Protecting Your Heart

It is a sad day in our household today.  One of my daughter's best friends died in a car accident on Monday night.  He was 20 years old.  There are not enough adjectives to describe how upset and sad she is today.  I wish I could take her pain away and make it all better.  Unfortunately, I am stuck just holding her while she cries.  I am trying to say the right things but even I am at a loss for words with this one.  Even worse for me is the fact that death and grieving is not something new for my daughter.  She has lost friends before and in fact, just attended a funeral last week of an older brother of a past boyfriend.  All of this sadness and heartbreak has brought to my mind the way humans protect their hearts.

Children with abusive pasts are experts at protecting their hearts from further damage.  They do not trust easily and are usually very independent.  It is difficult but necessary to break through these walls to teach them how to love again.  But what about a foster parent's heart?  It is a sad guarantee that a foster parent will  suffer some heartbreak through the fostering process.  I even cry over the ones that I an happy to see returning home.  Foster parenting is a gift from the heart and the heart is going to get stepped on sometimes.  Is there a way to protect ourselves from the pain of loss?  

I am sure there are technical and psychological techniques that can be studied and applied but I do not have much experience on that level.  All I have is my personal experience to offer.  I used to think that I could protect my heart better with an older child rather than a baby.  Babies tend to tug on my heartstrings very quickly because they seem to be built that way.  I quickly found out that I was completely wrong on that score.  At 18 years old, Shelly knocked down my heart barriers within two months and I still think of her everyday.  As a foster parent I am able to parent and act like a mother in a very generic way.  I do not have to love a child to be a good parent.    I hope that does not sound too cold but it is true.  I can dress, feed, and bathe a child just a like a babysitter does.  I can offer support and a safe household without risking my heart.  Some of this I learned through experience and some I had to learn the hard way.  I had a little boy placed in my home on the Friday of memorial day weekend.  By Sunday I was completely in love with the child, on Tuesday he was moved to another home to be with his siblings.  It was a quick and hard lesson in babysitting 101.  With other kids, I have offered up the gift of love even when I did not want too.  It is hard to maintain a distance when another soul needs love so much.

I believe that it is okay to keep your heart in reserve as long as you can when fostering a child.  Taking care of a child is a wonderful thing and can be done in a professional manner.  I am sure a teacher or day care professional does this all the time.  I also believe that it is okay to give your heart to a child and just deal with the pain when it comes.  The gift of the heart is never wasted and the child can take it with them when they leave.  I often take comfort in the idea that I have taught a child how to love or showed them how trust should exist in a healthy family.

 Later on, when time has had a chance to work its magic on my daughter, I would like to ask her if she wished she had never let this friend into her life now that she knows the ending.  I am pretty sure that she is glad that she knew him for the short time he was on this earth.  He added to her life and she to his.  Fostering a child and then losing them is the same idea.  I can make a difference in a child's life by opening my home and sometimes my heart.  I am glad that I have foster children in my life.  I hope you are too!

Parenting is a Journey

I probably should be writing something about the upcoming holiday's, especially since Thanksgiving is only a few days away.  However, I am not a person that enjoys the holiday season.  In fact the only appreciation I have for the holidays are the days off of school and work that I enjoy.  So please don't look for any Christmas cheer on this blog.  Instead, I want to tell you about teaching my 16 year old son to drive.  Yesterday, Jason unexpectedly had the day off of school.  Monday was a scheduled half day for his school that was cancelled due to fog.  I guess it was something like a snow day only with fog instead.  I have been teaching Jason to drive for a long time, due to the fact that he is not allowed to take his driving test until his grades are all in the passing range.  He has finally reached this milestone and the test will happen sometime in December.  He is very excited about it and proud of his efforts.  I had a busy day scheduled with work and preparing for company in the evening but I decided to take advantage of the unexpected time with my son instead.  The other kids in my family go to different school districts or go to work so Jason and I found ourselves alone with each other, which is very rare.  We happily jumped in the car and headed to WalMart to buy him some much needed clothes and necessities.

Parenting is often a skill that happens in very quick moments.  We do not have a lot time to prepare for the big moments in life.  I often just hope and pray that I say the right thing at the right time.  It might surprise you to hear that my husband and I do not feel like successful parents.  We cannot point to a child that we have raised who has become something spectacular like a doctor or a successful athlete.  Parenting has brought our goals for our children down to rock bottom.  We hope and pray they graduate from high school and become a successful adults, and that is about it.   That is not to say that I am not proud of my kids or that my kids have not achieved anything in life.  It means that my kids are defining their own futures and taking life paths that I could not have imagined when I first became a parent.

