Abandonment and Attachment

I wonder sometimes how many people read the blog and form opinions about young gay men based upon what I tell you abut my boys.

I hope almost no one.

I know other young gay men from work, through PFLAG, and as friends of my boys. They vary a lot. They range in all sorts of ways, including how stable their relationships are.

I've noticed something about them: they are remarkably like straight kids. The more they suffered abandonment or rejection, the more difficult it is for them to believe that they are lovable and to form emotionally healthy and stable relationships. All of my boys suffered abandonment. Two suffered physical abuse. David had the worst of it.

He was abandoned repeatedly, by a mother for whom I have great sympathy, but who was not equipped to take care of herself. She eventually abandoned him to the foster care system. David was experienced abandonment again and again. I even found myself in the role of yet another person who disappointed him.

The pattern he has had (so far) in his relationships with gay men has everything to do with his history, and nothing, I believe, to do with his being gay. Had he been straight it would have played out in a different way, but he would have been no more capable of forming honest, trusting connections.

Inside, David is just beginning to be more than the four-year-old boy who must always search the horizon for the next person who will take care of him. It is in the last year that he has begun to start to take care of himself. I am beginning to hope for him that he will eventually develop good relationships. It will take time.

Rejection by one's parents, whether it happens when you are four or after you come out at 24, hurts. That kind of hurt can make you feel unlovable. It can get in the way of your believing that anyone else can love you. It isn't that something that anyone can simply shrug off.

Went to visit David

David wanted to borrow my cutting tools and folding table so that he could do some sewing at his apartment. Brian and I drove down to bring him the things.

He is still sharing an apartment with the same young woman, whom I suppose I should make up a name for at some point. Previously they were subletting from someone, now they have a lease and are looking for someone to sublease from them.

I found myself thinking that I am so glad he has such a good woman in his life.

I've deleted my explanation of that a couple of times. Let's just say that he doesn't know very many straight men, and his relationship with other gay men always end with accusations. For a long time his living arrangements were tied to his confusing and volatile romantic relationships with other gay men. It was not good.

Now however he is rooming with a very nice straight girl. There is no confusion about the nature of the friendship or their responsibilities towards each other. Together they can afford the rent on a very reasonable apartment. So I'm happy for them. I'm glad that David has found such a good roommate.

In case you are wondering, I have not heard from Evan since he left the other day. I'm curious about what will happen next, but I know I could go two weeks without hearing from him and then get a phone call saying he was on his way over. Who knows.

Panel curtains are easy, right?

David came over yesterday and will be here for dinner. Evan is coming over at 1:00.

I woke up with stomach cramps and decided to stay home while everyone else went to the coolest, happiest service of the year. The guys out there may want to skip to the next paragraph. I stopped having menstrual cramps after giving birth. I thought it was one of the up-sides. I've begun to get them again every now and then, and it turns out that is all that I have today. I just didn't recognize it!

Anyway, David wanted me to help him make curtains for his bedroom window in his new apartment and a duvet cover. I told him that things take longer than one expects, but that we could try.

"Well, I have sheets for the duvet cover, so that will be easy. And I just want to make panel curtains. That's easy too, right?"

"Yeah. Come over early on Saturday and we will work."

So he showed up yesterday. He iron one flat sheet and then opened the other package to discover that it was a fitted sheet. So I drove him to the store so he could exchange it, except they were out of stock.

So we came back to work on the simple, no-trouble-at-all panel curtains.

He has two different fabrics. He wants a black stripe on the top and the bottom.

"Okay. That will mean doing double seams so that you don't have loose threads on the back of your curtain."

"Is that hard?"

"No, it will just take some time, but you just want to put a simple casing on the top?"

"Yeah. I just want to make it easy."

"Okay."

"Except that I don't want for it to get all crinkled on the top."

"Okay. We can make it only as wide as the window, and then it will lay flat."

"I don't want it to be flat in the middle. I just don't want it to be wrinkly on the top."

"Honey, the curtain will either have fullness in it or it won't."

"Can't we make them like your curtains in the dining room?"

"Tab curtains?"

"Yes. I like how those hang."

Jeeze Louise. Simple panel curtains my a$$. Next he tells me that he wants to put the tabs on the back, but he doesn't want them to hang funny; he knows we have to put just the right amount of looseness in them and he wants me to tell him how thick a curtain rod is! I point out that rods come in different widths. We need to know how big HIS is. We spent a couple of hours trying to put tabs on the back, and then he agreed to regular tabs.

We spent all day on them. I mean that. I went to bed at 11:00pm and he was still sewing. He did a good job though. I sat and worked on sudoku puzzles and gave him instructions. He has done every bit of the cutting and sewing, and the curtains look pretty good. Today he just as to sew around the outside.

It was nice though to have a project to do with him, and I am looking forward to Evan coming home this afternoon.

It is lovely to see them growing up and managing so well.

Why we don't believe...

Another post resurrected from the saved, but not published list (First draft: 8/16/06):

Rossecorp comments on the last post (NB: this is a post from August 2006) that she and other social workers have the experience of trying to tell prospective adoptive parents about the behaviors of children and yet they do not believe.

Failure to believe or even remember things we don't want to know is actually a fairly common human experience. Studies have shown this over and over again with patients in medical facilities. Take a conversation that David had with his orthodontist.

David,"How long will I have to wear the braces?"

Ortho, "Two years."

David, "Is there any chance that I could get them off earlier?"

Ortho, "It could happen, but it is rare, and your teeth are really crooked. I think it will take two years."

David, "But it is possible that they could come off a few months earlier?"

Ortho, "It's possible."

David, "Like maybe 18 months?"

