together, I think he thought perhaps we'd withhold our attention, rub his nose in his mistakes, or lecture him. When we arrived, he was sheepish and awkward, alternately wondering what to do and gushing with stories about his recent breakup with his girlfriend and all the hurt feelings he had that needed soothing. We saw a movie and took him for a haircut. A couple weeks later he suggested another outing and it was easier this time. We had a picnic in the park and picked up some groceries for him.

For a long time, when he was living at home, I fretted over how and where to set limits. Life with a seriously substance-abusing teen is a rollercoaster, and some days we felt between a rock and a hard place in trying to figure out how to support him without enabling him. I don't worry about that much now. I won't hand him cash, but if I want to buy him dinner, get him some groceries, trim his hair, or just hang out in the park, I will. I strongly believe that if he could change, he would, but like all of us, there are things he can't or won't change. That is his business. I can't make that different. His struggles come from a place of pain and grief and survivalism that I understand, but he also deserves privacy and respect. He is not just a patient, and not just the sum of his traumas. He's a teenager, with faulty judgment and half-formed ideas about the world, and he needs to get out and test-drive his life.

It strikes me that in foster care, every farewell is a trauma - whether it's the original separation from birth family, or the all-too-frequent disruptions in foster placements. He doesn't know how to leave a place without rupturing relationships. When we visit him now, he becomes very childlike, I think because it strikes him like magic. We had a life together, and now we are apart, but the bond is still there, and in some ways, it's stronger. We allow each other to transition. We forgive and accept, even the unacceptable. We give him permission to grow up, and away. That permission is an important part of being a parent to me.

He'll learn in his own way, in his own time, and if by some chance he never progresses beyond the struggles he faces now, he got as far as he could and he is just as deserving of my love. When he was at home, it was hard to express love and set limits at the same time. Now that he's living away from home, in a way, the message is more pure.

Redirect, Deflect, Protect

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

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

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

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

Why Be Happy

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for Yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It Didn't Work"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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