My New Family

It's been a while since I last posted. My family dynamic has changed quite a bit now. All my kids are legally and spiritually mine now. All the adoptions are final, they now all bear my last name. How strange it has been to be severed from the state. For the first time in nine years, I am free to be the parent in every aspect of my children's lives. I get to decide when they get their hair cut! I don't have to clear overnights and camping trips with anybody but my own conscience. The Department of Health and Welfare has always been my co-parent, and now I am suddenly a single parent. How do I feel about this?

My kids don't really know how to act either. The state has always had ultimate say in everything in their lives. They don't know how to feel about having nobody else to go to if they don't like my decisions. Even though they were all very excited to have the permanence of adoption, they are missing that other "parent" in their lives.

It hasn't been an easy seperation for any of us, but it was a needed seperation. Rules in foster care don't always make sense, they are centered more around avoiding lawsuits for the state than around children's needs for healthy well-rounded lives. While this on the one hand is understandable, on the other hand, it's no way to have to grow up. Can you imagine if you had grown up not being allowed to spend the night with your friends, not being able to ride in your friends cars until you were an adult, not even being able to get a driver's license until you turned 18. You couldn't go on overnight school trips, you couldn't go out of state with clubs from school or church, my kids couldn't go to our church's teen shut-ins because it meant being in the church all night with people who weren't licensed by the state to do foster care. What kind of life is this? If you were 16 and had a new boyfriend who wanted to take you to dinner and a movie, your foster parent had to drive you and be there with you. Talk about scaring off the boys! You might as were be in detention!

Now my kids have the freedom of other kids they associate with. "Mom, can I spend the night with Alex?" Do you know how good it feels to say, without hesitation, "Yes" to that request? I never knew the freedom I would feel!

We have a tough life, the disorders have not vanished with our severed tie to the state. In fact, we've had even more problems. Kassidy was abandoned over and over in her short life before she came to me at age 6. In fact, she came to me from a family she'd been with for 2 1/2 years, a family who had promised to be her forever family, a family who had allowed her to use their last name as her own, who had her calling them mom and dad and planning the rest of her life with her. Then one day they decided not to adopt her afterall, and that was that. With no honest explaination, they moved her into my home and said goodbye. By no honest explaination, I mean, they lied to her. They told her that I'd liked her so much when I babysat her that I was going to keep her. So essentially they made her believe that I stole her from them. Wow, talk about a difficult way to start a relationship with someone. She hated me because I kidnapped her. So that's how we started out together. I spent the better part of two years undoing this damage, all the while working on finalizing MY adoption of her. She was so excited that someone was still going to adopt her, but until it happened, she didn't truly believe I would keep my promise to make her a permanent part of my family.

Now the adoption is final, she is my child for all of eternity. How wonderful she felt knowing she would never be abandoned again. Then, about two weeks later, she began to doubt the permanence. She'd been promised a permanent family so many times only to have it yanked away from her, even now she couldn't believe in the concept of permanent. She began to show her distrust in this new dynamic of our relationship in very harmful ways. She started stealing without prejudice, meaning, she steals from everybody everywhere. She's made it impossible for anyone to trust her. We have had to buy padlocks and lock down our kitchen at night so she won't take all our food while the rest of us are sleeping. Her sisters have to have a padlocked trunk to keep their most valuable or dear possessions in so she won't take them. She has to have constant adult supervision at school, church, and day camp to make sure she doesn't either take or destroy other peoples' property. She's trying to prove that this is not a permanent family. She's trying to get me to go back on my word that I will love her forever and always be her mom. And I just keep telling her I'm not going to go anywhere, no matter how much she tries to hurt me.