Ortho, "That would be highly unlikely. Like I said, it will probably take two years."

David, "but they could come off earlier?"

Ortho,sighing, "Yes, it is possible."

Later David told people that he had been told that his braces were coming off in 18 months, 20 tops.

Patients who get bad news from doctors and are interviewed later DON'T REMEMBER.

People who are signed up for randomized clinical trials can explain what that means, tell you what a placebo is, and then will express shock at the very idea that, given their condition, they would be given a placebo. That would be wrong. They are sick and they got into this trial so that the could get the new drug.

We want to explain this away. It is the uneducated who do this, right? Wrong. In the studies, EVERYone does it.

And prospective foster parents are just as bad. We come up with explanations for why a child has behaved the way they tell us they have. Their previous house has been stressful. The last foster parents did not know how to do this; they just were not a good match for this kid. Or we just don't hear.

It's a shame, really, because these are children's lives we are messing around with. We do it in total innocence. Everyone is doing the best they can with limited resources: both time and money. Social workers need to find this kid a place to sleep. I am very fortunate in that I work in a foster care program that does matching. Most foster care programs are not about finding the very best home. Foster homes are where kids wait until the right home is found.

More social workers would probably do a better job if there were more options. You have a sexual active (hetero) teenage girl who bullies younger children and steals from other girls. Um...let's see...can we find a house with no younger children, no teenage girls, and no one that the girl is likely to have sex with? Well, only if there is someone out there with no other kids in the home.
******

2/1/07
That is as far as I got in August. It seemed to me then that more needed to be said and I did not know how to say it. Now I am not sure what else there is say. There is a great need for homes. Social workers are torn between needing to find a bed for a child to sleep in and the need to be honest with parents. Parents, like all people, have a hard time believing what they are told.

And it is tragic, because these are kids' lives we're dealing with.

Sigh...

I spent the morning fiddling with the blog and being available in case anyone wanted to bake cookies.

Around 2:00 Andrew showed up. We made golden bars (little more than brown sugar and butter), and pecan puffs. I mostly fetched and cleaned up and he did most of the actual mixing and such. We stopped for dinner thinking that we might do ginger bread people when we finished, but decided we were done. If Brian or David really want to do ginger bread people or, G-d help me, sugar cookies, we still can.

He even let me play carols all afternoon. I hate them in the stores, but find them necessary if I am baking Christmas cookies.

Hubby and Brian left around 1:00 to spend the afternoon in hell shopping in The City. They are picking David up when he gets off work in the furthest reaches of that hell the mall at 7:00pm.

And I heard from Evan. The meal he cooked for everyone went fine and...

There are five children ages 5,8,11,13,17.... So the kids love me....they tend to hit and pull and abuse me...but they like that i can take it haha...we went hiking and all the boys wanted me to go their way....stay way up front and keep up with them. Had a really great time. Then on the way back the 8 yr old decided he no longer could walk and would I carry him....carry him...about a mile back to where the mini bus. Which I did...haha all the way back, he weighed about 30lbs an it wasnt such a bad thing...just him..plus me...back up a hill was quite the work out. Merry chrismas! an ill be sending photos soon again....wooo

So right now I am sitting alone in the quiet living room. Andrew has gone down to his room. Hubby will be home in a while with two of my other kids. All the presents are wrapped. And I have nothing I need to do.

Life is good.

What if he goes and never comes back?

The respite girls come and go. Even those (except Ann of course) that I have got close to I do not have trouble letting go of.

Miss E will leave and never look back. If I see her again it will be entirely by accident. My place in her life, as in the lives of all the respite girls, is comparable, at most, to that of a teacher they liked or was helpful to them. They will be happy to run into me and they just might make an attempt to say hello, but not likely. I feel completely at peace with that. That is all I ever intended to be to them.

Carl and David don't have family, or don't have family they are connected to. Even if I don't hear from them for months I do not worry about it. They will call eventually. Even if it turns out that Carl no longer lives where he was living, I know he will call.

Evan is unique for me (even from Ann). I invested my heart with Evan, like and unlike the ways I did with Carl and David. And Evan has Family; the kind of Family you spell with a capital F. They are not his birth family; they are his family.

I am thrilled, I really, really am that he has them. I think it is wonderful that he and his mom are tentatively reaching out and connecting. I am so very thankful that I work for an agency that has the money and good sense to offer to buy him a plane ticket so that he can re-connect to brothers he has not seen in years. I want to hug each and every one of his half sister's family who don't care if he is no longer even related to them by marriage. When he leaves it will be his grandmother, his ex-step-father's mother, who will store his boxes and, when he comes home from Scotland, it will be to her house he will go to stay while he figures out his next step.

They are wonderful people and it is wonderful that Evan has them.

But it means he doesn't need me.

But what if he leaves and never comes back? What if he doesn't stay in touch?

I want to say, "Don't be silly. Of course he will." But that is not true. There is no "of course." As he moves on will I become just the foster mother who took care of him for a little more than a year? That woman who used to yell at him for not doing the dishes who had the boys he never really got along with?

What if he never comes back?

Entering into TheirSpace

David has told me that he wants me to get a MySp*ce account for a while. He wants me to see the photos he puts there. He thinks it would be a good way for me to stay in touch.

While he was here yesterday I let him set me up. I maxed up all the privacy settings, lied about my age and where I live (they have some places to choose that are clearly NOT where anyone lives).

Then David showed me Evan's site, just for fun of course.

I did mention it to Evan. I am not interested in invading his privacy. On one hand his site is available to anyone with an account, but I know he would rather I was not there. He's really disturbed by my ability to see it. There are things he really doesn't want me to see. He said that he was going to change his privacy settings so I could not get in. I did not tell him that I know he won't because he wants other people to find him. He said he could find my account. I told him that he couldn't. "I'll just search for women your age who live around here." "I lied." "You didn't! You wouldn't. You never lie."

