Thursday 28 February 2019

Dear Kevin,

Dear Kevin,

I sat down with your birth mom last week to talk about the current state of our lives and how the choices you have made have changed the course of so many lives. I wish I could have the same conversation with you. I wish we could talk so that you could hear that I still love you and that we all  can forgive you and move forward to build a new path as a family. It will never be the same as it was but it can happen.

I want to tell you that I am sorry that you were hurt as a little kid. I am sorry that you did not feel safe or loved or wanted. I am sorry that you had to move as many times as you did and that you could have a stable understanding family who loved you from the moment that they knew you were going to be born.

I have made so many mistakes as a human and as a parent. You and I learned and grew together in so many ways when you were a little kid. I had no idea what parenting 2 boys who had a really rough start to life would be like. I thought I knew but you quickly showed me I had no idea. Once I realized that I worked so hard to figure it out, to get help, to learn and figure out how to help you learn to love and attach to adults.

I have so many dreams for you, for us, for your future.

I miss you everyday and hope that you are doing ok.

I will always love you
Mom

Sunday 24 February 2019

Love

I have been listening to the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text for a awhile now. I get a couple of episodes in a week and eventually I will catch up to their current shows. But as I listen to the early ones I am struck by how profoundly so many of the episodes touch on so many of the things that are going on in my life. I find myself thinking again and again about how their themes address what is going on in my world right now.

In the first book they look at the themes of loneliness, commitment, fear, vulnerability, promises, goals, betrayal, and hope. I am at the end of the second book and the episode I listened to while I was making dinner was on the theme of love, if you want to hear it go ahead and go listen now ( book 2, Chapter 18). Then come back and finish reading.

They address love in so many different ways but the one that stands out for me is how you love someone and then send your love with them into the world and hope that you don't lose the person that you love. I stopped chopping carrots and thought about that in terms of my children and the life we are living at the moment.

I fell in love with these children because I wanted to be their Mom. They were not born to me and instead walked in the front door bringing with them a whole world of pain and trauma that meant the my loving them was going to hurt me too. I did not know that when I met them. I did not know that my love and commitment was not going to be enough to heal them. I so thought that I could fix everything for them with love, homemade halloween costume and amazing meals.

I quickly learned it was going to take a lot more to help them and so I read and went to workshops. I networked and researched and did everything I could while I loved them to pieces in the midst of our chaos.

It was not enough for Kevin. Once he went out into the world my love and connection to him was not enough. That hurts so much. I miss him and so wish that we were not in a situation where choosing between our children was necessary.

But I don't regret loving him as fiercely as I do. Perhaps one day he will remember that love. He will be reminded of it and be ready to make things right.



Wednesday 20 February 2019

Answers would be welcome.

I have been thinking a lot about what my family is going to look like going forward. This is not what I planned, this is not what I wanted and yet here I am.

I married a man much older then me, I convinced him to adopt and then thought I might have a baby. That didn't happen and we adopted again. I thought that even though things were hard I would be able to have a family to love and connect with as I moved through my life. I thought I would be able to make it different then the family I grew up in. I thought I would be the connected Mom who advocated fiercely for my kids and helped them to become successful ( whatever that might of meant for them) adults who had parents in their corner.

Now I have a rapidly aging partner who doesn't take care of his health, one child who pretends we do not exist, one who has been removed from my home and one who is 13 - girls at 13 are hard. My boys are both facing sexual assault charges from the things that happened in our home. My daughters life will be forever altered by the fact that we adopted her. We fought for her to be in a home with other kids so she could learn to be a kid again and instead she learned that brothers have sex with you and when you speak up no one believes you. I may never get over the fact that none of us believed her and social workers and therapists wrote letters to suggest her stories should not be believed.

The guilt and shame are so overwhelming some days.

I am not working, I miss my job and the community that came with it and I am still bitter that I had to leave because of my kids profound needs. I have way to many health issues many of which are a result of the immense stress that has been the dominant part of my parenting journey.

I often wonder what my life will look like in 10 years. Will I be all alone in the world? Will any of my children be a part of my life? Will I regret ever taking this on?

I wish I had answers but when I ask questions they just lead to more questions.

Saturday 16 February 2019

It could of been done so much better

So Randall was charged on Tuesday morning. The detective was amazing and supportive, she gets how impossibly hard this for all of us and showed us so much compassion.

DCFS on the other hand showed us zero compassion and had no actual for plan for Randall even though everyone had known for weeks that this was going to happen. He and I spent 5 hours sitting in a waiting room while they tried to get their crap together and find a place for him to go because I could not bring him home.  They did have a group home bed that was found and secured by my therapist but since they did not have their crap together that was not secured for the day that it was required. I was so mad.

He ended up going to a foster home about 2 hours from here for the rest of this week until his group home bed was ready today. I met him in our town and took him to therapy and then to the Group Home. He was lucky to get a spot, he had some great people advocating for him with the supervisors at the group home and that they meant they made some exceptions and offered him a bed. We are so lucky that they did. They get trauma, they staff are trained in DDP ( dyadic developmental psychotherapy ) which is a fantastic thing and they kids like Randall.

It's going to be a huge shift for him and I have so many feelings about letting go of my boy but I did not really have any other choices. We are going to have to figure out how to support him and help him as best we can from here and hope that it is enough.


Tuesday 5 February 2019

Let's Talk about the last 4 weeks.

We came home from vacation to messages from DCFS and the police due to the investigation that was started before the Christmas holidays. We rushed around and took children from here to there and tried our best to get the chaos under control.

 It didn't work.

We did not get it under control because about 12 hours after we got back from our trip Kate disclosed that Randall had been sexually inappropriate with her as well. It was much different then what had happened with Kevin and in some cases her idea but yet it was still wrong.

Randall is being charged and will move from our home next week and since the allegations we have not been allowed to leave them in the same place in our home for even a moment. There are adult eyes every time they are in the same room and it has made life impossibly hard.

I feel like such a failure as a parent, as a human, as a survivor myself. How did this happen? How did I miss it? Why didn't I push more when Kate spoke out at 6? Why didn't anyone hear her when she spoke the words aloud at school? Why are we all so very broken?

I feel so much shame and have no answers just more questions.

My shame has kept me from here because I have known how to admit to the universe that I have failed so profoundly.

People in my life keep telling me I did everything I could, I tried so hard and this is not my fault. My kids were broken when they came to me. My kids had already been hurt so very many times and the fact that they hurt each other is tragic but it is not as a result of anything I did... except adopt them.

I can hear that mantra somedays but today I am overwhelmed and feel like my life is never, ever going to get better.