A List of Blogs I've Read (in recent memory) or Read

It's "shout out" time again.

Family of Faith (whose blogs may or may not be "about" faith)
http://bostonunitarian.blogspot.com/

http://www.peacebang.com/ and http://beautytipsforministers.com/

http://learningumbrella.homeschooljournal.net/

http://happycindy.blogspot.com/

http://monkeymindonline.blogspot.com/

http://mskittyssaloonandroadshow.blogspot.com/

http://uuminister.blogspot.com/ and http://www.lovethroughaction.blogspot.com/

http://thehanifblog.blogspot.com/ (at least skimmed)

http://chalicechick.blogspot.com/ (though I have to say because I can't post a link including someone else's endorsement before I've offered mine that I vehemently disagree with the UUA presidential candidate endorsement on this blog...more on that another day)

http://chalicespark.blogspot.com/

http://justgini.blogspot.com/

http://tandik-fueledbyfaith.blogspot.com/ (LOVE it, but not frequently updated)

http://barbsbantering.wordpress.com/

http://www.uumin.org/sam/ (click blog on the left hand side of page)

http://truust.org/

http://unmitigatedbliss.blogspot.com/

http://iminister.blogspot.com/


Guilty Pleasure
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/


Montessori Mom I Discovered Randomly
http://chasingcheerios.blogspot.com/


Moms I "Know" From Elsewhere on the Internet
http://zachaboard.blogspot.com/

http://isle-of-inisfree.blogspot.com/

http://2undertoo.blogspot.com/

http://truebluexf.blogspot.com/

http://fostermomx2.blogspot.com/

http://rainbowmamajourney.blogspot.com/ (not updated for quite some time)

http://pumpkingirl71.livejournal.com/

http://adventureswithboandboo.blogspot.com/

...I know I am forgetting a number of folks, and I am so sorry but I am getting tired and need to head to bed. Ack! My deepest apologies.


Family Members
http://ragtagsf.blogspot.com/

http://awfulbrothers.blogspot.com/ (updated in periodic spurts)

http://colin-quodlibet.blogspot.com/

http://www.sunthroughleaves.blogspot.com/ (very sporadically updated)

http://www.chickadeescout.blogspot.com/

http://amazingadventuresofdante.blogspot.com/ (very sporadically updated)

http://justsebastian.blogspot.com/ (rarely updated)

...I'm probably forgetting whole other categories of blogs I read and stuff, but that's all I can do right now. Now, bed.

Family Planning

The other day was our every-60-day mandatory reminder that K. is still in foster care...er, uh, I mean our every-other-monthly homevisit from the social worker monitoring our home (in our old state, by the way, the visits were monthly).

In between these visits, we live in a sort of bubble. K. no longer has visits with her birthfamily, we have moved all the way across the country with her, and we keep in touch with M.'s birthfamily, but the state won't permit contact with K's birthfamily because of the risks they present to her safety. We rarely need to consult with or ask permission from the social worker for anything anymore because at this point, for all intents and purposes, she is our daughter.

This social worker who comes to visit our house now, I have a kind of mixed relationship with her. G. calls it "a weird tension." She is nice and all, but very hard to read. We needed her approval to manage our case in order to complete the interstate agreement that allowed us to move, and through the homestudy process she gave us no feedback at all. This left us wondering until I finally heard from our old state that the approval had come through. Because she is so "flat" in her interactions, she makes me nervous.

She also gives no indication that she remembers that we are long-time foster parents (not only that, but former therapeutic foster parents). She treats us like novices, which is subtle, but undermining. You have to understand, of course, that G. and I come from a county in which we felt like "star foster parents." Almost the whole staff at the county offices knew us and always treated us like we were the best of the best. We frequently got calls for placements, they asked our opinion about things that mattered, I participated on the foster parent advisory board, and we never worked with a social worker who didn't come to trust our expertise (about the kids we work with) implicitly. I think we are very good foster parents. It was treatment not undeserved.
It is so different now to have this woman come into our home every couple of months who never seems to drop her skeptisism or her lectures about "how it is done" (which result after we learn some different procedure between the two states, not from a fundamental ignorance).

