New Year

2012, what a year.

Busy, overflowing, joyful (sometimes), miserable (sometimes), feels like we are moving forward in this crazy, amazing adventure (all the time).

I recently told a friend that as exhausting as this is, as difficult as it is for me on many, many days, when I look back and when I look ahead, I am glad that I am having this experience at this time with Andrew and with Blitzen.  I admit that, occasionally, when I look at the right now, I think ‘wtf, why am I doing this?’  But that feeling quickly passes (usually) and I put a quarter in the swear jar  Blitzen made me because I thought ‘f’.

No matter how difficult this is or where we end up, I am fairly certain that I will be glad that I have done this particular thing in this particular way.

Looking forward to another year of growth (my own, Andrew’s, and Blitzen’s) and love (shared between me, Andrew and Blitzen).

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Anne Frank

The middle school kids at Blitzen’s school performed a play about Anne Frank recently.  Blitzen loves the theater so we took her, thinking that we would need to leave before the end.  We talked a lot about the story before hand, let her know it might get scary or too sad and that it was ok if she wanted to leave. This is the kid that asked me to turn off Happy Feet when the little penguin was shunned by the other penguins and had to listen to music all alone on a pitiful little ice flow floating in the ocean by himself.  But Blitzen was really fascinated by Anne Frank’s story, so she stuck it out through the entire performance and asked lots of questions.

Blitzen continued to be very interested so we got a great book about Anne Frank from the library  this week and it is a current favorite.  Blitzen is rightfully quite outraged by the story, often stopping us during the reading to look closely at the pictures (it is really beautiful illustrated) and to talk about what might be happening in the text and images.

Blitzen has a burning desire to understand things –  she is curious about people, the world around her, how things work, why people behave the way that they do.  Makes parenting Blitzen a joy and a challenge.  So many great questions to answer and sometimes there are not very good answers.

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Self Doubt

Is really a bitch, excuse my language. It infects everything.  It makes you tired, depressed.  It makes you say stupid stuff like, ‘Pull over right now, I can’t tolerate this, I am getting out this second.’ And open the door while the car is still in emotion motion.

I am exhausted by working every day to climb over, break through, run around, dig under Blitzen’s impenetrable wall of anger and pain.

So, I am done. I quit. I am going to live on a desert island with books and margeritas where all the inhabitants have taken a vow of silence.

But not really, because it doesn’t work that way.  If you need me, I’ll be drawing up yet another set of plans to get through the wall.

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Jumping off the walls

Blitzen said to me and Andrew during a recent rather rowdy dinner hour,  “I had a donut and hot chocolate after school.  I ate too much sugar – I am jumping off the walls.”  And indeed she was.

Blitzen is, how shall I say, energetic and lively.  She is a very kinetic kid and needs to be moving all of the time.  Some of her more anxiety driven physicality has toned down a bit over the course of this year but she still needs to expend a tremendous amount energy in order to focus enough to think and function.  A perfect example of this is that Blitzen couldn’t sit during dinner for the first 6 months or so that we knew her.  She would stand for almost the entire meal, eating and using some semblance of table manners but she would be up.  Now, she can sit and converse (as long as we’re talking about mermaids or another topic of interest to her).  She still fidgets and wiggles which is ok by me and frankly, I am used to it - Andrew is a fidgeter too!  But it wasn’t until her self-confessed ‘jumping’ that I really noticed how far she has progressed in this area.

I do think her new school has a lot to do with it.  The children are just not expected to be still and stationary all day.  A lot of planned physicality is included in the curriculum but they also move as a group from class to class, they do not need to sit quietly in their seats for the entire day – they can find the place and position that is comfortable for them.  Standing is ok. Kids can move like kids need to move. And I can really see the positive impact on Blitzen.  She is not using all of her mental energy every day trying to remember to sit in her place and squashing her impulse to wiggle.  She is not bottling up all that energy.  Therefore the liveliness is less likely to leak out all over the place.

Whenever I have one of these ‘ah-ha’ moments, I am reminded of how far we’ve come in what is soon to be a full year.  It is stunning to me what a controlled but not controlling environment can do for children especially those exposed to extreme trauma and chaos.

 

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All light

I’ve been privileged to meet a few people in my lifetime, so far, that put out all light, no darkness. Their aura, their being, their essence is so positive, so loving and embracing, so filled with kindness, humor and forgiveness, that the brightness that is at their core seems to leak out of their pores and shine on everyone around them. I was lucky enough to experience this type of presence over the weekend.  And it renewed me, filled me with energy.  Listening to someone that is truly a leader, not just a person of power but an inspiration to humankind, reminded me that my main job in life right now, maybe forever more, is to help Blitzen to find that light in herself and others.

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Blogging for 13 months

When we started this blog, Andrew and I, I think we mostly wanted to force ourselves to produce a record of what we expected would be an unusual, amazing, heartbreaking, confusing, joyful journey.  And it has been those things.  It has been a little bit of an electronic lifebook of the past year plus, a public journal of our attempt to parent/love/engage/give to a creative, bright, sad, angry little girl.

For me, the blogging has been way more.  It has been something that I have done for myself in a way that I did not anticipate.

I really enjoy writing – who knew?  It is cathartic and liberating and forces me to be mindful and experience this experience now, as it is happening.

