Tag Archives: foster parenting

Soft snow and single parenting

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We are looking at rental properties and Kathy mentioned the possibility of us splitting to find cheaper housing. After having spent the week alone with my three while she and our mom took her boys to Disney, I replied, “we’d have to be right beside each other then.”  Spending a week being a truly single mom – was truly stressful to me.

Single parenting….

It’s stressful when you have a kid in school and have to deal with sudden changes – oh, a 2-hour-delay for freezing rain; no after school programming for a couple days, anything else you want to throw at me?

It’s stressful when viruses are running amuck and you don’t know who and when is going to fall next. Micah had two evenings of low-grade fever, headaches and went to bed early, but I still wasn’t ready to call him sick since I was single parenting (so I just had to keep worrying that he was “getting sick”!).

It’s stressful when there are two grants due on the same day for my crisis nursery work (and I’ve never written grants before). I got 3 hours of sleep Tuesday night and 2 hours of sleep Wednesday night – and as you can imagine, this lack of sleep was not helping my parenting skills.

It’s stressful when you pick up the pen and sign your name that you are prepared to accept the responsibility of adopting another boy. You pick up the pen. You sign. A good stress….but a stress nonetheless.

And it’s stressful to worry about said boy who hasn’t gained weight in over 6 months so you’re just starting him on pediasure (to bulk him up) and spending the week wondering whether the phenomenal amount of blood letting they did last week will reveal any answers. (Update – All negative – he’s currently a perfectly healthy (runny-nosed) teeny, tiny little guy).

I spent the whole week with stress hanging over my shoulders about what I would do (and how life would have to be juggled) if just one piece fell out of my finely balanced tower. And if you’re living in stress and constantly under pressure and not sleeping for the week, the time moves by without much chance to catch up to it.

Soft snow

“Snow softly falling.” pinterest.com

Yet, as I drove to church this morning, I noticed my body soften looking at the beauty of the new snow on the world. I thought about the tranquility of watching snow fall through the yellow glare of a street light (I will often pause and stare for the longest time at this softness). I thought about how I love winter when it lets you slow down. You stay home because you don’t want to be out “in that.” You dream of a huge warm fireplace (next house?). It seems that the world should pause for a moment longer after the rush of the holidays. Yes, we tend to schedule fewer events and the weather tends to cancel schools and meetings and work. And maybe we should all follow nature’s rhythm of taking a break in the winter – resting, hibernating, rejuvenating, preparing….

Maybe I should become a tree.

Here’s to hoping for some earth-stopping blizzards in February!  (just kidding!)

 

 

A Perfectly Good (Adopted) Family

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We added a new boy to the family this week (fortunately, not by the phone call of the foster caseworker to announce the birth of a sibling!).  Stephen was officially adopted by my sister in a small courtroom in downtown Pittsburgh.  He is the fifth child of his biological mother to be adopted out and the judge who followed this case for years was so touched that it was “ending well,” that she came over especially to “proclaim” the adoption.  I am so excited for my sister.

It’s been a long time coming with many heartaches.  When Stephen was about two months old at the first court hearing, the judge said she would have handed him over for adoption right then and there, knowing the birth mom, if the CYF system had asked for it.  Instead, for the past two years, it’s been up and down with numerous, numerous attempts to help the mother “be” a mother….until recently when her “rights were terminated” as a parent….and she fled the state to try to block the “system” from taking her next newborn baby a couple months ago.

So Kathy has gracefully ridden this roller-coaster of hope and heartache, and all the while has loved this little guy every single second (including, even if not actually obvious at the time, when he spills a full gallon of milk splashing across the table and cascading majestically to the floor, upending his cereal bowl on a near-daily basis, and removing his own diapers at some of the most inopportune times!).

And now, it is final.  Stephen has a new name……Karl…with a “K.”  (It’s going to take a while to get that imprinted in my brain.  I’m getting pretty good at it…except when he’s about to pull all the bananas onto the floor, or is pounding on the dining room table with the tines of his fork, or is gleefully flicking the lights on and off in the living room….and I slip into a stern “S-t-e-p-h-e-n!”)  It will probably take even longer for the boys to figure out the name change, as Noah asked today “who’s Karl? Where?”.

It’s been a good time to review “name changes” and adoption with Micah.  He likes to ask what his original name was.  We review that he was born to another woman and came to live here when he was a very tiny baby.  We review that I love him “forever, for always, and no matter what” and I renew that commitment in my head.  We discuss that Seth will also one day change his last name (I already switched his first name when he turned one as that was easier for me J) and become “forever” family (hopefully in the next few months).

