Moving On

Then There Were Two...No, Make that Three Again

It started to seem that we had a revolving door. Kilee left, and here was Carly. Carly was only 12, so kind of a pre-teen. But, she was trouble. She had the body of a 17 year old girl, and not the maturity to handle it. I couldn't let her hang out anywhere without some kind of parental supervision. I suddenly felt like a jailer instead of a parent. And Carly had an attitude to go along with her body! I found myself wondering how I'd gotten to this point. A year before I was getting my first child, a baby, and the experience was wonderful. Here I was going into my second year as a foster parent, and I had no babies, or even young children. I had three teenage girls, all with their own niche in the teenage world of woes bundled up with a life time of problems from being abused and neglected.

I didn't feel prepared for this. Social workers kept telling me they loved what we were doing with the girls, our home was like magic. But I felt I was missing something. My parenting skills didn't get to grow up with anyone. I went from babyhood to teenagerville in the blink of an eye. But at the same time that I felt unprepared, I was also having fun. Each of the girls caused me their own special brand of trouble, but we mostly had a happy life. I'm not like most foster parents who have already raised children of their own so have a base of skills to draw from. I was a first time parent, so I was drawing on personal experience as a former teenager to parent these teens.

In our house, we don't make the kids do endless chores, it's simple: keep your room clean, strip your bed on Mondays, put your laundry in the laundry room on Tuesdays, help clean the kitchen after dinner, and we all have one room in the house to clean on Saturdays. We also don't want kids having too much time to dwell alone in a room by themselves, so they can't hole up in their rooms until after 7:00 pm every day. We like to play games, Phase 10, Aggravation, Hearts, Sequence...these are our favorites. The girls enjoyed learning the games, and became quite good at them. We spent a lot of time with these three teens at the kitchen table playing games. I also love movies, so we took the girls to a lot of movies. In foster care, kids can't get a driver's license, ride in cars with driver's under 18, or have too much unsupervised activity. We tried to make up for this by taking them to festivals, movies, malls, whatever we could find so they weren't cooped up in the house all the time.

Maybe it was good that I was a first-time parent in some ways. I didn't really feel old enough to be the parent of teens, so I may have identified with them a little more than someone older with more parenting experience. I don't know. Whatever it was, it was working. And for that reason, I kept getting calls to take more teens. And for a very long time, that was what I loved, and what I thought I wanted. So much so that it led to my first two adoptions.

Getting back to Carly...she, Kneesaa, and Stacie got along fine, until one night when all three girls were in trouble. They'd taken advantage of our trust, and got in pretty big trouble. It was the first time Kneesaa and Stacie had been in trouble in the six months they'd been with us. They weren't happy, but took their consequences with a grain of salt, and went to their room. Carly, on the other hand, had only been with us a little over a month, and was still settling in. She let her temper flair up, and puffed up her chest and took a threatening stance in front of Granny. Strangely enough, this act led to a wonderful realization.

When Kneesaa and Stacie saw Carly threaten Granny, they came out of their room. Stacie actually got between Carly and Granny. "This is our home, and you will not hurt my Granny." It was the first time either of the girls had verbalized their emotions about our home. It was almost as if the seriousness of what had happened that night melted away in the glow of joy at hearing Stacie defend our home. It was amazing in a way that is so hard to explain. Carly backed down and went to bed. We didn't have anymore trouble with her from then until she left about 2 months later.

Tune in again to read tales about the adventures from the Angel Retreat.

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