Now that K.'s case is wrapping up, we have the question of whether we will get foster licensed out here or whether we'll seek another adoptive homestudy. Apparently, the homestudy we had done was for K's case and the interstate agreement alone. G. and I have been foster and adoptive homestudied numerous times over the last six or seven years. We've had at least five homestudies...switching agencies, updating expired homestudies, expanding previous homestudies to include adoption, etc. There are truly few homes as well monitored as ours. Our homestudy here in our new state was completed just under a year ago, so I asked the worker who has been visiting our home whether it would take a lot to get a new homestudy if we chose to keep our home open.

She told me we'd basically have to do everything over again! "The only thing that won't change is your childhood information from your homestudy interview." She said we'd have to do all of the other massive paperwork again, including but not limited to new letters of reference (five required), a financial background check, new letters from all the doctors our family has seen since our last homestudy, a letter of good-standing from my employer, and so forth. She'd also have to come over and complete another hour-long interview, do an inspection of this house even though she's been here visiting every 60 days, and...the list goes on. Oh, also, we have to take the foster/adopt training program because she won't consider transferring credit from our old state for their foster/adopt training program. Which is no big deal (other than finding a babysitter for 30 total hours of training time), but irritating because before we moved here I inquired with the foster licensor at the county office (this worker is, alternatively, from the agency that was contracted in our case) and she said they'd definitely be willing to at least take a look at the training we've done. Again, we used to be therapeutic foster parents, so it is worth noting that we've done some pretty intensive training along the way.

I almost took the worker's reaction as trying to discourage us from moving forward, but at the same time, she also actually told us about a three-sibling set for which she was seeking an adoptive family (almost as if she was "feeling us out" about it) and she was eager to give us the dates of the upcoming foster/adopt training. Also, she discouraged us from doing foster care (which couldn't be done through her agency) and encouraged us to stick with her own adoption program. She said, "we have access to all the same kids as the state does." I think that is misleading because most kids are going to have a state-- rather than agency-- social worker, and though a social worker who is looking to place a child might seek the contracted agency's help, if they know of a waiting foster or adoptive parent through their own program, wouldn't they go ahead and place there first?

These are questions to which we are currently seeking answers. I have a call into the state adoption office, I've chatted with the foster care office (there is no foster-adopt program here in the formal sense, so the departments are separate), and I am going to call the state licensor for our section of town as well.

We're not quite ready for another. We are hoping K. will be out of diapers, that the kids will be just a wee bit more independent, and that we can hammer out our financial life a bit more before another placement. But K. is almost three, and homestudies in our experience take a very long time, if nothing else because of the time it takes to get the paperwork done. It does seem time to at least start working slowly toward being ready. The conversation with the social worker who visits our home was in a word: discouraging. I am hoping the conversations I will be having with others over the next couple of weeks will be the opposite.

In My Arms (Plumb)

A fellow foster-adopt mommy shared the following song in a discussion on an adoption board. She talked about her intense sadness about the experiences her daughter had in early life, and the equally intense desire to protect her daughter from further harm. I can relate to that sadness and desire.

There are three versions below. The first one is the original. The second and third are two different dance version remixes. The second includes the vocals immediately, in the third you have to wait for it a bit (I might like it better than the second though, I think). The videos were chosen pretty randomly, so it is interesting that they were each a very different take on the lyrics. The second is apparently images from "Final Fantasy." Um, okay, I don't know anything about "Final Fantasy," but I had fun watching it anyway. I apologize, but the third has music only, no real video images. The song lyrics are posted below the video clips. If you do a YouTube search, you'll also find a few folks who have used the song to narrate video and photographic images of their babies.







by Plumb
your baby blues
so full of wonder
your curley cues
your contageous smile
and as i watch
you start to grow up
all I can do is hold you tight

knowing clouds will raise up
storms will race in
but you will be safe in my arms
rains will pour down
waves will crash all around
but you will be safe in my arms

story books full of fairy tales
kings and queens and the bluest skies
My heart is torn just in knowing
you'll someday see the truth from lies

knowing clouds will raise up
storms will race in
but you will be safe in my arms
rains will pour down
waves will crash all around
but you will be safe in my arms

Castles they might crumble
dreams may not come true
but you are never all alone
because I will always
always love you

clouds will raise up
storms will race in
but you will be safe in my arms
rains will pour down
waves will crash all around
but you will be safe in my arms

Reflections on Family

Me, my dear wife G, my dear son M, and my dear foster daughter K


We began grieving the loss of our baby girl, K, the day she came to live with us.

