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!