Things come together and fall apart

Lately, I've noticed that I've become more anxious, due to both my thyroid medication and the more mundane realities of middle age. I've always tended toward a slight and useful paranoia, but circumstance and hormones have tipped the balance and I am substantially more prone to worry than I used to be. Although I've come through a disruptive bout with thyroid cancer pretty well, it left me with the lingering feeling that if anyone were to look too hard, we'd probably find some more bad news. I don't get through the routine mammogram as breezily as I used to, and the other night I woke up from a sound sleep with the distinct thought that, just based on age and statistics, my life (at least the active part of it) was probably more than half over, which was not a soothing thought. I am sure I am quite typical of American adults in their forties.

I'd like to quell the emotional edginess of my newfound perspective (or lack thereof), and at the same time, I'm aware that it's a fairly frank response to reality. As the Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once said, "Life is like getting into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink."

My fretfulness does not make me a better parent, but it does make me more like T, who is a world-class worrywart. Just today, he walked into the bathroom and said with absolute seriousness "What are we going to do when I'm not here to remind you to brush your teeth EVERY morning?!" Yesterday, he told me three times "Do not forget to lock the front door behind me after I leave!" The day before that, while we were packing for a short vacation, he must have asked Tim and I a dozen times "Is there ANYTHING we forgot? ANYTHING AT ALL?!"

Selfishly, I find this relaxing and a little bit comic (my thyroid medication compromises my short-term memory, and I'm embarrassed to admit that his post-traumatic stress-induced hypervigilance works out rather nicely sometimes!). There's little likelihood I'll overlook some obvious risk, so vigilant is he in alerting me to life's potential hazards. But I feel for the guy. It's no wonder he has a hard time giving up his beloved marijuana!

We had a nice weekend trip with T and his bestfriend, with whom he shares a very similar life story. Together, they create an odd atmosphere, both innocent and mournful, but they love each other best perhaps because they let each other ebb and flow and never let a stormy mood interfere with their absolute loyalty to one another. I think they are a bit ahead of me on the path to enlightenment, as obvious as their struggles are. (In fact, I have often wondered that T must be a particularly advanced being, because the universe seems to have conspired to hurl at him an epic and ceaseless array of thunderbolts from the moment he was born, while all it's really dealt me was an ordinary midlife crisis!)

Listening to them chat casually about this childhood disaster and that one, I was struck by their advanced awareness of loss. The lesson I am learning now--that I can't control or predict the future, that inevitably, everything I have and love will be lost or change--took a long time to sink in. Dumb luck made me arrogant; I became accustomed to having and holding on to what I wanted for myself. But T and others like him knew the truth very well a long time ago; through no action of their own, they've lost their mothers and their fathers, as well as numerous homes, many friendships, and most opportunities to experience a "normal" childhood. (While we were driving to the mountains, T's bestfriend casually said to me "This is so great- I was never allowed to go on trips like this when I was in foster care, because I had to get permission for everything from my social worker, and if was up to her, nobody would ever be allowed to even talk to me without being fingerprinted first.") Yet they manage to get up every day and take the next shaky step on their path, and listening to them together, it's impossible not to notice their open-heartedness.

Which brings me to another bit of Buddhist perspective, two quotes from the writer Pema Chodron that, together, capture my thoughts about bonding with and parenting an older traumatized kid. She writes, "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others."

And further, "We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

I'd say that only a grasp of those two ideas is required to make a decent foster/adoptive parent to a traumatized kid.

Happy New Year!

Teenagers are Children Too

Last week, during our family visit at the treatment house, I was being a nag. T lost his patience, stormed away from the table where we were having dinner and refused to come back for group family therapy (which we do every Sunday). We shrugged our shoulders and, after he made it clear he would not return, left.

During the course of the week, we got a reasonable apology letter explaining that "I get a lot of feedback here every day and sometimes I just don't want to hear anymore. I'm working on myself, and I'm making change, but more pressure from you doesn't help." He added "What I did was wrong," and also "You are the best parents I could have!" He excels at stream-of-consciousness.

We returned to family group this week, and T made me an origami paper heart while we were talking. He also made a lengthy speech for all present about how he is there voluntarily, and about how he came there because he wanted to stop hurting us. He went on to explain that he used to think that it was his choice if he wanted to do things that caused him harm, but eventually saw that hurting himself was hurting us, and realized he didn't want to cause pain to those who love him.

He also went on to share an epiphany that I found most striking. It went something like this:

I like to help other people, but I could never help myself. I wanted to focus on others, because to focus on helping myself would mean thinking about my history. I didn't want to look at my history. I've been through pretty much everything you can go through. I am starting to realize that I can help myself by looking at what I've been through, and that helps me listen better to other people too.

I am often astonished when the kids join us for the join parent/teen session at how much they illuminate the room with their insight and tenderness. Most are on parole, and all are "at risk", or however you want to put it. Many are not there voluntarily. And yet they are all working so hard to communicate with their moms and dads, and they are full of self-reflection and uncertainty and perception. It makes me think that perhaps teen addiction and teen treatment is quite unique; their motivation to repair a rift with a parent, and their awareness about needing parenting in the first place is surprising and moving. Their flexibility is also striking - they try out new ideas, and absorb optimism when it is offered to them. They are all still children, in many ways, some perhaps all the more because they have missed out on certain healthy experiences of adolescent independence by falling into substance abuse and dependency.

Tonight, we mixed it up and parents spent some time talking with a kid other than their own. The boy I was paired with told me how much he wants his dad to take him to the movies. He said that his dad works so hard that he only has time to talk to him when he does something wrong. He wasn't accusatory - he offered this in a shy, gentle way. What struck me was how earnestly he longed for his dad to just ask him to the movies.