I imagine that most-- if not all-- of us have experienced this kind of grief. It’s the type of grief that comes with terminal illness of a loved one, for example. It is the pre-loss grief of a loss that is possible, or probable, or inevitable. It is both grief for the loss, and also grief for the grief; it is grief for the loss of so much joy that we might experience in the time we have with our loved one if only we weren’t already grieving.

My wife, G, and I have been foster parents for a number of years. We adopted our son, M, after foster parenting him for thirteen uncertain months. By the time K arrived, we knew well that in the course of a foster-adoption, anything could happen. K moved to our home from another foster home because she needed a potential adoptive placement.

Yet, while M's adoption had been considered a straight-forward one, even in his case I had walked into the Children's Services office one day when he was about a month old (totally unsuspecting), and received news from his social worker that she had found a suitable birth relative to care for M. Birth-relative placements give children a greater chance to maintain ties with their extended birth family, and thus are often considered ideal. But whether or not this move was ideal for M, it meant we’d be saying goodbye. "He will be moving to her house in two weeks" the social worker told me that day. And though the relative changed her mind the day of M’s move, it was forever etched in our hearts that everything was bound to change in an instant.

When facing such uncertainty, emotional survival mechanisms kick in. One job of the human brain is to protect our fragile emotional state. A disequilibrium of the emotional system can be tolerated for a short period of time, but then the brain must do its job to regulate. Otherwise, the other systems of the body-- and ultimately, human survival-- are threatened. The human mind is capable of great trickery to achieve this end. When M was six months old, Halloween came ’round. G and I waited until the day before Halloween to make his costume. In our minds, Halloween came into existence on that day when it was no longer “the future.” Somehow, we had to cope with the uncertainty, and limited vision did the trick.

M's adoption was finalized seven months later. We did not celebrate M's adoption until 31 days after it was finalized in court. The 30th day was the last day of the appeal period. Over time, the difficulties and pain of the foster-adoption roller-coaster faded from our memories. When G and I learned of K, we were able to joyfully say “yes” to her placement with us.

But the day she was placed in our arms, we all went home emotionally exhausted and took a family nap. I awoke with tears in my eyes, my heart heavy and throbbing at the thought that this moment- ANY moment - could be our last together. In that moment, I thought of K and also her birthmother who were both grieving losses that had already occurred.

It has been about a year and a half. K is a beautiful, stubborn, rough-and-tumble, curious two year old.

Our lives were all complicated very much in August, when we were scheduled to move to a state across the country. K's foster care case was originally scheduled to be closed in May. Likely, this would have opened the door to our adoption over the summer. Unfortunately, a variety of court delays have prevented resolution. K's ability to cross state lines have been semi-limited, except on a temporary basis when the court would allow a short-term travel order. So G and our children did not move with me. They continued to live in our old state indefinitely, while we awaited news. In October, we received news that the court was opening a door to adoption based on the history of the case. K's ability to travel for longer periods expanded, though she can be called back to our old state at any time. The court agreed on multiple counts of permanent parental deficits regarding K's mother. However, the case is under appeal, and won't be heard in the court of appeals at least until late summer or early next fall. Our lives remain very much in limbo, and in my brain, I sometimes protect myself by assuming that the other shoe will drop.

K and G and I have been participating in a therapy together to help encourage her attachment to us. It is not a traditional attachment therapy, nor is it among controversial attachment therapies. It is a behavioral-response therapy that helps me and G respond to K from a position that makes sense to her given her early trauma. This helps K to feel safe, and then we can begin to work on healing from there. Like me, K has to keep herself protected even as she loves and attaches. Though she isn't able to cognitively understand that her life is in limbo, on a cellular level, she has learned to accept impending loss as a permanent state. She has loved many people before coming to us, and she has lost all of them.

Once upon a time (and not that long ago), the child welfare system felt it was best to prevent kids from forming attachments and learning to love their caregivers because of the very "limbo" we are discussing. However, this was so incredibly damaging to children, that this social experiment was finally put to rest. The brain development of children depends in part on the development of early attachments. Whether or not K stays with us, her brain needs the opportunity to attach so that her neurological system can develop properly. Unfortunately, K's early life history makes attachment feel emotionally (and thus neurologically and thus physically) dangerous for her, and I believe that our periodic separations through this last year have on some level been re-traumatizing, which I previously feared but am uncovering layer by layer now in the therapeutic setting.

