Support

John and I have been helping get a local support group going for foster and adoptive parents. I’m hopeful and excited about it. We’re meeting once a month, and have now had two regular meetings, as well as a couple of planning meetings. I like the group of people that has been attending so far, and I’m hoping that more folks join us. We invited the other couple from our church that’s fostering and they seemed eager to join in.

The two best things to come out of the group so far are a friendship and an email address. The friendship is with a woman I’ll call Ruby who lives in a town not too far from us. She is the woman I randomly met at the foster and adoptive parent conference for our state last fall. We were the only two people (well, along with her husband) from our district office to attend the conference and we just happened to sit down next to each other at lunch and start talking. I really like her. She’s a pretty no-nonsense person but also warm and relatable. Her family started the TPR process about a month after ours. They are still waiting for an adoption date.

The email address is one for a woman who works at the local university in a trauma intervention program. At last month’s meeting we had a woman come and give a presentation about trauma. The videos she showed us emphasized over and over how important evidence-based interventions are for children of trauma–and early intervention at that. Several people asked her how we can get help for our kids. We know it’s important, but it’s so hard to figure out where to go and how to get help. John and I have had this conversation many times about C. We desperately want to get him–and all of us–some good services to deal with his grief and anxiety. I asked Frank about it long ago and was met with basically zero help. Which is ironic, since the woman giving the presentation on trauma told us that the State is using a new approach of looking at all foster child cases through a trauma lens. Oh, really? I wanted to say. Has Frank gotten this memo, and does he even know what trauma is or what the best practices are?

Anyway, out of this rather frustrating conversation came an email address. Several people, experienced foster parents who’ve been there, done that with the State nonsense, recommended getting in touch with this woman. They were confident she could help. I emailed her last night and heard back from her this morning. She sent me a nice list of therapists who were trained in these evidence-based practices. I am eager to look more closely at who they are and how we can be seen by them. (She also encouraged me to share the info with our group, and said she would give the list to the head of the local district office.)

As I write this, I am sitting in the dark in our upstairs hallway, outside the kids’ room. C finally filled up his bed-boy bed chart. I took the rail off his crib on Friday night. The first night, he fell asleep in John’s arms in the living room while E was practicing violin, so we just put him in the bed and that was that. The second night he was up until 11:00 and then out of bed at 5:00 in the morning. Last night his shenanigans landed him in the Pack and Play, where he managed to empty E’s closet of all of her clothes (it’s a stand alone Ikea closet, and their room is so small we had to have the PnP pushed right up to it) before finally falling asleep around 10:00. Tonight, I told him he had one chance to stay in the bed. If he got out at all, I was putting him right in the PnP. So far, in the hour and a half he’s been in bed, he’s been crazy jumping around on his mattress (but, you’ll notice, not OUT of the bed), then quietly breathing heavily, then running the hard plastic eyes of his Elmo back and forth across the rails of his bed, then quietly yawning, then giggling and belly laughing, and now quiet again. He begged me to stay in his room tonight when I said goodnight, but I just can’t open that can of worms. Immediately when he asked that and I hesitated a bit, E said, desperately, “Can you sit by MY bed?” It perfectly illustrated why my being in there would not be a help. So here I sit. In the dark. Quietly. He thinks I’m downstairs. And I can hear his anxiety in all his ups and downs.

Tonight, before bedtime, while we were sitting at the kitchen table after dinner, C looked at me and said, “I’m a baby.” “Are you?” I asked him. He said, “I need to be rocked.” I told him I’d love to rock him–I’d even feed him a bottle (a sippy cup of water). So we did that. And I sang him a song that I used to sing to E when she was a baby. And he made mega-eye contact, I will note. And then Daddy rocked him and fed him while I rocked and fed and sang to E. It was sweet. And a little sad, thinking about the fact that I didn’t ever get to rock him, and he didn’t get much rocking when he was actually a baby, instead of a big boy who is feeling unsure about his place in the world and in our family.

It’s no coincidence that this time of rocking came after he found the keepsake box I use to keep his old artwork and birthday cards. He pulled it out and asked what it was (“It has my name on it? It’s for me?” he asked.) and I explained that there are keepsakes in it from when he was littler, and cards from his adoption day too. He pulled the top off and gently slid a card out from the box. Holding it up, he “read” it to himself, “Dear C, Happy Dock-shun Day.” He smiled and put it down carefully. “I didn’t wreck anything, Mama,” he told me, pride spilling out as he spoke. I watched him tenderly lift a letter from the box and study it with serious eyes, his brow furrowed.

There is so much to consider each day, so many questions to ask, so many wonderings to have. For anyone. But especially for this little boy. And for me as his mama. I hope I can continue to support him in his questions and wonderings and frustrations and his need for a gentle touch. What a responsibility it is to mother this child. And what a gift.