Reflecting on Andrew's posts

I came home from work, on what is now yesterday, quite early and climbed into bed. I think I slept for two hours.

It seemed absolutely necessary at the time, but now it is 1:00am and I am not sleeping. Since I left exhausted I also do not have the materials I need to prepare, so I will just have to cope, I guess.

It was interesting reading Andrew's blog posts. He asked m to read them before he put them up in order to get all the pseudonyms right. (I tried to refrain from proof-reading).

Still, two things struck me in what he wrote. One was that he kept coming back to the point that when a placement isn't going to work it shouldn't be drug out. That at least has been his experience.

He and Evan really did not get along in the beginning. My judgment though was that it was not unlike the ways that siblings sometimes did not get along and they would just have to work it out. Eventually they did. That is not the sort of thing that Andrew is talking about.

What Andrew remembers as the really bad parts of doing care is dealing with kids who really don't want to be here: like Ann the entire time and like the last couple of months of David's time with us. Ann made him miserable. David just pulled away and I made myself miserable trying to hold on to him when he wanted to go. In either case though, tensions in the house were just too high. We were fighting a losing battle. A teenager who has grown up in and out of the system knows that they can't be made to stay in a home. If they want to go, they can go. The only real question is how much hell they will put you through before you will let go.

Frankie we never tried to fight in that way. When he said he wanted to leave so that he could switch schools we said that we would miss him and hoped he could find a way to stay. I tried to make it clear that I wanted him to be with us, and that we were not standing between him and the door, so to speak.

I don't necessarily recommend that others take that approach. I do know that it is what we have had to do in order to make the situation workable for the boys. You can live here even if you break rules, but we are not running a prison.

The second thing that touched me in Andrew's recent posts was his casual comment that we did not yet have too many kids in the family. What he actually said was, "I could potentially see a point where there would be too many kids but that seems a fair ways off."

It made me happy -- Andrew doesn't think we are done, not even close.

Of course he would not be the least bit bothered if we did not get a new kid in the house during this, his senior year. There is a lot going on and a quiet house is a good thing.

Still, he just expects that there will be more kids.

Cool, huh?

Can you tell that I want to want it? I want to get back into that place where I want to bond with another youth.

Keep asking him questions, if you please. He is hoping to "find" his college essay in his writing to you. So please feel free to push a little deeper, get him to dig, really think about it. He won't publish your question if he doesn't want to answer it.