At the end of our fourth therapy visit, K fell down and bumped her head. The therapist and I watched in awe as K came over to me, crawled onto my lap, and put her head against my shoulder for a whole five minutes while I soothed her. K has always enjoyed being held, but she also keeps her body at a distance from mine. Though G has enjoyed K's attempts at closeness on occassion, K has always kept me at arms length. Remember, love and attachment does not feel safe to K, whose brain has been hardwired during a series of losses in her life. While K has not yet approached me for this degree of closeness again, I trust that we will be able to work together toward that end. K is attached, but it is terrifying to her. The very act of being attached to us, of loving us, and being loved back, makes her feel insecure. She has walls built around her heart for protection, just like G and I play mental trickery on ourselves to make the future disappear so that we too can feel more protected.

I pray that K continues to find peace in life and that she increasingly finds real love and attachment not only safe, but also fulfilling.

I love K so much it hurts. When I watch her laugh, when I see her playing with M, when she runs at me with wide-open arms, I choose joy. But it is painful for me too. There is a place inside me prepared to be her forever mother, and another place inside me (which I go around pretending doesn't exist, for my own sanity and so that I can attach and parent normally), that must be prepared to never see her again. This is what I would call a legally-induced multiple-personality disorder.

In a way, this is the immediate reflection of the struggle of all of us, as mortal beings: to love when it means losing, to love even though it means losing. Look around at any human being near you. They too are afflicted by this universal condition. We all are. We love, we lose, and somehow, we love again.

I'd like to write some reflections here on foster care, adoption, foster-adoption, and adoption reform periodically in the months to come.

Journey of an Aspiring Allie, Part I

The following is a link to a video, with which I will begin to share with you a personal journey I have taken over the last 33+ months.

I will share my journey by way of a video tour in a series of posts titled: "Journey of an Aspiring Allie." I hope you will watch the videos (one or more in each post over the next several days) exactly as posted in the text, as a break before reading further. I had attempted to learn to imbed videos in my posts but was unable to do so.

____________________________________
Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgH65hXp0Vk


The week my son M. was born, I had no idea that I was going to have a baby. At least, I had no idea what age child I was going to have and when.

My dw G. and I had been foster parents with a private, state-contracted therapeutic foster care agency. We had several life-changing, perspective-altering experiences as foster mothers, including the most significant of them all: parenting a teenager with a complicated life (over 2/3 of which had been lived in foster care) and a list of diagnoses a mile long. He had come to us, we were told, as a "permanent foster placement." We had not actually asked to be a permanent home for any child. In fact, we weren't even foster parents when we received the call about this boy. They hand selected us from the community (we had a connection with them through a person in the congregation I was serving, and we had been in touch with them at one point when we were considering getting foster licensed). They called us and asked us to get foster licensed specifically to parent this child. The agency did not do adoptions, but this child needed some kind of a "forever family."

It turned out the agency lied to us, and in a story deserving of its own series of posts, it turned out our dfs was not with us as a permanent placement afterall. Slightly less than a year after his arrival, he left. His exit from our life was devastating. We cried nonstop and swore we would never foster parent again. Being his mothers had changed us forever in ways that I can't possibly get into now without it requiring multiple posts of its own. But let's just say, among many other things, that we had our eyes opened in regard to "disabilities" and that we had a new sense of respect and compassion.

We stuck with that agency for six or seven months before we finally decided to transfer our license directly to the state due to what we felt were irreconcilable differences in philosophy between us and our agency's Director at that time. Shortly after, we decided to apply for an adoptive homestudy as well, so that we could provide permanency for a child if it was in the child's best interests.

It took us about nine months to get our new license and adoptive homestudy completed, and then we began our wait for a child to be placed with us. We accepted a couple of placements for children who ended up staying with their families rather than coming into care. Then we found out about a nine year old who needed a very temporary foster home, and we gladly took her in for the month that her mother could not care for her. Two weeks after she left, we received the call about M. He was just one and a half days old.

