Consequences of Faye's Drama

I don't think I was very clear about this, but the person that Faye was planning on moving in with on her 18th birthday was also involved in the drama. This person, Faye learned last night, has decided that allowing Faye to move in is not wise.

I'm glad, for Faye's sake, that she decided this now and not, say, one month after Faye had left care.

Faye of course is fairly devastated -- in that way that kids who have been knocked around by life have of being upset while emotionally closing down and moving on. She said that she wished she could live here, and accepted it when I said that that would not work for us.

She started listing various aunts who might be persuaded to let her live with them, and I suggested that she talk to her social worker about Marsha. Miss E will be moving out in July. Faye seemed to be seriously considering that option. Personally I think it would be perfect. Faye would stay in comprehensive care until she finishes high school.

She really can't stay where she is now. It was intended as a temporary placement. The house is quite full. So much so that many of Faye's possessions are in storage.

Well, we shall see what happens.

What would it take?

I just had a short conversation with Faye.

I ended up asking her what it would take to get more kids to stay in care past their 18th birthdays. What would it take to get her to stay?

"Just let me do whatever I want! Geez, I'm 18. I mean I'm living in your house, but let me do what I want to do. Like Evan does."

Sigh.

Evan does have an enormous amount of freedom. We have given up on assigning him a particular chore. When he is home though we often ask him to do something and he will do it. I tend not to see him, even though it is summer. He gets home late, goes to his room and is on his phone or computer. He then wakes up in time to leave for work at 1:00pm. On his days off he is usually around, likes to spend time chatting with us, and will do whatever chore we ask him to do, although we don't ask him to do much. He picks up after himself, pays his rent, and is polite and considerate.

Sometimes he does go out on dates and we don't ask him for details. Once or twice he has told us that he is going to be gone for the night and I have told him that I appreciate him telling me, that I would probably worry otherwise.

And Faye wants to live just like him.

With a few exceptions of course.

Like she doesn't want to get a job. Her social worker tried to make an appointment with her to help her look for a job and she was outraged. She told her social worker that she was "quite capable of getting a job on her own." She hung up and rolled her eyes. "Did you hear that? Did you hear what she said to me? Help me find a job, like I can't do that. I am capable of finding a job. I can do it. I just don't f**king want to."

She doesn't see how she could possibly find a job. I mean she is only going to live in the place where she is for two months and then she is going to move in with her friend's mom.

I said, "But she isn't licensed. You won't be in comprehensive care. You will have to pay rent."

Faye, "I know."

Me, "So you will have to go to school and work."

Faye, "I know."

I took a deep breath and did not point out her absence of siginificant work history.

But she is convinced. Life will be so much better when she has to go to school full-time, pay most of her own expenses, live with someone who has a restaining order out on her boyfriend, and be able to do whatever she wants.

Faye is being "good." She is not arguing with me or my rules. This should be as easy as any other respite. It is just that I find myself listening to her idiotic plans for the future and desperately wanting to slap some sense into her.

The bad boyfriend

I've been keeping to my strict rules about the Faye's boyfriend. He may meet her in the backyard. He may not come inside the house except rarely to use the restroom. No, he may not shower here. No, he may not go with us to the grocery store. Faye may not go hang out with him and his friends.

Faye has been relatively complacent with these rules, knowing that it is the best deal she is going to get and that if she doesn't follow them she will find herself moved to another respite placement.

The backyard is not a bad place. Though it has been getting quite warm even hot, there is a very shady nice place to hang out. They have just enough privacy that they can't be overheard. We can also see them well enough to know that they are still there and still clothed, but there is partial obstruction of view too. I ignore the amount of food that disappears from my kitchen into the back yard.

I don't let him inside for a variety of reasons. I do think that there is a real risk of petty theft, although that might be balanced by him knowing that if anything did disappear we would suspect him. I let him into the back yard so that Faye will not feel the need to lie and sneak off to meet him. I said as much to her social worker while Faye was standing next to me. Not letting him into the house, and sticking to that, is a way of communicating to Faye my attitude regarding this young man.

But I also don't let him into the house so that he cannot charm me, which he so easily could. He does not present as a dangerous guy; more like a child lost in the woods. He has a genuinely bad mother. He is on the edge of homelessness as he finds it impossible to live with her and so does everything he can to avoid going home. He considers himself homeless and generally sleeps with different friends. He dropped out of high school, is nineteen years old, and does not have a job.