It has also built a community of support.  When I feel tired or like I am not a good parent or think to myself, why on earth did I sign up to do this exhausting, maddening job? Somebody always hears me and responds in a way that makes me take a deep breath and reminds me that I can do this.  That I am doing it and I am doing it pretty darn well, actually, so I should let go a little bit and accept and relax.  And often the responder is a total stranger which is oddly validating because, wow, someone that doesn’t even know and love me, is taking time to send me good internet vibes.  How thoughtful, how kind, how helpful it is to hear from you, internet peeps.  And I also feel, as corny as it sounds, that creates an atmosphere of love for Blitzen.  She doesn’t know about it but I do — a kind of shockingly large number of geographically diverse people are rooting for her and interested in her story.

All this to say, thanks for talking me into blogging, Andrew.  It has totally been worth it.

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The panel

Andrew and I were asked to participate in a panel discussion hosted by our agency for folks considering becoming foster parents.  The audience was a group of people that had almost completed their MAPP training and were working toward becoming certified foster parents.  Some will make it, others won’t.

We sat on the panel with a young man who grew up in a care and a woman who is the parent of a child that was briefly in care but now works at our agency as a parent advocate.  These were 2 extremely inspiring people.  They were funny and smart and had taken what seemed to be a whole frickin lifetime of lemons (they were both very young) and made serious lemonade.

And Andrew and I are just, you know, us.  We don’t feel so inspiring most days, we’re just trying to work through this thing.  And that is why the agency asked us to participate, I guess.  Our former MAPP teacher thought that we would be perfect because even though we have only been foster parents for a short time, we’ve actually had a considerable number of experiences – good and not so good – that represent the roller coaster that foster parenting can be.

We are fortunate enough to now be sharing our lives with a vibrant, creative, bright and beautiful child.  She is also a child that has experienced significant trauma and she is really, really pissed off at the world.  She has every right to be but it is not always easy living in the vortex of someone else’s anger.  And I hope that we were able to communicate that to the group.  That and the fact, whatever your worst fear is about being a foster parent, it will probably happen and you will face it (hopefully with grace and humility and look toward learning something new about yourself) and then you will move on.  And you will, most likely, still be a foster parent.

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Why Do We Do It? (One of Fosterhood’s answers)

You remember Fosterhood, our favorite fostering blog.

People ask her why she fosters, and doesn’t she get attached to the child?

“Yes.  You’re supposed to.  I think that’s why they’re looking for human beings to foster and not robots”.

The real question they’re asking though is “Isn’t it so incredibly painful when the children are reunited with their parents that you want to go walk out in front of a bus?” and I get the question, I really do, but not so much.  Because doing nothing makes me feel like walking out in front of a bus.  Maybe it was all of those damn Sally Struthers commercials growing-up.

Doing something is actually pretty fun most of the time.  Like lying awake typing this post because starting at 3:02am that 22 month-old in my bedroom started singing a disturbing mashup of “Baa-Baa Black Sheep” and “Poker Face”.   And she’s on like the 29th verse already and for all I know she thinks there are 43 more.

I can’t imagine feeling any more alive and happy.

 

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Why Do We Do It? (One of Andrew’s non-answers)

So why do we do it?
What good is it?
Does it teach you anything?
Like determination? Invention? Improvisation? Foresight? Hindsight? Love? Art? Music? Religion?
– Terry and Renny Russell, On the Loose

Judging by the reactions we get when we mention our impending FosterWee, it’s surprising for white urban professionals to choose fostering over brewing up their own children.

Human motivation is a complicated thing.  Carrie gave her first non-answer to the “Why?” question here.  I suspect this blog will document our stumbling non-answers to that question, the sum of which will be our answer.  Can’t wait to read it.

There are lots of reasons that fostering might work for us:

1) Carrie and I are witty, charming and have mad skills with children.
2) We have very few other responsibilities in our lives right now. We have no ailing parents, we’re not on the verge of any crucial medical breakthroughs. We don’t even have any pets.
3) We have time and money.  (For years, Carrie’s answer to when would we have children was, “Maybe when we’re sick of having time and money.”  We haven’t gotten sick of it yet, but…)
4)  We really like the young neices, nephews and friends’ children in our lives.
5)  We’re goofily idealistic, in the face of all evidence
6)  We like adventures.  We’re happy to hop on a bus in China and see where it takes us.
7)  We like working on projects together.  From planning our wedding to weeding our community garden.
9)  We’re willing to get messy and be engaged in our community.
8)  We have a hard-core, bad-ass, ready-for-anything community of friends and family around us.  Carrie and I lived together for seven years before we got married.  When we did get married, we had a team in place — friends to officiate the ceremony, play the music, cook the food, make Carrie’s dress.  Today, we have a village — folks who will cook for the wee, folks who will babysit folks who will create art with Blitzen, folks who will read to him, folks who will play sports with her.  Surrounding an NYC child with the role models we’re surrounded by can’t be anything but a good thing.

Peter Singer might suggest that given all this, we have an ethical obligation to help take care of a kid and family in our community.  I’m not sure I buy that.  The ethics of race, privilege and power around foster care and child welfare are murky.  More than that, we all have to find our own ways of unleashing our talents on this unsuspecting world.

What I really think is that being a foster parent with my partner Carrie and our far-flung-friends will be rewarding and fun.  I think I’ll learn a lot about myself and the world around me.  I think I’ll fall asleep every night tired and satisfied.

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