I'm thinking he looked for me and could not find me because today he asked me to promise that I would not go to it. I told him that if I promised I would be even more tempted to look, but he shouldn't worry. "Really, Evan. I'm in a TMI* situation with you already."

His eyes got wide, "What does that mean? NO...Don't tell me. Gawd I don't want to know. Don't tell me!"

I didn't tell him.

But I'm still laughing about it.

________
*Too Much Information

David

Having David home is always so powerfully bitter-sweet.

I want to tell ask him to move back in. I want to tell him that he can come home and finish high school and then get into some kind of job training. He can live here while he does all that.

I want to help him live the life I want him to live.

But the life I want for him is not the life he has chosen.

Thanksgiving update

David called. He's on his way over. He says he will play cards with me. He is the only one who will. I'm fairly ruthless and David is the only person who can beat me half the time.

Evan plans on getting back at least in time for pie.

So we are six.

It is good to have my boys here. I'm thankful.

Now to get out the card stuff and prepare to take on my most worthy opponent.

Maybe I will even change out of my pajamas.

Thanksgiving thoughts

It looks like a quiet Thanksgiving for us.

I invited David, but he did not call last night, so he probably has other plans. That is okay.

Carl of course is in another state.

Evan is spending most of the day with teenage sister and the extended family on her side.

The usual adult "strays" who have had a standing invitation here also have plans elsewhere (which is good and healthy). One is coming tomorrow to eat left-overs with us.

So it looks like it will be just the four of us. Last year I think there were ten. It is okay, we have been tired, or I have been, and a day spent quietly will be good. Today we will just eat and relax and eat some more. Today I will not pull a child aside and say, "Hey -- you know you can feel whatever you feel, right? For a lot of people Thanksgiving brings up bad memories. If you feel sad, that's okay."

Thanksgiving has never been so traumatic for Evan as for many of the kids in care. He spent most of them at grandma's, as he will today.

Our meal shows the influence of doing care. There are all the things that we normally do, plus whatever the current kid finds essential. This year Evan has made us stuffing just like his grandma does it (extra wet and gooey) and a banana cream pie no one will eat but him. When David was here I believe we had to have some chocolate pudding pie dessert. Carl introduced the kids to crescent rolls from the refrigerator section of the grocery store, and they insist upon those now. Carl also always wanted that nasty green bean casserole (my apologies if you are a fan), but that did not stick.

Hubby took Andrew and Brian out for errands and a fast food dinner last night (Evan was at work and I got three hours alone in the house -- Woo Hoo!). He asked them about doing care and if they wanted a break. He reports that they are ready and willing -- as long as the next kid is closer to Brian's age than Andrew's. Andrew wants to be older than the next kid and Brian wants someone who won't leave soon.

Guess we will be looking for a fourteen-year-old.

When I think about the next kid I always find myself remembering that that kid already exists. He (or even she) is somewhere right now -- an unstable birth home, a foster home which will not be permanent, the youth shelter -- somewhere. I do not let the thought make me crazy, but like Margaret, this morning I am also thinking about the empty chair and (in my case) the teenager who will sit in it.

So today I will also say a prayer for all the kids who are not yet in their permanent homes, and I will be thankful for the empty chairs waiting for them.

Evan and bonds with the boys

**This is a "rescued post." Something I wrote and for reasons I no longer remember did not publish. Composed 11/20/06. Published 5/6/07**

I've recently been updating on the private blog. Partly because I have been tired and snarky, and partly because there is something going on with my RSS feed, or Blogline's ability to read it. It is also happening with Granny's blog and a few others, so I am not worrying about it. I am waiting for the good mages in the Internet to defeat the gremlins who live there too and make everything better again. (My understanding of the 'net is much more sophisticated that Miss E's.)

Today Gawdessness said, "Turtle Girl and Spring are closer, there has been a break through, they are sisters because they know and feel it. I see it happening with the brothers too. Slowly sometimes, but steadily. "

It made me sad and jealous.

That happened with Carl. It really happened. No matter how bad things might have got, Andrew and Brian knew that Carl was their brother and things would be good again.

It happened to a lesser degree with David. Though David has a difficult time forming meaningful bonds, Andrew and Brian feel they forged one with him.

Evan though came in on different rules. He was going to be a cousin. He wasn't going to live here very long (one school year). We weren't going to expect him to be a part of the family in the same way. He and Andrew did not get along at all for months. Evan's rehab did a lot for their relationship. Andrew is not close to him, but they now get along fine

Evan and Brian though never did form a bond. Evan has said from the beginning that Brian reminds him of himself at that age, which makes it difficult for him. And recently all the tensions have been hightened.

It will be better soon.

Permanency Crisis

Evan didn't seem to have one, well unless telling us he was addicted to codeine was it.

Carl went to a party he wasn't supposed to go to and got drunk.

David, not a licensed driver, borrowed a car.

Our licensing worker told me, after we had been doing care for about half year, that a good number of people who have worked for the state and then come into permanency care don't make it. He said they get used to having kids for about six months. Part of their coping mechanism is just to hold on for that long.

But also they had no idea that the kid was going to get worse, at least for a while.

It may be something special that happens with adoption or permanent foster care. It probably doesn't happen all the time, and maybe it doesn't happen as much when placements are indefinite and no one says to the child "you're staying here."