I mean it too, I'm not going anywhere. I'm exhausted, I'm frazzled, I'm often at my wits end, but I'm still here and have never had a thought of giving up on her. I just sometimes wish I had someone to help hold me up. Someone I could lean on at my most exhausted moments, someone who would cry with me and celebrate my victories with me. Wow, I sound pitiful! Somewhere along the line, even though I have maintained friendships, I have lost the closeness I once had with my friends and I often feel very alone. I love my kids, but I also need companionship that my busy schedule and that of my closest friends doesn't allow. My mother's health has not improved much and she needs to lean on me, she doesn't have the strength to hold me up. I'm no marter, I have no problem accepting help. I just don't know how to ask for it without feeling weak and foolish. I didn't love and adopt my kids so that people would admire me, and I didn't do all this with the intention of putting myself in an impossible situation. In fact, I don't feel like I am in an impossible situation. I love my kids more than I've ever loved anything in my life, and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I also have no desire to get back the so called "support" from the state that we had before finalizing the adoptions. I just desire companionship. I'm freely admit that I don't know how to obtain that. I don't know how to ask people to be part of my life knowing the complications involved in being my friend.

Wow, I sound pathetic. I think, though, this is one of the few times I've written a post that wasn't contrived. I just needed to write, haven't done it in a long time. If there is anyone out there who still reads this blog, this is all I plan to do with it anymore...online journaling. My hands are too riddled with arthritis to write with a pen or pencil anymore. This hurts less.

Quit explaining yourself, Kelly, just write!

Talk to you soon I hope.
Kelly :-)

The Secret Garden

So lately, a new tradition has emerged at the Angel Retreat, and it’s a rather nice one. On Sundays, my daughter, Kneesaa, and her boyfriend and her two little boys have been coming over to help move stuff to storage and pack. We’re trying to sell the house, but we have so much junk, it looks cluttered all the time. It’s been nice having them over once a week, and in the evening, we sit down to a big family dinner.

A few weeks ago, they showed up with a friend. Joe was in foster care too, but he had never lived in my home. I’d actually had his little brother, Rafa, for a very short time during my first summer as a foster parent, but we made a connection that will last a lifetime, and some time during the time I’ve known Rafa, his brother Joe came to be part of our family too. When Kneesaa and Allee were seniors in high school, they double dated with Joe and Rafa for the prom, and they still talk about how much fun they had, today.

So now Kneesaa, Mark (her boyfriend), the two boys, and Joe come over every Sunday. We’re trying to get Cami to join us. She moved back to Boise a few weeks ago, and is doing well, but doesn’t have a car so has to bum rides out to Nampa to see us. We spend a few hours working on the house, and then we sit down to a big dinner and talk and enjoy each other. It’s great, and we’ve all decided we want to continue this even after everything is moved out. I look around my table and see my first wave of kids all grown up, talking about they’re kids, and my heart fills with joy. Intermixed with them are all my young ones who are growing up with this big diverse loving family and you can see how much they are getting out of it. It’s so much like one of those big family dinners you see in movies and I love it!

Last week Joe got to our house before anyone else. The girls had just put in a movie, “The Secret Garden,” a movie they had never watched before. It was funny because they always watch the Olsen Twins, or Barbie, or any other Disney or Pixar movie that has come out in the last ten years. But for whatever reason they picked this one on Sunday, and they really got into it. The house was as quiet as it’s ever been at midday when all the kids are home. Then I looked at Joe, and HE was into it. What a picture. See, Joe comes from a gang family, like third generation gang, and he’s a tough guy. If you saw him on the street and didn’t know him, you might avoid eye contact. He’s not a horrible person, just a product of his environment. He has a big heart, and he loves the kids and the family, and is actually pretty gentle. Anyway, to see this big tough guy surrounded by all these little girls and all watching this movie together…it was awe-inspiring.

By the way, it is a great movie!

Thanks for reading!