When I went to meet M. at the hospital, I knew virtually nothing about him. I knew he was a boy. I knew why his birthparents could not care for him. I knew he was having some difficulty eating and that he was very jaundiced and in the special care nursery. I knew his birth weight. This sounds like a lot to know, but in fact, this information was very watered down at that point. Though I asked many questions, the notes I had taken over the phone filled nothing more than a thirtieth of a letter-sized paper scrap. Still, by the time G. and I had said we were accepting the placement, I was more interested in racing to the hospital than in taking notes (G. had to finish her day at work, which was awful for her...having to wait to meet our baby).

I walked into the special care nursery and, standing by the door, my eyes scanned each bassinet where there were no parents, looking for a blue name card indicating that the child was a boy. I would not be able to pick out my baby by distinguishing family marks; resemblance to me; eye, skin, or hair color about which I had no information; or his resemblance to ultrasound images. I needed a name card, but I couldn't see the names from where I was standing. Within a moment, a cheerful nurse came to me and inquired about my identity. Then she said, "Let me introduce you to your baby."



"Let me introduce you to your baby." Those are words I will never forget. My heart fills with such joy, and I get so weepy when I think of those words.



She led me to a bassinet, where M. was wrapped from head to toe. His eyes were closed (as they would be for seven full days, like a little kitten). He was wrapped up so tightly, that I simultaneously wanted to let him be and scoop him up in my arms. The nurse immediately sensed my hesitation, and thinking that it was about all the machines he was hooked up to, she said, "you can pick him up you know," and she brushed away the machines and put the cords off to the side of M.'s body. Then I scooped him up, and drew him into my chest, taking him in.

In my former life, when I was very involved in childbirth education, I had seen so many real-life and video recordings of birth, with children coming out and gazing at their mothers, that I remember wishing M. would just open his eyes so I could really SEE him. At that time, I felt like I needed to see his eyes to really "be" with him, to really take him in (of course, I believe that the sterile smell of the hospital special care nursery contributed to this feeling, as the smell of starched blankets was too overwhelming for me to catch a whiff of him, and the bright lights and scratchy starched blankets encasing his whole body did not encourage me to run my hands against his skin).

This tendency I had does make some sense. Barring complications, medications in the baby's system, or too bright of lights (for example), babies are born awake and alert and ready for bonding. This means survival from an evolutionary perspective. Their physical structure during the newborn period emphasizes their eyes, which are big with dilated pupils, attracting the gaze of adults. But I did not have eyes to gaze into, so I sat and rocked my baby, too fearful of what the nurses would think or say to unwrap him and get a look at his little body.

I also felt a tinge of fear that perhaps he was totally unaware of me, that he was sound asleep and that I was nothing but another disturbance, another person rudely handling him.

I pulled him in closer to my body, hoping that even in his sleep, even with the tightly positioned blankets that kept his head from my skin, that he could smell me, however faintly. I rocked him, and rocked him, and whispered sweet nothings in his ear. I wrapped his fingers around my pointer finger. He was (and is) sooooo beautiful.



My heart swelled. My dear, precious baby. I was falling head over heels in love.

...to be continued tomorrow

Comforts

Lest I appear to be full of only despair right now, I thought I would share a couple of things.

First, as painful as it is to be moving before my wife and children are able to move, I am very much looking forward to my new ministry. It is truly, truly, truly exciting, and I feel blessed to be partnering with this congregation. I also believe the time to get settled in my work there without the usual, daily family obligations will give me better roots.

Second, there are some things bringing me comfort at this time. I think a lot about the men and women in the military who go through indefinite periods of being apart from their families all the time. It is difficult, but none of us are alone. My wife and children and I do not know when we will be reunited, but I am blessed, as I am not facing combat, but rather making an exciting and positive move in my life. Over the long haul, this move is one G and I chose because it will be good for our family. And while we do face the possibility of loss during this time apart, if we are unable to adopt K, we have to believe that in all likelihood, the system will allow her to be with her birthfamily only if it is safe. We want an ethical adoption. We pray we are correct in our belief, and moreso, we pray that the judge will rule with not only her safety, but with her best interests in mind.

Another comfort is this:

I had the pleasure recently of listening to the Rev. Meg Barnhouse (http://www.megbarnhouse.com/). Her song, "All Will Be Well" (http://www.megbarnhouse.com/gpage.html) touched my faith deeply. She described the song as a conversation she has had in her head with the 14th century Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich. For an interesting sermon about Julian, check out: http://www.gracecathedral.org/church/sermon/ser_20070506.shtml. In any case, the song is tremendously comforting to me, and I have ordered the CD.