Think of it like this. You are on the edge of a cliff and someone puts you in a seat attached to a nice thick rope. You have been traveling over small, shallow gullies on similar devices for a while. Now however you are stepping off for a long ride. What do you do? Back away from the cliff and give that rope a couple of good hard tugs. Yank that sucker as hard as you can and see if it breaks.

Of course, if you are going to be doing this for years, you will have to stop every now and then to see if the rope is holding up, if you are still safe.

It is all perfectly reasonable.

It's just really, really tough if you happen to be the rope.

Dealing with superficial affection

Gawdessness in her post this morning, The Dark Bits Around the Edges of Things, wrote about many things, but included there is a passage about dealing with a child who is able to turn off affection. David was, no, is, like that. Reading Gawdessness' post has made me think about it living with that reality.

I want to be clear, Gawdessness's post made me think about all this, but this is about me and my relationship with David.

I don't know about you, but some of the smallest things can upset me the most. Andrew responded poorly to his immunizations. His two months shots made him cranky. I gave him ibuprofen in advance of his four months shots. Even so, his little leg got hot and swollen. He was miserable. I think I held him and rocked him for almost 24 hours straight. As long as I did not move him suddenly, or touch his leg, that was all he wanted. I can still call up that body-memory of him on my shoulder, accepting comfort.

Even then I knew that though I was full of concern for him and I wanted his pain to be over, I also found caring for him deeply satisfying. He was hurting. I comforted. He was comforted. I was satisfied. It is not everything there is to life, but it is part of it. We give our love and, when it is received, we feel good.

That memory is in contrast to the times when holding him did not help. He cried. I picked him up. He arched and pulled away and screamed more. And though he was mostly an easy baby and I was mostly a good mom, at that moment I would have a terrible thought. Something like, "Well, if you don't want me then I don't want you either." Or worse. For a moment, I wanted to reject my baby.

It is so primal, that need to love and have our love received.

Andrew and Brian have been raised in loving homes and they have both rejected my love and comfort on more than one occasion. It is a difficult experience, but it is one moment in parenting. It passes, and we move on. Thank God it passes.

Except when you are raising children who have been traumatizes it does not always pass. RAD kids work hard to be rejected. They push every button they can find. When they were small they were hurt horribly by the people who were supposed to love them. For them, love is equated with pain.

But kids like David are different. My theory is that they were not so much physically abused as rejected. Their abuse came in the form of abandonment.

They were on the opposite end of that loving/rejecting experience. They, like all humans, offer love and affection. But what if, when they were small, that affection was regularly rejected? What if they had that horrible moment of rejection? What if it happened a lot? What if they lived there? When I am rejected I have a foundation that allows me to keep my footing and still feel good about myself. They did not have that. So they responded in a very different way.

I have never been sure what goes on in David. It is possible that the affection he seems to have for me is genuine, but that he can turn it off in an instant. Or maybe there is no real affection. Maybe he just uses people and has no real feelings for any of them. He offers me the behaviors he needs to in order to get what he wants from me.

For a long while it was important for me to figure it out. I wanted to know if he really loved me.

But I have changed my mind about that. If I were talking about a friend or a lover I would need to know. If there is an adult in my life pretending affection in order to get what he wanted from me, then I would want to know because I would not want to be his friend or lover anymore. I need those relationships to be mutual. I would not want to fall for the act. If I did, I would think I was being duped.

But I am David's parent.

And I love him.

Unconditionally.

I love him even if he doesn't love me back. I love him even if he is using me. I love him even if he is trying to manipulate me. Maybe when he hugs me it is part of a performance for him, but when I hug him back it is real. And I am not being duped because I know what is going on, or at least what might be going on, and I am choosing to love him anyway.

Now before anyone out there thinks I am fantastic, please know that that is a decision, a commitment, I make over and over. I don't always feel it. I feel all sorts of things. Sometimes I feel that he is a manipulative little brat whom I just don't want to deal with. I also don't always or even usually do what he wants me to.

But I decide that I am committed to him -- or perhaps I remember it. I remind myself that loving him means loving him unconditionally.

It would be more difficult though if he were a seven-year-old girl who had been socialized to offer charming smiles and hugs. I don't know how I would handle that. Which is why I don't have any advice for Gawdessness -- just solidarity, sister.

I do have one thought though. Loving unconditionally does not mean giving affection on their conditions. If we are going to teach them what genuine love is, then we need to behave in genuine ways. If we don't feel like cuddling, then we don't cuddle. Oh of course there are plenty of times when as parents we don't feel like hugging our kids, but they need comfort and so we put aside all our exhaustion and hug them anyway. But that doesn't mean that we hug them when they are being manipulative little brats whom we would rather not deal with at the moment.

Even if we do still love them.

Responding to comment.

On the previous post, Magaret said,

How hard it must be to say yes to something when you're not comfortable
with it. I know he feels like an adult, but he is only 19. If my decisions as a
19 year old guided my life now, I'd be a complete mess. But I see that you're
weighing smaller decisions against the larger good. In the long run, that will
benefit him more.

I guess I was not quite clear. I don't have a problem with him spending the night (somewhere else) with his boy/friends. It is a pretty normal thing for him to do, actually. The problem is more that I am tempted to think from a place of anxiety -- that Evan's behavior is not just normal 19-year-old stuff but rather a replay of what I went through with David.

If I don't think carefully, I will act from that anxiety and say things that I don't mean.

And I don't have that luxury. Saying things that I don't mean can have consequences they would never have if Evan were a birth kid.

Of course sometimes I have allowed kids to do something not because I thought it was right but because I did not think it was worth the fight (choosing battles and all that). In this particular case I'm fine with it.

But thanks Margaret for your support!

Young Adults

I've been trying to remember what it was like in those last few month before going to college, or the summer I spent at home after my freshman year.