Cami

I’ll never forget the first night Cami was with us. Her case manager brought her to the house, and she was bawling. She DID NOT want to live in Nampa! She was angry to be moved to a home so far from her friends, and I found out years later, that when she heard we had a baby in the house she was even more upset. They brought her piles and piles of stuff into our living room, it was late evening, and she looked so vulnerable. I felt an instant connection with her. I went to Wal-Mart to get her some towels of her own and a few other things she would need, and I picked up a card with Piglet on it because she’d mentioned liking pigs. When I got home and gave her the card she cried some more and told me she loved Piglet.
She started school two days later at the high school, and she was scared. In Boise she’d been in Junior High, but our ninth grade is in High School, so this was an even greater change for her. She told me she wasn’t going to bother making any friends because she already had enough friends at her old school and she didn’t need any more. I told her I bet she’d make at least seven friends on her first day. It was funny because she was so determined to be mad and hate living here. She got home from school and very reluctantly told me that she’d made exactly seven friends.
The first few weeks she tried real hard not to like anyone in the house. But one day, she was passing by when I was playing with Will, who was not even a year old yet, and she tickled him. He laughed his oh so irresistible laugh, and it was all over. She melted right before my eyes. From that moment on, they were bonded for life. To this day, if he gets mad at me all he wants to do is call Cami, and Will is one of the first people she asks about when she calls. She would play with him for hours, carry him around like he was hers, blows bubbles with him, bathe him, feed him, dress him, she wouldn’t let the other kids touch him.
She also started to feel a connection with me. You could tell because she sought me out to talk to about everything and nothing. She started calling me “mom” by her second week with me. Her aunt told me she had never called anyone else mom that fast, and there was only one other foster mom she’d used that name for. I was honored. I didn’t really know what I’d done to make her feel that way she did, I treated her like I did all my other kids. She told me, again years later, that I never acted like this was a job, but that all my kids really were my family and that made a difference to her. She’d felt like all her other homes treated foster care like a job.
But we weren’t without problems. She got in trouble at school, skipping classes, and then smoking marijuana. I left for a week one time to go to a foster care conference in Florida and spent most of that week on the phone with the babysitter discussing the trouble Cami and my oldest daughter were getting into constantly while I was gone. She caused a lot of trouble at home, fighting with the other kids, alienating them. She dated boys who were in trouble at school and sometimes even with the law. She lied constantly about where she was going, what she was doing. She tried to manipulate everyone she came in contact with.
But I never let up on her. I gave her consequences for everything she did, and I loved her more and more as the days went by. I’d always let her know how I felt about the things she was doing, and as I seem to do, tell her how things would turn out if she continued certain behaviors. I’m not always right about things, in fact, I often predict wrongly, but somehow, with her, I was able to predict outcomes pretty well. She hated it; telling me that I was always right and she should start listening to me but didn’t want to.
She fought back every time I enforced boundaries and rules with her. She kept increasing her behavior testing my limits. She told me she thought my rules were unfair, and that I should change them. But I never backed down with her, never wanted to give up. I don’t think she knew how to handle that, she was so used to people having her removed from their homes because of her behavior, and I just kept hanging on. One time we got another girl in the house about her age and she had a fit, crying and saying mean things. I couldn’t understand the problem since she’d been so bent on hating it here and not wanting to be part of our family, and when I finally got through her protective shell, she told me she didn’t want this girl to take me away from her. She couldn’t understand how I could share my love with more than one person. She also couldn’t understand how I could keep letting kids into my home and heart after some of the things other kids had said and done to me. She told me if I took this girl in she would know this was only a job to me. I didn’t let her manipulate me. I told what I always told her, this was never a job to me, and I CAN love lots of people at the same time. She said she didn’t believe me. What came in the next months was sort of shocking.