Faye tells me his mother has given him one month to find a job and an apartment (suggesting that he is still allowed in his mother's house even if he does not want to be there). Faye is worried that one month is not enough time, and besides, how can he get a good job without a high school diploma. (It's really not going to be enough if he continues to spend all the daylight hours in my back yard).

At the beginning of her stay, before he pulled the stunt that put himself and others into danger, Faye was suggesting that I might let him stay for a while.

I understand Faye's savior complex with him. He does seem like the sort of boy who does need some parenting. He needs a safe place to stay while he grows up. He was not a foster child, but maybe he should have been. He could probably stand to be one now. He is in a terrible place: nineteen years old, no high school diploma, no job, no safe home. He has no relatives to move in with, no one who can support him as he makes the transition through adolescence into adulthood.

And so you see the other reason I won't let him into the house. I don't want to let him get closer to me. I don't want to fall for the trap that Faye has fallen into. He is a nice young man, and he does have the ability to move off the path he is heading down, and he probably needs help to do it.

But it is a long-term project and it is not a job I am willing to take on. Though I think it is possible that he can turn his life around if he was given some help, I think it is more likely that he would just accept whatever help he had and just slide more slowly down the path he is on. It is a problem that there is no place for young adults whose lives are so unstable. He needs for there to be something, even if he is not ready for it (which I suspect he is not).

So I feel for him. I see why Faye is attracted to him; why she thinks that she can save him and that he can be a good person.

And so I don't let him into my house.

Faye leaves on Sunday.

I'm not helping

I appreciate the kind words and even suggestions for helping Faye.

I'm staying detached from her though. She is here for a two-week respite. She is turning 18 in August and determined to move out. Those of you who have done foster care for kids that age know that trying to convince one of them to reconsider moving out is like trying to turn back and avalanche. I might try if she was placed with me, but she isn't.


Evan has actually been the one to point out to her the advantages of staying ("free rent, food, everything, why would you walk away from that?") and the difficulty of finishing high school any other way.


Hubby and I were tempted to offer our house as a placement for her senior year. But that was before the bad-boy boyfriend pulled his stunt. It is just as well. Brian has a hard time with people leaving and he does not need for two people to go at the same time. Also, we promised Andrew that he would be the only senior in the house next year "It's not that I want to be the center of attention, Mom. It's just that last year is so stressful and there's only so much we all can take." That would sound like a lame cover for wanting to be the center of attention if it came from just about anyone else, but Andrew is the observer of the household and he is right.

We have stuck to our guns about Bad-Boy having to stay in the backyard and Faye not leaving with him. She has been remarkably accepting. She asked if he could come in and take a shower yesterday and we said no, although I have allowed him supervised visits to the toilet (well, not supervised IN the bathroom). Earlier she asked if they could hang out with his friends. Inside I was laughing hysterically and saying, "Are you INSANE? OF COURSE NOT!" Fortunately I realized that she was almost certainly asking because he asked her to ask and so I said quietly, "Given what happened last week, I don't think that would be appropriate."

And Faye accepts these decisions. She knows it is the best she is likely to get. She is able to see him because I will let him into the back yard. There is every reason to think that when she goes back to her current placement any contact will be close to impossible. That is likely good for her and him. Total separation is too difficult for us to pull off. We live in his neighborhood and it would be too easy for her to sneak out.

Andrew is right; we do need to insist on not-a-senior next time around. Those last six months before emancipation are so difficult.

Andrew will be 18 in October. I cannot imagine him moving out, and neither can he.

I like older teens, but this time around, I think I could deal with starting with a 14-year-old. I want one who is not already counting the months to their 18th birthday.

Old Stories

I keep thinking that maybe I should tell you what is going on with Faye, but I feel like her story is old and tired. To her it is new and fresh. It is real and full of love and pain.

And that is the tragedy of it all. If I were to see this as a movie preview there is no way I would buy a ticket. Even on one dollar night. I would sigh and wonder why anyone would re-tell the story about the bright young woman who thinks that she, and she alone, can see and bring out the good in her man.

It would be boring if it didn't promise to be so tragic.

And then there is the other story, the one about the foster kid who could stay in comprehensive care until 3 months after graduation, even if that meant she was 20 years old, but who instead plans on packing her bags and walking into the world on her 18th birthday. So what if she has one more year of high school? She will finish. She has a plan.

And the adults say, "I know it looks like a good plan, but if anything, anything, goes wrong it will all fall apart."

But the stories are not old and tired to her. They fresh and new and real. Nothing will go wrong, and the man she loves will be everything she knows he can be.

Drama update.

Even though I gave you the abbreviated version I still got the details wrong. The crucial wrongness was that Faye was not present when the scary things were being said by the scary people.