Evan spent both Friday night and last night out with his new boyfriend. This one he is willing to tell me about (rather more than I need to know) and promises he will introduce to us. He however is not allowed to have the boyfriend spend the night here, boyfriend works until 10:00pm, and they are out all night. Yesterday he told us they were going to sleep at a friend's house and everyone was going on a hike today. We said okay.

There is a part of me that is jumping to worrying that it is going to be like it was with David in the end. David stopped coming home. He sometimes had permission to be gone, but sometimes not. He manufactured situations in which he was unable to get home. David always tells the truth, but for him telling someone that he did not need a ride home (in fact refusing a ride home) and then telling us he could not get home because his friend was not going to take him, and he knew that for sure because he had already talked to him about it, counted as telling the truth.

David was turning 18 and had three semesters left of high school. He did not want to stay, and yet could not bring himself to telling us that he wanted to leave. In the end we made the decision to move him out, but I am still convinced that is the way David wanted it to be. He wanted, even needed, to be the innocent one. He wanted to be able tell his friends that they had to take him in because his mean foster parents would not let him stay. David's disappearances were intended to upset me.

Evan however is not doing that, and I keep reminding myself that it is not the same thing. Evan wants to stay here until he can move into the dorms. If he were told that he could not he would feel terrified and betrayed. If we have rules he does not like (we do), he will argue (check) and try to manipulate what we have said (check) so as to get to do what he wants, but he will not push it like David did. He will stop shy of any behavior that will get him moved out

What Evan is doing is something very different. Evan is growing up. Evan is separating himself from us so that he can leave in January. He is getting used to the idea, convincing himself that he does not need us so much. He feels, like all young people his age, that he is entitled to the privleges of being an adult without being burdened by any of the responsibilities. He has this three month stretch in which he does not have either high school or college. Sure, he needs to work and save money, but it is the last time in his life in which he can have fun and not worry about paying bills.

There are a couple of ways this can go. I can try to make him follow the same rules I would have for a fifteen-year-old. If he were a birth kid and I did that we would fight and make up and fight again. I would complain about the way he behaved and I might complain to my friends and those who had had children the same age would smile and nod and tell me that that was the way it was for them too. I might, in anger, threaten to kick him out. I might tell him that if didn't want to be part of the family he could just move out now. But we both would know that I would not mean it and it would blow over and we would make up and start the cycle over.

But that is not an option for us. I can not say those things, or make those complaints without them being taken seriously. Since he is a foster kid, there are a team of professionals who are dedicated to solving the problem and who are quite comfortable with the idea that he should follow the same rules. They would tell him that if he wants to make his own rules and be an adult then he should be living on his own. If he wants to be comprehensive care and part of a family, then he must act like part of a family.

At least that's what I think they would say, and I what I know they would say if they thought I wanted them to.

What will happen, what is happening, is that Evan will keep pushing the envelop and we will keep pulling him back in. We will give him more freedom than we expected and less than he thinks he deserves. We will quarrel, but both of us will realize that we do not have the freedom to loose our tempers and say things we do not mean.

In a birth family it is safe to for the kid to say, "Well, maybe I will just move out!" or the parent to yell, "If you don't like it here, then why don't you just find your own place!" It is not safe here though. If either of us say something like that, the other think we really meant it. If social workers are called they may really think we meant it. The story will end in a different way than either of us intended.

So we must both be more careful.

I try not to let my decisions be determined by my power or my fear of abusing my power. I am trying to do this right.

I am trying to remember what it is like to be nineteen, nearly done with high school, and three months away from college -- even while I discover what it was like to be my mother during those months.

Different perspectives on foster care and Christmas

FosterAbba has a couple of recent posts about being a Jewish foster parent while caring for non-Jewish children. Recently she has been talking about Christmas.

I think she and FosterEema are handling the religious/cultural issues well, and thinking about her posts had let me to some musing of my own:

Our agency has a "clear and flexible" policy about the requirement that foster parents support the child in his or her own cultural identity and practices while at the same time being true to their own beliefs. The religious groups break into: Roman Catholic, Protestant, LDS, with a few Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. (My liberal protestant congregation does not have vacation bible school. We do have "Peace Camp" which we do in cooperation with the Synagogue, Mosque and a few other progressive protestant congregations.)

Our agency, as you may know, gives more support for dealing with day by day needs of kids than most other agencies do. If they have a child whose religious practices are important to them, they will try to match them with a family with similar beliefs. If they can't do that, they will try to identify and recruit a family who can become the child's "aunt and uncle" and could have the child visit them on the various holidays.

What makes Christmas hard for so many of us, is that most people in America do not practice it as a religious holiday (although it is). The things most children would miss would not have anything to do with the religious celebrations; Christmas trees, presents, and special cookies are not religious. Which of course does not mean that they should be allowed in a Jewish home. For many children, Christmas is not part of their religion, but it is part of their culture.

But I am losing track of what I wanted to say.

I think that FosterAbba may be more have over-estimated the trauma of not celebrating Christmas for most foster kids. It is a mistake to imagine that the kids have come from lives in which Christmas was idyllic. Last year, was it around Easter?, Claudia had a post asking if the holidays really are the hardest, or do they just seem to be the most difficult because our expectations are so high?

I am inclined to think that they are objectively more difficult than most days.

Christmas for most of these kids was not an idyllic stretch of time in which Santa brought them their hearts' desire and Mom baked up a storm of cookies. It wasn't even something that could have appeared in Dickens or even Little House On the Prairie. It was not a we're poor but happy; we have no presents but lots of love.

For some of the kids, it was a time when tensions in the house peaked: when promises and hearts were broken. Christmas is an emotionally charged time, filled with memories.