She said she wanted me to adopt her; she wanted to be a permanent part of the family. She’d been with us only about six months. I wanted to say yes, but told her I wanted her to ask me again after she’d been with us for a year. I wanted her to be sure she wanted it before we got into the process. She must have marked her calendar, because at the one-year anniversary of her coming to our home, she asked again.
I was a little surprised; we’d had a lot of ups and downs. She pushed away every time we started getting closer, and I really thought that like others like her who I’d had relationships with, she’d only been saying what she thought I wanted her to say, or was saying things to test me. She’d been moved around so many times, and had only one or two real life-long bonds with people from her past. And I know when she moved out to our home she planned to keep her distance until it was time to move on. Even after living with me for a year, and feeling like we’d made a connection, I felt like she wasn’t being 100% honest about wanting to be adopted, but I wanted it and I let my emotion rule the day.
I started talking to her case manager and her aunt about it. Through a lot of discussion, we started moving forward with the adoption. At first, she was acting very happy about it all. She really started connecting with my extended family, and making herself a permanent fixture in my heart. That summer was trying, though. She got a job and was working as many hours as she could get. I worried a little because I knew in the past, at other homes, she would involve herself in activities outside the home just to be away from the foster family she was living with. Her behavior started escalating again, she started getting colder towards the family.
Then we were only a month or two away from finalizing the adoption. Tragedy struck our home. Will’s mom got custody back. I’d raised him from birth, and Cami had been there for a majority of it. We were both devastated. He was leaving us, and though I knew we’d still see him because of our relationship with his mom, Cami didn’t believe it. She left me the same day he did. She told me she’d never loved me and everything I ever said to her went in one ear and out the other. It was a bad day to say it, because I was grieving a loss too, and couldn’t play this game with her. She told me she wanted to move, and I let her. At that moment, I didn’t have the strength to hold on to her.
I often regret my weakness in that moment. I wish I’d have held on to her until she stopped screaming. But I just couldn’t. And she moved a few days later. She moved to a horrible place where the foster mom truly did think of foster care as a job. Cami became a lone person in a home full of lone people, and I kept telling myself that I didn’t care, she’d pushed too far that time. But I did care, and it hurt for a very long time. Ironically, I had Will back in my home within a month. His mom voluntarily brought him back to me and eventually I adopted him. Cami’s case manager told me that when she went to see Cami, pictures of our family were all over her wall. She was still calling me mom. I missed her, but didn’t want her to hurt me or my other kids anymore.
After four long months of silence between us, we met again. Cami’s counselor, my miracle worker, brought us back together. We met in his office. He’d told me that with all Cami’s problems, her inability to love and be loved by others, he felt that she had finally let someone in, me, and that she did need me. I met with her, and had a list of things I needed to make clear if we were going to have a relationship moving forward. She listened to me, and she agreed with me. Some of the things I had to tell her hurt, but she finally felt a strong enough connection with someone that she was willing to let that someone call a few of the shots in the relationship.
Cami never moved back into my house. But we’ve never missed a single Christmas with each other. Everything has not been jellybeans and roses since, we’ve had plenty of “talks” and we’ve had to listen to each other. But she’s never left me again. She tells me she often hears me talking to her when she’s about to do something she knows I would hate, and sometime it keeps her from doing it.
She’s moved here and there, on her own at 18, with a little help from me and a few others. She’s finding her way, but she still calls me mom. She’s moved out of state, but comes to see us whenever she can, and she calls and texts often. She has since reunited with her birth mother, and said the first thing she told her mother was that she already has a mom, but she was willing to get to know her. I encouraged the reunification so she could never have any regrets.
When she comes home to visit I laugh because I hear her tell my kids to listen to me, I’m always right. I’m just glad I still have her and happy she’s glad to have me!

