I died 1000 times.

Ever stand in the doorway, watching your child sleep peacefully?  You often wonder what they are dreaming, or how safe and sweet they seem.

I have been a mom for seven and 1/2 years.  I started out at 11:00pm with a group of 4 siblings.  They were 8 months, 4, 6, and 8 years.  They came on a frigid night in the deep of winter.  It was a crash course in motherhood with different ages, development, and experiences.  They arrived scared, silent, and starving.  They wore multiple layers of clothing, everything they owned layered underneath their ripped and dirty coats.  The baby, big eyed and silent.  They sat on the couch in their coats, not willing to take them off, devouring bowls of cereal.  The four year old caked in mascara and make-up finally allowed me to bring her a warm wash cloth to wash her face.

My oldest used to open his eyes in the morning, in the years following this night, to caress my cheek when I woke him up for school.

“You’re still here.”  He’d state.  Silent tears leaking from the corner of his eyes.

“Yup.” I would tell him.

He would go on to tell me how I had died in his dream.  Each time more violent and gruesome than the night before.  He would explain in a monotone how our home had been invaded, all the areas our security wasn’t strong enough.  The windows on the ground level made him nervous at bed time.  The curtains upstairs had to be closed at dusk.

At first I was mortified.  I couldn’t get my head around what he had experienced that could breed the level of terror he felt.  At times, meeting his needs for safety were impossible, incredible, and on some level astonishing.

I would find him in his closet, buried in every blanket from our house, under his bed, hidden.  As he grew, his ability to control some of his fear grew, but lead to other behaviors that weren’t safe for him.

I struggled to hold on, to my own sanity, sometimes feeling his fear, anxiety.  I struggled to hold on to the safety of our home, his siblings, and some pieces of “normal” for him.
The more that he shared, information was confirmed, and he really spiraled.

I had to accept some really hard truths.  I loved this little boy with my whole heart.  I wanted to have him healed.  I wanted to give him the experiences that he deserved as a human being.  I wanted him to have peace.

I had to accept that I couldn’t give him healing.  I couldn’t give him peace.  I couldn’t keep him safe.

I was asked if I had prayed, had I really prayed?  I was asked if there wasn’t something more I could do…..I was asked if there was another way.  I was told it was a shame.  I was told it was out of my control.  Finally, he was removed from our home, to a higher level of care.

I was hurt, I was angry, I was ashamed.  I thought God would heal him.  I thought God would provide all the things I needed to give him.   I went through a period of numbness, backing off on my own attachments with my other kids, and my husband.  I became a robot, putting one foot in front of the other.

The one thing they don’t tell you as a foster parent is that they want you to function like a family, but function like a clinician as well.  So you perform all the parenting stuff, but don’t really attach to kids.  Don’t fall in love with them.  No one acknowledged my loss of my son.

There were so many of my beliefs that were challenged.  I believed you worked hard and you could make anything happen.  If you are committed and you put in all your heart, If you prayed, if you believed, if you were creative, if you gave, if you labored, if you hoped, anything could be accomplished.  I was wrong.  I did all of those things to the extreme.  I couldn’t change the situation.  God didn’t change the situation, I begged Him, pled with Him.  I used every service available, I opened my home to every clinician.  We exhausted every resource, in ourselves, in our home, in our community.

The answer was “NO.”  There isn’t always a happy ending.

So after dying in his dreams a thousand times, I wasn’t dead.  His fear had come true all along, I was just gone.

 

 

Back To School…..

So…… I have spent days running around for all the school supplies listed for my kids.  I have a 5 year old boy, he’s headed for kindergarten.  I have an 8 year old girl, she is headed for 3rd grade.  Between the two of them there is a bucket full of supplies.  But the supplies are not really my concern.  I know that they will have every single thing on that list.  The list is so easy in some ways.

It’s the other list I worry about, the unpublished one.  The list of expectations for my kids that I don’t know about, or maybe I have an idea about, but the kids will be blindsided by.  I have intimate knowledge of the list on some levels, because I teach and have been doing so for a long time.  You would think I know the secret.  The truth is I don’t.  I am not being an over anxious helicopter mom.  I worry.

I worry that my son will hug everyone, and not understand that some kids aren’t comfortable with that.  He will take it personally.  He will think that someone doesn’t like him.  He won’t understand that it’s about personal space and boundaries.

I worry that my daughter will hear her teacher say that she is not paying attention, unfocused, or distracted.  I KNOW my daughter will be all those things.  She has ADHD, she does struggle with all of those things.  When she hears them though, she thinks the teacher doesn’t like her, isn’t her friend, or likes the other kids better.

In second grade, her teacher told me she was “unmotivated.”  I still get teary, sad, and Mama Bear angry every time I consider that.  I want to growl and lash out.  There is nothing “unmotivated” about her.  The struggle is capturing her enthusiasm for the task you are presenting to her.  It is possible that the task she is completely engaged in, is inside her head.