We celebrate Christmas in a big way in my house. We always go to Christmas Eve services. My mother has sent me so much homemade Christmas stuff that my house, like hers, looks like a Christmas shop has exploded. There is huge, beautiful cross-stitch picture of Santa, an even huger and somewhat tacky quilt hanging with Frosty the Snow Man on another wall. I have a creche from The Congo in which African shepherds stand over the family. There are cloth read and green napkins, kitchen towels, and hand knit stockings with our names on them. They all go up even if not everyone is here: Hubby, Yondalla, Andrew, Brian, Carl, David, and Evan. The entire house is full of that stuff. (Any year now my mother is sure to send me a Santa toilet seat cover.) We do bake cookies. When the kids were younger the boys made gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. The rest of the year I show no evidence of any Betty Crocker or Ladies Home Journal influence, but December rolls around and I go crazy.

And what is the reaction of the kids? Are they thrilled that they get all the trappings? Partly.

But they also have to deal with the bad memories. They look at all my trashy Christmas stuff and feel angry that their parents never did any of this. They have always known that Santa is a lie. If they ever thought he was real they also thought he was a jerk. Why else would he bring such much more to rich kids than poor kids? They try to enjoy they day, if only because they like me and I clearly want them to enjoy it. But they are also relieved that it is over.

So would it be tragic for a non-Jewish child to be placed in a home in which the parents said, "There will be absolutely no Christmas in this house. This house will not be full of reminders of what you did not have and what you did suffer every year. We will have another, simpler celebration though. It is not an emotionally frenzied one. It is quiet. It is not a riot of color and noise and does not come with a lot of annoying, repetitive tacky music. It comes with a few simple decorations and candles. It is a celebration of victory over oppression. It is a celebration of freedom and of peace."

In my mind the reaction of most of the foster children is not, "Oh, how can you deprive me of Christmas?" but rather a sigh of relief. "Oh cool. I was afraid they were going to send me over to Yondalla again this year. You know that woman's insane, right?"

Parenting the Parentified Teen

You know, maybe that should be the name of my blog. Certainly it could be the name of half the posts.

All three of my foster boys have spent a signficant portion of their lives with neglectful mothers and no real fathers. Not one of them were physically abused by their mothers. Even in the worst case, their mothers did not even insult them. Only David's mother had trouble providing housing and food. David and Evan's mothers both tended to bring abusive men into their children's lives. But all three were clearly cherished their newborns. At least when my boys were their babies, they were clean and sober. Whatever has happened afterwards, the baby in them knows what it means to be safe.

In other words, they do not have attachment disorders.

So that makes the job possible (for me). It does not make it easy. There is no internal panic alarm that sounds when they feel themselves beginning to trust me, but they have learned as children and adolescents not to trust adults. They may like me fine. They may come to love me. They may feel safe here.

I however am not the boss of them. Not only do they not respond well to orders, they wish to supervise me, monitor me.

Evan monitors me more closely than my mother ever did. What am I doing on the computer? Why did I put on makeup today? Where am I going? What mood am I in? Why am I sad? What am I going to do next? He wants/needs to know where everyone is at all times.

On the other hand if I ask him what he is doing on his computer his answer is, "Why do you want to know?" as he looks at me with suspicion. He has chosen not to socialize with friends because he does not want to tell me anything about his friends and he does not want to lie to me. (There is another whole post about Evan's out-of-whack sense of right and wrong.)

Now I am fairly good at dealing with this. I am confident in my own authority. I usually resist the temptation to get into power struggles.

The other evening I told Evan that I needed for him to go help Andrew clean up the kitchen. "Why doesn't Brian have to help?"

It is an annoying question. Just a little thing, but annoying. Having my fairness called into question every time I ask him to do something; being asked to justify every request for his participation (espcially since we stopped asking him to do very much at all once he got a job outside the house) is frustrating. Evan would like to see the chart indicating what I have asked everyone else to do. He would like to be the judge of whether it is fair.

I have resonded to the question in different ways. The most effective response is, "Because Brian has and will be asked to do something else." I tried to take it head on the other night, "Evan, don't worry about what everyone else does. Just do what you need to do."

He defended himself. He claimed that he "had every right" to inquire into what I asked the other kids to do. I asserted that he did not, or at least I had the right not to respond. I was the parent and he needed to trust that I was making decisions fairly. The look on his face said it all. Clearly I was going insane. He dropped it. Well, he made some under the breath comment about the likelihood that I would be fair and went to do what he had been asked to do. Typical teenager stuff.

I get it. I really do. The treatment that Evan has received as a child has been past unfair. He has promised himself that he will not put up with that again. He will protect himself. He is in charge of himself and will do what he has to do to ensure that he is treated fairly. He does not trust.

Now I can handle this at home. I get it, and I work around it.

It is really getting in his away at work though.

He has, as you know, been having trouble with his current supervisor. He assures us that he understand that when you are at work you need to do what your supervisors tells you. You just do. That's the job. And he can do it too...he has no problem with that. None. It is just that THIS supervisor is impossible to work with. She is on a power-trip, and he won't let himself be bullied!

The other day he was pulled of the bagging line by the store supervisor because there were more baggers than needed (so much for him being indispensible). The store supervisor asked him to clean the restrooms. He immediately asked, "Why doesn't so-and-so have to do it?" The supervisor at work is not a trained foster parent dedicated to avoid power struggles so as to maintian a relationship and attempt to parent a parentified teen. I don't know exactly what he said, but Evan clearly thought it was evidence that this guy is also on a power-trip.