And even though I can talk about this to Micah (and sometimes to Noah who doesn’t really pay attention), it still sometimes seems so surreal to me.  I know that Micah and Noah are forever mine…..that I am their Mommy (because they “tell” me so hundreds of times a day!)….and yet, sometimes, I sit back and pause and say “wow….I am a mother….”  I can easily think of many things that I am – a woman, a Christian, a doctor, a night-owl, a reader, a work-a-holic (most likely), …. and I am a mother.  This is one of those “I am” things that is palpable in the way that I become very defensive on behalf of the boys, in the way I beam with pride in their very very little league sports accomplishments, in the way I peer intensely into their eyes sometimes and say “I love you.”  Sometimes you can just touch that “mother” aspect and roll it around and bounce it here and there.  You can lift it high, you can bend it, you can smash it, you can pound it….but you can never ever ever break it.  I am their mother – forever, for always, and no matter what.  And this Christmas season I am thankful (again) for that gift in my life.

Our family

Our family

 

Kathy realized as she hung the stockings that this year, Seth’s name had changed from one with a K to an S….and Stephen’s name changed from an S to a K….and so our stockings of last year with initials embroidered upon them still reflect our family perfectly.  A perfectly good little family.

A “contact visit” with birthmom

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“The inmates sit in the pink chairs, we sit in the blue….oh, and at the end, we’ll stand here again while they turn all the chairs and tables over to make sure no one left anything for one of the women.”

I stood in a group of about twenty people waiting for the inmates to change into red “Contact Visit” labeled uniforms.  The room held 16 evenly-spaced small tables each with a pink chair and 1-3 blue chairs.  Pillars broke into the open space, a podium at the front displayed the American flag on the wrong side (according to the ex-military man I stood talking to), and a scattering of broken toys and books in a plastic bin sat in the corner.

The women filed in and took a seat.  Family members gathered around them, sisters, mothers, children brought to the visit by CYF caseworker or grandparents.  There were many happy smiles.  I stood with Seth in my arms looking for a woman with an empty blue chair. There wasn’t any and I asked of the guard where “H” was.  They called her down from the cell block.  (We almost didn’t have a visit since for the second time, because the birthmother’s name wasn’t on the list for visits.  We were only let through because a sergeant reluctantly cleared it, and yet the case supervisor had called me on Tuesday to make sure I knew that this visit must take place.)

Seth’s birthmother entered, and the guard pointed her out to me.  We sat awkwardly.  She asked how old Seth is and how he’s doing.  She asked how the older two were (using their original names, which I did not correct as I don’t want her to know their new identities).  She asked “what kind of mix is he?” pointing to Seth.  I said, “well, they believe he’s biracial.”  She nodded, paused and said “I was in drugs then….I don’t remember much.”  “I did want to get my tubes tied.”  Awkward moments interrupted by a guard who told me I needed to sit “across the table” from her, not with the chair at the adjacent side.  Seth eventually became restless of playing at the table and I got up to get him a “kitchen toy” with a small blue plastic pot.  He’s one and a half – the joy of tossing that little pot off the table was just a bit too irresistible.  Unfortunately, at the second drop, the sergeant patrolling the room didn’t appreciate his need to explore gravitational pull and took away the toy (“none of that throwing”).  I let the birthmother know that he was just being a normal kid.

Eventually playing with a broken toy at a table became less than enthralling and Seth yearned to roam the floors.  We wandered over to the book bin and he pushed a small plastic chair around.  The birthmother chatted with some of her fellow inmates and I thought about how foreign this world was to me.  They talked about their release dates, about who else they had seen “back in,” and about how cute each other’s kids were.

I felt so guarded.  I didn’t know what to talk about or how much to share with her.  In such a crowded space and on a first meeting, I didn’t want to pry, despite my intense desire to learn more about her.  I felt so torn about what to talk about, knowing that she had just “contested” the termination of parental rights thereby delaying the adoption process.  When she mentioned that she was about to be released in 20 days for “maxing out,” I wondered what her intentions were in regards to Seth.  Was she going to start fighting to get him back?  Was she going to ask for more visits?  She did say she was going to move back in with her father (oh, who has a new child himself.  His girlfriend just had a baby who is two months old and just out of the hospital because of methadone too.  My brain was reeling).  It wasn’t until about 10 minutes before the end of the visiting time when she told several other inmates that Seth was being adopted….and that she was “okay with that” …since it’s best for him, that I sighed inwardly.  And yet, I was still so tense.

Despite how intensely I thought the whole visitation of a child to a stranger was awful, I know it was the best thing for him that I was there.  To Seth, this was just some odd morning when we went to visit a new place and play with new toys among a big group of new people (with a mother who was oddly stiff and kept calling him “buddy” instead of “Seth” and some lady occasionally touched him and called him another name). To me it was one of the most tense, uncomfortable, out of my comfort zone experiences I’ve had for a long time.  We walked out into the crisp air – a welcome relief after the warmth of the basement of the jail – yet I could not relax.  I turned on my cell phone and listened to messages of my mother desperately trying to figure out where Micah’s basketball game was and called her briefly to learn that he had had an explosive fit, had run down the block chasing my sister’s car when she left and was currently in her car and refusing to get out.

