Wednesday 28 September 2011

Archived Post 2011 - Longing

E's family is about to get a baby to foster and I must say that I am jealous to say the very least. I have written about learning to be happy with the family I have, about it being enough and it is enough. In fact it is great but my heart still longs for more children and I am working on it.

I am frustrated by the fact that we were the right family for two very broken boys that no one else would take but that we can not be the right family for another child. I am feeling the sting of infertility as more and more people around me announce pregnancies and new babies and my life is destined to remain without a baby to nurture. It is hard, it hurts me to core and there is little to be done but to learn to cope with the pain and these feelings.

To be honest, I have had to learn to cope with a lot of things that were out of my control and it's crappy. It sucks to not be able to dictate how and when our family will grow or not. It is hard to watch other people get to nurture children from infancy while I know that I will likely never get that privilege and that is not to say that my children are any less fabulous but there is a part of me that longs to have a baby in my arms. Sometimes the realisation that it is unlikely to ever happen is hard to swallow and makes it hard to keep the tears in check as another person tells me their due date.

To add to my overwhelming feelings of loss I am also trying to wrap my brain around the fact that tomorrow is my last appointment with my therapist. With a woman who has journeyed  with me for 13 years and has seen me through more than anyone else. She has held my hand through serious depression, through loss and grief,  through joy and wonder. I am working on moving on, I have not seen her all summer on purpose, I have stayed away so that I can start to move on but saying good-bye to her tomorrow is looming large and yet it needs to happen, I need to close that door.

My grief at this moment is heavy, it is weighing me down and as if that was not enough I spent 30 minutes doing homework with Randall. I need you know that this alone would make anyone crazy let alone me given the way that I am feeling this week.

I know I will survive, I will learn to cope, to let this be enough, to let go of the dreams of more kids and babies in my arms, but it is hard and sadly I do not think that it is going to get any easier in the next day or two.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Archived Post 2011 - Big Emotions

Yesterday Randall and Kevin got caught trying to blow themselves up with a barbecue, well I am reasonably certain their goal was not to blow themselves up but it could of definitely been an outcome of playing with it. Regardless of what their motivation was they were in trouble, lots of trouble.

Kevin showed an appropriate amount of remorse, understood the problem ( cause dead is not really something you can come back from), apologized, accepted his consequence and moved on.

Randall not so much.

Randall wailed and gnashed his teeth and generally tried to convince us that we were being to hard on him. We were unmoved. He continued to wail and cry and then once the flood gates had opened the damn broke and the poor boy cried about all the things that he has been carrying around for the last little while.

He cried about his sister and why we could not adopt her, about why they were not together and how he had not seen her. I held him and the poor boy just kept on crying. He doesn't understand and there is no way to make it make sense to him because I can not make it make sense for me. T is clearly in crisis again and we are as usual, shut out, due to stupid rules about confidentiality and such. How do you explain that to a 9 year old who wants to see his sister.

Once we had heard about T for a bit he started to talk about how hard it is to wait for more kids, how he is trying to patient but he does not want to be patient anymore and he just wants it to happen already. You and me both buddy was about all I could say to that. I wish we could make this whole process easier but sadly that is not something I can control.

Then he just lay in my lap for awhile sniffling and sobbing. Randall carries everything so deep inside his heart, he is so afraid to talk about his feelings that when he finally does there is a flood of emotion that overwhelms all of us. It's hard.

We cuddled and then moved on with our night. He is still mad at us because we would not budge on our consequence and he might still be mad next week but oh well.

Tuesday 20 September 2011

Archived Post 2011 - Oh Trauma

Oh trauma how I understand you ( sometimes) and how I wish more parents who were parenting hurt kids did as well.

Let me explain.

I just hung up the phone with T's foster father. She was recently moved again and she is not doing so well. The problem is that she has been moved so many times that no one pays any attention to any of the trauma triggers that are compounding her behaviour because no one is going to read the 10 inch thick file to find all the dates that might be issue for her.

The thing is, someone should.

Dates matter because even if a child is not able to vocalize their stress around certain events it is present and effects their behaviour. The fall is a particularly tough time for T, Kevin and Randall because it is when they got apprehended. Both Kevin and T remember it, blame themselves and associate being apprehended with T and Randall's birthdays.T's birthday is Thursday, Randall's is in 3 weeks, no wonder T is acting out.

To add to the stress at this time last year she successfully broke down a placement  by calling the cops and making false allegations against her foster parents.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out this is going to be a tough few weeks for her.
She has RAD, she is in her 4th home since she destroyed her relationship with her prospective adoptive parents because she was afraid to be loved. Her story is a tragic one and the hardest part for me is that her tragedy is also my kids tragedy because they love her and they want her to be a part of their lives but it is so hard to do when she is out of control.

She needs to be parented by people with training, she needs support and structure, she needs a lot more than she is getting and I know that she is not going to get it because the system is not equipped to deal with her. It is so frustrating to watch them fail her again and again, we offer help and support but everyone puts their fingers in their ears and pretends that this time they have found the right placement for her. They will not hear that there is no right placement for her  because they are not addressing her issues. She wants to go live with her birthmom and if they let her go back to birthmom things are not going to be any better because she is not any more equipped to deal with an angry teenager with attachment disorder than she was to deal with an angry kid with attachment disorder.

There is little I can do but watch the train crash.

Sunday 11 September 2011

Archived Post 2011 - 35

It was 35

It could of been 60 or 80 or 249 but it was only 35

35 what?

Minutes

What was 35 minutes?

The tantrum that Kevin had last night because while he was at a birthday party I had the audacity to take his little brother out for a spontaneous play date with their little brother E and his Mom. We went bowling, it was fun and of course Randall had to tell Kevin all about it. Kevin was jealous, sad and angry.

Of course he could not tell me that he was feeling that way, he needed to be mad about something else instead. He started to fight with me, I knew what the reason was but I let him get all upset first and once had stopped hollering at me we talked through all his big feelings. In the mean time the rest of us went on with our evening routine because although Kevin was mad he was not raging or trying to hurt anyone and thus could be left to be angry and upset by himself.

Since no one goes to bed angry in this house he had to work it out and he did. He apologized, received some comforting hugs while he had a good cry about missing out on something and learned that sometimes having friends means you miss out on family things, it's a hard lesson to learn.