He did the horrible, degrading bathroom cleaning, which clearly he was asked to do as punishment. It is obvious, isn't it, that his supervisor complained about him and turned the store supervisor against him? That was bad enough, but then this guy asked him to pick up and carry this big thing. Evan responded, "Pick it up? Shouldn't I get the dolly to move it? It's dirty." The man looked at him "funny" and said he was a big strong guy and a little dirt wouldn't hurt him. Just pick it up and move it! Well, Evan did, but he came home pissed. When asked he said that no the object was not too heavy for him. When I pointed out that he did not look dirty he said that he brushed it all off.

He understands that you have to do what your supervisor tells you to do and he would never challenge their authority, but this guy is some kind of nazi. He could see it in his eyes. The manager was just asking him to do things to see how he would respond. He was testing him, trying to push him around.

I told Hubby that I thought he was probably right. I would not be surprised at all if the store manager was wondering if Evan as as insubordinate as the supervisor said. He may very well have decided to test and see if Evan was really that bad.

Now he knows.

Worrying about emancipation

I have been trying to write about emacipation and foster care, but the topic is just too blasted big. There are huge issues. The foster care system was designed to take care of children on an emergency basis. It was supposed to be a place for kids to stay until they could go back home or get adopted.

No one thought that children were going to grow up in care. They still are not supposed to. As we realize the problems that kids who age out of care have, we try to find solutions. We try to figure out how to get them out. Get them adopted. Find members of their birth families who will take them. Get them out of care.

I have no judgment on that solution. I just work with the kids for whom it is not going to happen. I work in one of the few systems that specifically takes kids for whom adoption and reunification are no longer being considered. These kids are going to move from foster care to independence.

It breaks my heart sometimes. I look around. I read. I know that most young people in America do not become independent until their twenties. People who go straight off to college usually get some financial support from their parents. They have a place to go to during the holidays, or when they get sick. Even if their parents are not paying for their tuition, they are probably still covering their medical expenses.

Kids who don't go to college do not typically move out right away. They stay at home for a few years. They get jobs if they can. Some contribute to the family budget in one way or another. Few can afford to support themselves. I see multi-generational working-class families all around me.

But that is birth families. Nationally the situation for foster kids aging out is pretty sad, although it is a problem that it is recognized. There is a lot to be said about the different approaches that are being taken, but today I just want to talk about the system that I am in and how I am feeling about it right now.

The agency for which I work takes kids for whom adoption and unification are no longer being considered. They give support and training to foster parents designed to promote permanent relationships. Those who read my blog know that they are paying a counselor (privately) to see both me and Evan. The case workers have lighter loads. They give us 12 nights a year of respite. They match kids and families as well as they can, and then they support that relationship.

They have a limit to the number of kids they can have in comprehensive care at one time. It is not just a matter of the number of families who are working in the system; it is also that they do not have unlimited resources.

They have a pretty good transitional services plan. It works really well for some kids. They are ready to offer them money for school or training. They will continue to pay for some medical treatment, help them to apply to whatever public assistance they might need, and have some money for some things like work clothes and bus passes. Of course the youth need be the sort of kid who is willing to get a job and work with a social worker. They have to do what feels to them like submitting themselves for constant evaluation (what are your goals? have you met them?). The youth do not understand that every single requirement exists because there is clear evidence that they help youth to become independent. All they see (okay...I am talking about the kids I have known well, especially Carl and David) are nosey social workers making them jump through hoops.

So they have this really great program for permanent placement foster care and a pretty good program for supporting kids as they move into adulthood. The social workers are committed to helping the kids move along the path.

So, in Evan's case, this his plan. He will work at his new job at the grocery store 30-40 hours a week and save money. He will take two night classes through the alternative high school in early fall and then be finished. He will apply to a computer program in a technical college that is associated with the state university in The City. Because it is associated with the university, he will be able to live in the dorms and eat in the cafeteria. He will move in January. The agency will help him come up with a budget, apply for aide, and probably pay for about 1/3 of his total expenses.

If he gets fed up with dorm life and wants to come home for a weekend, we will fetch him. If he wants to spend Spring Break here, he can. If he needs a place to stay for a few weeks between living in the dorms and living wherever else he is going to live he can come here. But I won't be keeping his room available for him.

When he went to rehab I promised that I would keep his room for him. I did let some respite kids stay there, but there was no chance at all that I would take another kid and give his room away. It was his room.

When he moves out though, it won't be his room any more. The agency will ask me to meet a new kid and I will say yes. The new kid will move in and the room will be no longer be Evan's. If Evan wants to come for a visit he will sleep on the futon in the rec room, like David and Carl do when they come to visit.

That does not happen to birth kids. When they move out for the first time their parents do not immediately get calls from people asking them if someone else can have the empty bedroom. There is space in the house for them still. Eventually their parents may turn their rooms into a sewing room or den, but typically for a few years it is still there. It is still their room.

I could do that for Evan. All it would take is telling the agency "no more kids." All it would take is telling them that the next time a queer kid is being harassed by their foster siblings or abused by their foster parents, that kid will just have to find somewhere else to go.

But because the agency is supporting Evan, that is not supposed to be a problem. He should only need to visit here. He should only need emotional support from me. Sleeping on the futon in the rec room should be enough because he will just be visiting.

That is, as long as he follows the rules.

What if he messes up in any of the oridinary ways that young people mess up? Forget about the addiction for a while, what if he get to the technical program and hates it? What if he gets sick and has to drop out? What if he spends all of his money and cannot meet the budget that he and his worker agreed upon? What if he finishes the program but can't find a job? What if he can't find a job for a long time?