I pushed toward the parking lot with feet lifting concrete boots and my body straining under such a mental weight.  I thought of so many things I wished I would have asked the birthmother.  I tried to remind myself that I’m not the perfect mother and didn’t remember to leave directions for basketball, but that Micah would recover from his horrible morning.  I drove in numbness despite the gnawing pain in my head.  I snapped at my kids.  I grumped about rushing off to soccer.  It took hours to start to feel normal again.  I can’t imagine this reality for so many families with loved ones in prison.

Random other snippets:

– walking downstairs toward the visitation room, I overheard a preteen girl tell her grandmother that she was always nervous about contact visits.  When asked why, she replied “it’s hard to actually see the one you love.”

– “She thought it would never happen to her,” lamented the 56-year-old grandmother whose daughter had succumbed to heroin and all the illegal activities associated with it and now she was taking care of the 15- month-old baby.  She’s the one who talked me through some of the process.

– “Whew, whose smell is that?”  Well, it could be any number of these toddlers and babies as there’s no diaper changing in the visitation area – everything had to be locked into a locker and one inmate was amazed that I had brought a sippy cup through.  Hey, someone else walked past the wanding body searching security guard with a bottle, so I figured why not bring along the sippy cup.

– “Does he have Hepatitis C….because I do.”  Um, don’t know – guess I’ll have to have him checked.  “Anything else you want to add?” I wondered.

Despite how incredibly difficult this morning was for me (it really was the first time I’ve ever met the birthmother of my three sons), I kind of wish that the visit had worked out last month.  That way, the “first” time awkwardness would be gone and maybe today I might have had my thoughts about me to ask intelligent questions that might help for the future of the boys.  I might have been more willing to share more about them.  The strange thing is, I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again though I did offer to send her a picture at Christmas (“maybe” of all three boys – though why didn’t I just give her a little peace and say “definitely” of the three?).

It’s going to take me a long time to think through the visit this morning on so many different levels.  But the best thing was hearing her confirm that Seth would be mine, and feeling Seth’s confirmation of that in his tight hugs around my neck.

Awakened…by the foster care system

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It’s almost 7 am on a Saturday morning.  Six-year-old Micah has already been appeased by Netflix on my cell phone and it’s a dark rainy morning so I’m loving the chance to drift back to sleep.  Suddenly, though, I open my eyes to see my sister standing over me, “Lynne, there’s a case worker here to pick up Seth for a visit.”  I’m awake.

And I’m mad.

It’s Saturday morning and apparently they decided to schedule a visit for an 18-month-old boy with his birth mother whom he’s never actually seen, who is in the county jail, and who has no chance of ever being his parent because of her repetitive mistakes.  He doesn’t need to see her.

If this isn’t infuriating enough to me – the fact that no one ever told me that they scheduled the visit has definitely pushed me over the edge!

I throw a sweatshirt over my jammies and grab Seth and a change of clothes for him.  While I change him, Kathy is packing up a diaper bag (her foster boys have gone on visits before – she knows exactly what to put in it).  I rush him out to the case aid at her car in the alley and inform her that “heads are going to roll” come Monday morning (or Tuesday, since Monday’s a holiday).

She’s empathetic.  She just does the driving.  She had no idea that I didn’t know.  She also has no idea how to buckle a baby into a car seat….nor how to install the car seat in her car….and yet she’s paid by the county to transport young children daily! (ahem, get down off that soap box too, Lynne!)  Seth is crying in her arms as I try to buckle in her seat.  I take him back and say “give me 5 minutes to get dressed and I’ll follow you down there.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m feeding quarters into the meters outside the Allegheny County Jail.  I’m shaking my head that for poor people coming to visit a relative in jail, getting 5

The jail entrance…where we sat for 20 minutes.

minutes on the meter per quarter seems sickening.  We walk inside.  The case aid finds a locker to put all the stuff – “Including the diaper bag?” I ask.  Yes.  I sit in the cold lobby with Seth on my lap and start to feed him some breakfast as we had to be there an hour early anyway.  He’s making a mess — spilling Kix all over the floor and bench. I’m cowered over him in a most protective way.  People are putting all their items, including any “hoodies,” into lockers and going through the metal detector.  The case aid enters through the detector to check in and wait for me inside.

We finish the yogurt and the aid comes back out.  “Well,” she says, “I’m glad you came down with me.  There’s no visit.  They didn’t put mom’s name on the list.”  I’m reminding myself to take deep breaths now…and yet letting a few out with relief.  One error after another has spared this tiny little boy from a very traumatic morning.  And yet, some judge, somewhere in his cozy house with a cup of coffee this morning, without ever a clue as to the disruption and pain he “court-orders,” has deemed it appropriate for a woman sitting in jail to spend one hour with a boy she birthed but can’t parent.

Yet, who is advocating for the child?  And who is advocating for the foster parents who step forward to care for unwanted children, yet whose lives are turned upside down over and over again?

Some day, I’ll look for answers. But today, I gave Seth some mighty tight hugs, strapped him into the car safely, and brought him home to his family.  Please, Lord, let’s not go through this again next month.