So Faye is being given different versions of what happened and some people in her life, including the boyfriend, are making believing their version a loyalty test.

So I have been doing a lot of listening and hand holding. Boyfriend is not allowed in the house and Faye is not allowed off the property with the boyfriend, so they are meeting in our back yard. Everyone, including the social worker, feels safe with this compromise. It is certainly better than her feeling tempted to lie, sneak off, and end up in a dangerous situation.

Sigh. I would tell you about all the drama of the last 24 hours but it would be inappropriate. Let's just say that at the moment I can't imagine why I'm committed to teenagers.

I think I will foster kittens.

You can keep them in boxes, right?

Faye's Drama

The short version, and the only one I am going to give you is this:

Faye's boyfriend has connections to scary people. Boyfriend got in trouble and along the way angered one of the really scary ones who said to boyfriend, "It would be really sad if Faye were to get hurt or killed" in front of Faye. Boyfriend said nothing, which may have been wise. I'm a big fan of saying nothing when people are acting irrationally. However saying nothing made Faye feel unloved and abandoned, on top of the fear.

I will be talking to the social worker today who will talk to Faye and they will decide if she is safe here, four blocks away from where boyfriend's mother lives. She probably is, but really, this is more drama than I had anticipated with a simple respite. Respite is supposed to be easy.

Yep, it is all about me.

Actually it is all about the safety of the family. I think the threats made against Faye were intended to frighten the boyfriend and not something that are likely to be acted upon. On the other hand, this is as far as I am willing to go. If we start getting scary phone calls or if the boyfriend comes by after he is told not to, we will have to consider moving Faye.

Re-licensing, possibilities, and budget blasters

We had our yearly re-licensing visit. The licensing worker asked us if there was any way the organization could be improved. I pointed out that she was the sixth licensing worker to visit us in seven years, so ... um ... that was a problem.

We had a nice visit. When she asked about what I like about the agency and talking to you all informed that. I told her how much I appreciated that the agency paid for anything the kids really needed, that I knew people who couldn't afford to do foster care because of all the things they had to purchase. When Evan moved in and had no clothes I went out and spent $350 and told them I still would need to buy a coat. They reimbursed me and congratulated me on my frugality. Heck when we first started we needed to build a freaking wall and they paid for the materials. (We got volunteer labor from church and had to pay an electrician).

Anyway, she asked us if we were open for a placement and exactly when. I told her that if there was someone right for our family I did not want for them to not introduce us because Evan was here. Evan would not be disturbed by our meeting someone and he was moving out August 24th. She asked, "but where would he sleep?"

That caught me a bit by surprise. In the past whenever we met someone they were living someplace where they could stay while we were all getting to know each other. It took six weeks with Carl, although that was mostly about us getting licensed. David and Evan we each met at the beginning of the summer and moved in the day after we came back from Maine. They each spent quite a bit of time here prior to our trip (about 21 days each, I think) and were not officially in the program until they officially moved in. So, I tend to assume that we are always at least a month away from someone actually moving in, although I know that is not how the rest of the world works.

She went on to say that there are quite a few kids emancipating from the program right now and so there are a corresponding high number of intakes. If they needed a bed quickly, could we provide one? We said we could, that we could kick Brian out of his bedroom and make him bunk with Andrew, like we were doing for respite. (We explained that typically we pay the kids a nominal rent for their bedrooms).

We would of course rather not have that many kids in the home at one time, but we have been waiting six months for the right youth to come along. I don't want to miss him or her.

"Would you consider a girl?"

Sigh. I know we have been over this ground before. I said that we were committed to all LGBTQ kids. Hubby said, "'L' stands for 'Lesbian'" using just enough of the fake teacher voice to be funny. Anyway, I am trying to not let myself get excited. There may be a chunk of new kids coming in this summer, and maybe one of them will be for us, but maybe not. We will see.

In other news:
Faye is doing well here. Respites are always pleasant of course. She has had a reputation for disappearing a lot, hanging with friends and not coming home. One of her best friends however lives near here and is very happy to hang at our house, so she is mostly home with us.

The puppy went to get groomed at the vet, because they are cheaper than the regular groomer. Of course they noticed that he had retained puppy teeth and said they were having trouble grooming him anyway because he was trying to bite, so they anesthetized him to groom and remove the teeth -- most expensive dog grooming trip ever.

Hubby and Brian both went to the dentist. Hubby needs a crown and Brian has two cavities. Brain also simply must have braces because even though his teeth look perfectly straight, his back teeth are crowded and crooked and this will cause grinding and pain and other horrible things.