I can help him some, but I won't be prepared to take him back in as a full-time resident. I won't be prepared to let him live here for an indefinite time while he gets his life back together. I will not stop loving him, but I will not have a bedroom, and I know how much strain it puts on this family to have someone staying for more than two weeks in the rec room.

The stakes are high for foster kids, even for kids in fantastic programs like this one. There is a support system that will help them succeed into adult hood, but it is a system that has little room for compromise or stumbling.

And I will be able to help him some, but unlike kids who live with their birth or adoptive families, someone else will come along after him and move into his room.

Because the agency will ask, and I will not say no.

Survival mechanisms

All of the foster kids have had some very basic personality traits which have been distressing to me. They were hard to live with. In just about every case I could see how this trait was a strategy that helped them to survive their childhoods. It was annoying to me and, I thought, destructive to healthy adult relationships, but it made perfect sense that they were they way they were.

Carl lies. He lies about everything, all the time. (Actually since I only have access to reports about his life and not his life itself I can no longer know to what degree what he tells me is true). It makes sense. His mother had emphasema. She could not normally leave the house and she could not help with problems. She wanted to hear that everything was fine, better than fine. School was great. His friends were great. Everything about his life was wonderful and promising and there was nothing that she needed to worry about.

When Carl answered a question he seemed to be tuned into what he thought the person he was talking to wanted to hear more firmly than he was tuned into reality. In other words, where I have to decide not to tell the truth, he had to decide not to say whatever would please the person he was with. The first thing that would come out of his mouth was what he thought you wanted to hear.

David forms very superficial emotional attachments that last only as long as he is getting what he wants (he would say "needs" but he does not recognize any distinction between those two). If one person will not fill his needs, he looks for somone else. The adults in David's life abused and abandoned him. He saved himself and his brothers by finding people who would give them what they needed. Cutting himself off from hurtful people and moving to someone else may have literally saved his life when he was small.

The thing is, neither Carl nor David recognized these traits in themselves. I wanted so much to help them to see these patterns, recognize that while they were survival techniques that were creative and smart and important when they were children, they were not going to serve them well in adulthood. These ways of dealing with the world were preventing them from having fulfilling adult relationships.

I had to accept though that I could not help them to see this. The very best I could do was to give them a picture of a different way of relating to people. They could see in the way Hubby and I treated each other that there was another way. Hopefully it would not be the only alternative picture. Maybe that picture would be a resource. Maybe someday they would want to be different, relate to people differently, and maybe the picture they got from us would help them to do that. Someday.

But something is happening with Evan that has not happened with the other kids. Evan is noticing one of his own childhood adaptive behaviors. He told me that he has been talking with his counselor about it. He asked me what I thought.

We had a wonderful conversation yesterday in the car. I told him the ways in which I thought it was something he needed as a child. He agreed. He wants to rid himself of it, but he is not certain that it can be done. I told him that one of the reasons I was going to see the counselor was to work on some of my childhood survival mechanisms that were not serving me well now. He laughed a little when he told me that he wasn't sure it was better to know about it, since he wasn't sure he could change it.

It was one of those fantastic parenting moments that you cannot allow yourself to hope for. The conversation was the sort of thing it would be so easy to imagine that you would get to have as a foster parent. "Once they trust me, we will be able to talk about their childhood and how it affected them. I will be able to help them, just a little, to over come the pain and heal the hurt. Because of my influence they will be healthier and live happier lives."

I'm not saying that we don't help them heal, but it does not usually feel like it. Mostly it feels trying to convince a tree that has grown twisted in the wind to uncurl and stand straight. Daily life is sometimes good and ordinary and sometimes exhausting and frustrating. If the youth develop any insights into their own pain, their own lives, it happens very slowly. If you look closely you can notice that the child, like the glacier, has moved, but you almost never SEE it moving.

You almost never get to sit on the freeway, stuck in slow moving traffic and listen while a kid says, "I realize I do X in my relationships with people. I don't think I want to keep doing that. Do you think it is possible to change that sort of thing about yourself?"

Best traffic jam ever.

Transition Services in My Area

I don't think this is a state-wide thing. I think it is just the valley.

The permanency program for which I work has provided a couple of staff people who work with all kids who are emancipating from foster care. The kids actually in the program qualify for some pretty impressive job training and educational money. All the kids may qualify for a federally funded rent assistance program. The social workers help them with planning, job hunting, and budget-writing.

They have a small budget of money for state kids (and a somewhat larger budget for their own kids) to buy bicycles, bus passes, appropriate interview clothes, and other particular things that can help them achieve independency.

The traning/education funding is designed to get the kids through whatever post high school educational and job training they want without loans. In fact, taking out a student loan disqualifies you for future funding. They help the kids apply for every scholarship possible; insist that they work between 20 and 30 hours a week; help them write a pretty tight budget; and they pay for the rest. When Carl was in Job Corps they had a Christmas Break for two weeks. We had told Carl that of course he could spend it with us, even though the campus was open (dorms, cafeteria, and recreational areas). His social worker contacted us and said that they had decided that since the campus was open and he COULD stay there, they would only pay room and board money for Dec. 24 through Jan 1. I was not expected anything. That's when I learned that it is typical for them to pay room and board for college kids when they need a place to stay during breaks. The youth can apply for this funding for the first time until they are 24. Once they are in, they can stay until they finish. The local division has, in one case, helped a kid all the way through medical school.

On paper all of this looks great. The problem is that these services require a higher level of maturity than most emancipated foster kids have.

So many of them, David included, leave care when they are 18. T, our recent respite girl, told me that she can hardly wait until she is 18. Then she can move out and have her own place and "finally be happy." Many of the kids who leave haven't finished high school. Even those who do, make bad decisions.

That they do is not at all surprising. They are children with the legal rights of adults.