Another Halloween...

We are going all out this year. In the past, with the teenagers, we always got pretty elaborate. The whole front of our house was decorated and spooky, done mostly by the teens. We carved pumpkins using difficult patterns and making masterpieces. We put together ingenious costumes and drove around the city trick-or-treating. Then, somewhere along the way, we ran out of steam. To be honest, this has never been one of my favorite holidays anyway. I've always found pumpkin carving tedious, and walk around in the cold begging for candy...well....cold. I preferred to stay in and hand the candy out or watch spooky movies. Even as a kid, my costumes were a bit ho-hum, and I spent more time at home with a stack of movies than out walking the neighborhood.

With the teenagers gone and nobody to do the decorating, we really haven't decorated for a few years. Last year, we got paint out and had the kids paint their pumpkins. Whoopee....no wonder they all hate me! But this year something changed. I feel different. I really think I was going through a depression over the loss of my original teens, and still getting over the stress of the later teens, and just wasn't getting into all this at all. But the painted pumpkins, that was almost cruel. They were ugly and boring, and you couldn't see them at night.

This weekend, we celebrated autumn. We went to the pumpkin patch and picked out pumpkins. We made fry bread....it was SO good!!!!! We decorated the front porch, though still not as elaborate as it used to be, but the kids still love it. And we CARVED our pumpkins. They are so cute. We've bought new costumes for everyone, and they are adorable. I have a Spiderman, a Blue Power Ranger, a girl pirate, and blushing bride, a velvet princess, and a Bloody Mary. I, of course, will be Winnie the Pooh, as usual. In 1999 I bought this costume at the Disney Store, and it cost $50. I figured, if I wear it every year for 10 years, then it only cost me $5 a year. I'm almost there. And the kids love it, so it works. Besides, when Annie, Will and Andrew were smaller, I had Tigger and Eeyore costumes for them to wear, and we were awesome looking!!

Anyway, I guess the point is, I'm so proud of myself for getting back into the groove a little bit. I hope I can keep it up, because I had a lot of fun with my family this weekend. I'd like to keep having so much fun with them!! And we have pumpkin seeds to eat now...I LOVE pumpkin seeds!! I hope you all are having fun with this holiday! And just think, in a few days we can start looking forward to my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE holiday, Christmas!!!! (I've only made them listen to Christmas music twice so far this year.)

Thanks for reading!

Jeanne Fowler

I've been away for a while, but I wanted to get back to my blog and tell you about someone I met recently. A few weekends ago we had our annual state foster parent conference, and I was very busy. I had the opportunity to teach two different workshops. The workshops went well, and as always, it's nice to be able to be so involved not only in my work as a foster parent, but also in helping recruit and retain other foster parents.



A few months back, when everything was being organized for the conference, a call went out for suggestions for speakers for the conference. I had to suggest someone. See, a couple of years ago, my daughter, Kneesaa, brought me this book she'd read. It was written by a woman who had grown up in foster care. I read the book, and bawled like a baby. Her story is so hard to imagine to be true, though it is definitely true. Her name is Jeanne Fowler, and her book is Peter's Lullaby. I had been to the website of her organization, Big Family of Michigan, and knew she spoke publicly, so I suggested her for our conference.


Much to my happy surprise, the powers that be decided to follow my suggestion and commission Jeanne to speak at our conference. I got to spend some time with her outside the conference to welcome her to the area. She was so excited that someone west of the Mississippi knew about her story. I was excited to meet her. And I was amazed. She was a happy woman, full of energy and enthusiasm for life. She has a great sense of humor, laughs a lot, and jokes a lot. I have a deep respect for her, and knowing her story, am in awe of her passion for people and life.

I sat through her presentation, during which she went through the same story she wrote about in her book, which I had already read. But I have to say, it was so much more powerful hearing it from the mouth of the person who lived it. We had to go out and buy more Kleenex for the second part of her presentation because we ran out during the first part. Jeanne does a great job of bringing the reality of family/domestic abuse towards children to the minds of people who have a hard time understanding the truth of it.

Her story is graphic and hard to read some times. But it's important, and I believe people need to know what kind of stuff is really happening to kids out there. People need to be aware that there is a need for more people to get involved, to help in whatever way they can. There are kids out there who need your help.


In writing this post, my hope is that more people will purchase and read Jeanne's book, and that more people will consider what they can do for the children of their community. Follow the link I've connected to the name of her book to the site where you can purchase it, and follow the link to her organization to see what kinds of organizations exist to help children. There are more ways to help than doing foster care. Even supporting local foster families, or organizations that work with kids can make a huge difference.


Thanks for reading.