There are many unspoken items on the unpublished list:

  1.  Brands of clothing, sneakers and supplies.
  2. Acceptable reactions to other kids.
  3. Participation in athletics, groups, and activities.  Yes as early at Kindergarten.  Even parent’s activities count.
  4. Location of your house, size of it, and your occupation.
  5. How involved you can be in school activities.
  6. What is packed in the lunch bag, or if you are buying lunch.
  7. Keep in Mind that snacking is a serious business, there will be written rules for this.  Don’t mess up, your kids will tell you all about it.
  8. The bus—-what your kids say, do, and who they sit with.

The pressure is excruciating.  This is a really small list with very little embellishment.  I can’t tell you how many awkward situations I have felt or even created unknowingly.

I have found with my daughter that talking to her about everything in a relaxed way is the most enlightening.  Both my kids like to “unload” in three places.  The first place is the car, I can’t believe the things they will tell me when they are riding along back there enjoying the scenery.  The second place is the kitchen, peeling potatoes inspires a conversation for everyone at our house.  The final place, and probably most revealing, is when we are doing our night time ritual, they are tucked and snuggled, and all the days wonderings escape their lips.

I don’t know what they will face on any given day, but I try to give them opportunities to share with me.  I have concerns, I do sometimes channel my own version of “crazy Mom.”  I admit it.  I want my kids to be safe and healthy at school, physically and emotionally.  I don’t care which parts of the unwritten list they get, understand, or miss, as long as they are safe and healthy.

“Unbiological Mom”

Unbiological is not a word.  It’s a prefix attached to biological.  Biological means that there are shared cells when we are talking about parenting.  I don’t share any cells with my kids.  I do share everything else.

I started out as a teacher, and after a very long day, my wise husband thought that we would make fantastic foster parents.  He was standing on the porch when I got home, and said, “What do you think about being a foster parent?”

“Have you lost your mind?” I asked, swiftly rounding the front of my car with three very heavy school bags.

A few days later I found myself in a classroom with other couples learning to be foster parents.  As we learned, we grew as a couple.  We struggled through some concepts and breezed through others.  We learned a lot about each other and explored what we believed.

I struggled with a name for myself to start this blog.  The prefix “un” is negative.  I am not negative, I don’t think I have ever been described as negative.  However, biology is the one characteristic of motherhood I haven’t experienced.  We will explore the reactions of the biological moms to the “un” biological moms in a different post, I promise!

I thought a lot about what I wanted to share, and how I wanted to bring something to those who go about parenting in a different way, and in our case may struggle, feel like you’re the only one going through stuff, and yet find a way.  There is hope in each child who can be hugged, nurtured, loved, and safe.  One of the most profound things I learned through our journey, is that there are so many kids out there who can’t handle a hug, don’t trust nurturing, refuse to believe they are worthy of love, and have never been safe.  Another profound and shocking piece of information is those kids live in our communities.  They are our neighbors.

With the thought that we don’t know who any of them are, at any given time, isn’t it worth it….. to share a smile with the kids who cross your path?  Please, hug your own a little tighter and count the blessings, even after a long day, even if you wait till they are asleep!

 

 

Photo by Andreas Wohlfahrt from Pexels

 

Is That True Mom?

This is the question that can send me running.  It typically follows a piece of information that seems unrelated to anything we were just talking about.

My daughter had just turned 4 when we had a new roof put on our house.  For a week prior to the work, she was a wreck.  She worried constantly about if it was going to rain or storm.  She wanted to know if airplanes would still fly over our house, we are in the flight path of an international airport.  So the night before the work started, as I’m putting her to bed, she asked the question.  I didn’t know what she was referring to so I asked a few more questions.

“Is our roof getting cracked open tomorrow?”

In her concrete thinking, she believed the whole top of our house was coming clean off!

“Is that true, Mama?”

Well that one wasn’t so hard to explain.  Rain wasn’t going to fall on her while she was sleeping and passengers in airplanes would not be able to see our potty.

As she has gotten older, I still hear it.  Often it is an easy explanation, sometimes though, I tell her I need some time to think about what she is asking, or even do a little research.  I try to be honest about what I know and what I don’t.  She expects me to be able to tell her the truth, even when it’s hard.  I want to do that for her.

There are parts of her story that are difficult, hurtful, but I want her to always know that Mom loves her and will give her the truth as much as I am able, and she can understand.  I remind her when the hard questions come that I don’t know everything, I can’t fix everything, somethings I don’t understand either, but I love her and we can get through the tough stuff together.

 

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

 

This is my very first blog.  It is an exciting time with the anticipation of a new journey.  There are so many topics that I plan to address here, including parenting without a biological connection to our kids.  Families come in all shapes and sizes and are growing and changing every day.  I have learned so many things from kids, I find them to be more genuine than adults any day of the week.

Most of the wisdom as a parent, I have gained from my own amazing parents, who were able to make it look like such an easy job.  I have often asked my Mother why and or how she made it look so easy.  She replies with similar responses every time we discuss it.  She wants to know what gave me that idea.

Our kids are a reflection of us, I do often sound like my mother, therefore I know this as my truth.  I do cringe occasionally when I hear some of the things my children say, when they sound exactly like me………

 

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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