I believe that a good parent is someone who never gives up.  A good parent is someone who keeps trying every day to reach a child who seems unreachable.  Jason is my biological son.  I say that because I want to remind foster and adoptive parents that all children are difficult regardless of how they arrived in your family. He has had trouble in school most of his life.  He went through a difficult (and scary) period of experimenting with drugs.  I have tried out a million ideas on this child to help him reach some positive goals.  I think my husband would agree with me when I say that most parenting techniques have failed on this child.  Love and support were useless.  Tough love only sent him running in the other direction.  Rewards and punishments were largely ignored as he plowed through life.  The only technique that seemed to accomplish anything was never giving up.  We found him a new school (an alternative high school) that he helped to choose.  He is experiencing some academic success there for the  first time in his life.  He is thinking ahead to career choices.  I am so proud of his small successes that I could burst with joy!  I understand now that it is not the big events in life that matter, just the slow and steady steps toward happiness that matter.

To return to my fog day story, Jason and I went down to the local school to practice parallel parking af.  ter shopping.  This was a new thing for him and I knew it was going to difficult.  He does not have a lot of patience (or attention span) and we are driving a minivan.  A minivan is the hardest vehicle on the planet to parallel park.  I will drive around the block 15 times before I will attempt to parallel park my vehicle.  I have been through the parking process with three previous teenagers and I was ready for the fireworks ahead.  The school has a practice area set up with cones that is identical to the official testing area.  Sure enough, before we even finished the first run through, he was ready to throw in the towel.  I convinced him to try a few more times and then let him off the hook.  All the way home, I was inwardly laughing at his tirade about how unfair this test was.  "This kind of parking was not a real life situation and he needed a different car to pass this test," he said.  It went on all the way home.  The funny part about this is that I have heard it all before.  His brother and sister had already covered this ground with me many times before.  I could have written down all the things he was ranting about before he opened his mouth.  It is moments like these when I enjoy being a parent because I already know exactly what to do and say.  I love it when my kids go through a phase that I have seen and handled before.  It makes me feel like an accomplished parent!

With my first child, parking the car was a huge drama.  I worried that he would never be able to do it.  I worried that he would not pass the test.  Looking back it seems very funny to me now.  Maybe parenting is less about skill and more about staying in the game long enough to get it right.  I have had kids fail the driving test and the world didn't end.  I have had a child drop out of high school.  The world didn't end and she has signed up for night school.  My kids are not the perfect darlings that I envisioned when they were born or arrived on my doorstep.  I am not the parent that I thought I would be either.  I have finally learned to roll with all situations and  just keep trying something new.  My favorite quote from the movie "Galaxy Quest" says it all, "Never give up, never surrender!"

Foster Parent Support Groups

Part of my job at Hands Across the Water is creating, supporting, and maintaining a foster parent support group.  I was very excited to take on this portion of my job because I enjoy sharing stories about foster care.  I hoped that my crazy experiences as a foster parent could be valuable to others.  I looked forward to listening to the stories of others and comparing notes.  I set up the classes, advertised them, and nobody came.  I waited a few months and sent the word around to different places and still nobody came.  I changed the day and time to encourage people to come and I am still at zero attendance.

Hmmm.  In the meantime, I jumped at the opportunity to substitute as a facilitator for another support group at HATW, the A-OK group for parents who have adopted older children.  This group has been established for  long time and has some regularly attending members.  I hoped to gain some ideas for my own group by hanging out with an already established group.  The experience was amazing!

Three families came and shared their situations and talked about their challenges.  I was concerned that my experiences would not apply to their situations but I was wrong.  Kids with behavior problems share many similar characteristics.  I learned a great deal and I wished that I had brought my husband with me.  It is wonderful to be around people who are seeking out solutions to their issues.  These are people who will not give up on their children and will continue to learn and explore until they find a method that works for their children. Their situation is similar to older children in foster care.   Many people outside of the foster care world wonder why a foster parent stays in a difficult situation when they can send the child to another home and just give up.  Foster parents know that if they become another step on the ladder in a long line of foster homes that the only one paying the price is the foster child.  Many refuse to give up and continue to try and help the child in their care.   It is inspiring to be in the same room with people who are so committed to their children. 

In my opinion, raising children is a life long commitment no matter how they arrive as part of the family.  Biological children come with disabilities and behavior challenges just as adopted children do.  Foster kids always bring along emotional baggage when they arrive in the home to add to the challenge of parenting.  I can honestly say that my biological children have caused me more grief than my foster kids in some cases.  We never know the path we will be traveling when we become a parent. 

That is why support groups are so important!  We can talk to each other and share the burden.  We can get new ideas or help out another family. We can form new friendships with others who have chosen to ride in the same boat that we have.  I will keep trying to get my group going because it is too important to just let it go.  If you are a foster parent at HATW email me if you are interested in participating in a support group.  If you are just surfing the net, look for a foster parent support group and let me know the address so that I can join in too.