Lordy, these critters I live with are expensive.

A blast from the past

Faye called. I don't think I have heard from her for two years. It really must be at least that long; she never met Evan. She was arranging her own respite care; she wants to know if she can stay here from the 11th to the 24th of this month. I told her it was okay with me if it was okay with her FM and social worker.

Last I knew her older sister had got licensed just so they could be together. I saw them together at an event. They looked happy. I was happy for Faye.

When Faye first came here she was angry. She had moved into Mandy's less than a week before and she was not happy about being in respite before she had had a chance to settle. That first weekend she did little more than sulk. But she came back and gradually became one of our favorites. She did well at Mandy's and, like just about all the girls who do well there, got tired of all the drama from the other girls. So she moved to another home and then to her sister's.


And now she has moved again. She turns 18 in August. She seemed to take it for granted that she would be leaving care then. I told her that she did not have to, that the agency will give her full support until she is done with high school. She seemed surprised.

I was just able to talk to her social worker. She hopes the sister will work it out by the end of summer and that Faye will move back. It's her only real hope for staying in care until she graduates.

But, in any case, she will be spending a couple of weeks with us. I am looking forward to seeing her again.

The Respite Kids

The Respite Kids

I never kept a record of the kids who have been here on respite, but I thought I would try to remember as many as I could. This record is mostly for me, but maybe some of you will be interested...

Ann: started as a respite, but was placed with us for a while.

Bella: came with one of the "Christy's" when Carl still lived with us. She fell asleep on the floor and Christy and Carl put make-up on her face. That would not have been such a big deal, except that she was allergic and woke up with quite a rash. We saw her often. She was the one who overheard Ann yelling at Hubby and informed Carl of what was going on the next day at Job Corps. She is now married with a small baby. First visit: summer 2000.

Christy: The name I will give in retrospect to cover 3 to 5 (?) girls who came for just one weekend anywhere from 2001-2005.

Debra: A very responsible young woman who did very well at Mandy’s. She appreciated the structure and lived there for several years. First visit: 2001.

X: A boy who spent one weekend with us and whose brother stole Andrew’s handheld gaming system. (I actually think he was in on the plot and I don’t want to give him a real name.) Only visit: Spring 2005

Miss E – A girl who came for the first time in early 2006. She has come for respite on multiple occasions. I drove her to school during the 06-07 school year. Post on her start here.

Faye: a girl who at first was sullen and pouty who blossomed under Mandy’s care. Her aunt got licensed and Faye lived with her for perhaps two years. She visited here first in 2004 and was back in June 2007 for two weeks. Click the label "Faye" for posts from those two weeks, bad boyfriend and all.

Georgia (previously “N”): a young woman dear to all our hearts. Everyone’s favorite. She surprised everyone by fighting with Mandy and landing herself in detention for a couple of months. Is currently living on her own, working, and hoping to start college. First visit Spring 06. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII

Helene (previously “T”): a girl for whom I did respite while her foster sister had a baby, and then did day care for in the summer of 2006. She was moved to a residential facility and has run away. I, II, III

Irene (previously V): frightened girl of perhaps 13 who came with Miss E the night Georgia hit Mandy. She was moved quickly. I remember thinking that Miss E was not good for her.

Jackie: Young woman who came in October 2006 for a long weekend. Presents as responsible and dependable, but comes with a warning label. She and Evan know each other from the teen shelter. Jackie did really well, stayed with Mandy until her after 18th birthday and is now (May 2007) transitioning into independence. I, II, III (and many more, search or click on Jackie label).

Kellie (previously S): Young woman who stayed for a while in June 2006.

Linda, a young woman who almost stayed with us in Nov 2006 when Mandy took her foster sister Jackie to a family funeral. I had her for an evening and had to take her to a teen shelter because her social worker said my license wasn't good enough. The social worker later apologized and said that I could have taken her.

Maria, a 17-year old who came with very little notice when she got out of detention (November 2006). I, II, III, IV

Nancy, a 16 year old who joined us suddenly after a blow-out with another respite provider.

Olivia & Pam, who came together in May 2007. Olivia is Mandy's neice, Mandy being the woman for whom I most often provide respite. As of January 2008, Mandy is hoping to get legal guardianship of her and her younger sister, Sara.

Quiana and Rhonda, who came together in June of 2007. Rhonda suffered from a severe case of princess syndrome.

Sara, Olivia's younger sister who came with Olivia for the first time for New Year (08). Sara was just eleven, very young for me.