I think sometimes as parents of a teenager, it's easy to assume that they'd rather die than spend time with you in public. But that's not true, according to these kids. They seem to just want a break from official parenting, long enough to see that you really really like them. As one of them said tonight, "When we were using, we stayed out all night and all we thought about was what we wanted. Now we're all in here, all we want to do is get that next visit with our parents. All week, I just think about when I'm going to see my mom."

ADD and Attunement

After one of the readers of this blog recommended Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which had a huge influence on me, I picked up his other book, Scattered. It describes the dynamics of early infant development and Attention Deficit Disorder. As I noted before, I resisted an ADD diagnosis for T for a long time, because it seemed to be the diagnosis du jour and I have a prejudice against medicating kids. While I still hold the belief that psychiatric medication should only be part of a treatment plan, I see now that I was wrong about ADD. Properly explained, it strikes me as a useful lens for helping kids like T and their adoptive parents get creative about addressing and sometimes repairing gaps in their emotional growth.

Besides the science, Mate is a lovely writer. I enjoy passages like this one, about early infancy:

Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional self-regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain herself in a relatively nonstressed, non-anxious, nondepressed state of mind. Its clearest expression is the rapturous mutual gaze infant and mother direct at each other, locked in a private and special emotional realm, from which, at the moment, the rest of the world is as completely excluded as from the womb.

Mate draws a connection between the disruption of the mother/infant bond and Attention Deficit Disorder, which he says might just as well be called Attunement Deficit Disorder. In other words, if the dynamic of attunement goes awry, the prefrontal cortex may not develop normally, resulting in later problems with impulse control and emotional regulation.

When we were taking our foster/adoptive parent training courses, I remember that the teacher said that we must become “attachment experts.” She meant that we needed to find ways to help them create the tight bond with us that is at the root of the parent/child relationship. I hadn’t thought about attunement, and learned only by trial and error the practice of trying to remain calm and receptive in my mind so that T is able to sense that I am available to him. It also took me some time to learn that such bonding is mostly nonverbal, heavily dependent on eye contact and physical proximity. I watched Tim and T play checkers last weekend, and it was obvious that it had a more direct affect on T than any conversation could have.

Mate also writes about the fact that the dance of attunement and attachment is up to the infant, not the parent. The infant engages and, when he becomes overstimulated, withdraws. The parent is the one who needs to match the baby’s rhythm so that he learns that she is able to perceive and respond to his state of mind, and, thus, that he is understood. I found that useful, and true of T in my experience. In the beginning, we learned quickly that we needed to be available, but not assertive, and let him come to us and go away again according to his own needs and tolerance for intimacy.

It has proven to be absolutely true that it’s only when we are nonstressed, relaxed and open-minded that T is able to calm himself. In fact, living with a kid like him can be revelatory, because he senses any stress or unhappiness that we might be trying to bury sometimes before we are even aware of it. He is like the canary in the emotional coal mine. If he tells me I need to calm down, or that I’m getting angry, he’s always right, intuiting a change in my rhythm that I haven’t even noticed yet.

When one of us is displeased with his behavior and shows it, he often becomes very agitated. Last Sunday, during our family visit at the residential treatment house, he and I had a small disagreement and I made an expression of displeasure, which sent him into a tailspin and he spent the next half hour anxiously checking my face and trying to re-regulate. That kind of separation anxiety might seem tragic, but mostly it just strikes me as a sign of where he's at in his emotional development. His anxiety strikes me as a lasting indication of what he learned about life’s harsher realities, and a sign of the vitality of his surviving instinct to connect.

It’s tiring sometimes to interact with such intensity, in somewhat the same way that the constant needs of a young child can be exhausting. It can also lead to somewhat awkward situations in public; some people are taken aback by such a tall child interacting with his obviously non-biological mother with infant intensity. We don't really care though. We are busy bonding and filling that deficit of attunement.

T Day

A mid-week aside:

Early on, we established "T Day" - which came to be days on which he volunteered at a local hospital. Although he was interested in and agreeable to this after-school activity (because his ambition is to be a nurse), volunteering also felt a little nerdy to him and it often left him tired at the end of his shift. So we invented "T Day": volunteer days became "T Days"--days when his will dictates our other plans, within reason.

He has since stopped volunteering but the "T Day" tradition survives. Now that he's in twice-weekly therapy and grappling with difficult memories, he has decided that therapy is his official after-school activity (fair enough!) and that therapy days are therefore "T Days". (Often, his logic is irrefutable in this way.)

On "T Day", he gets whatever he wants. Thankfully, his desires are modest. He wants a fast-food snack en route to therapy. He wants his choice of dinner. Sometimes he wants to go to a movie later in the evening, though rarely. He wants to be allowed to stay up an extra half hour.

But most of all, he loves to remind us that it's "T Day". It gives him a sense of power. If I disagree with him on "T Day" he'll get in my face and say playfully "What day is today? Did you forget? Is it not T Day?"

He refers to it that way, using the third person. It's hilarious. For example, today, Tim forgot and balked at buying an after-school fast food snack on the way to therapy. I apologized to T for forgetting to fill Tim in. "I got it covered," he texted me back "I know how to work T Day."

Indeed. A friend once commented, "He missed out on a lot of T Days growing up. Probably every day should be T Day!" I don't think we could stomach that, from a nutritional point of view. But I certainly agree - T Day gratifies an unmet need for indulgence. It also takes the edge off the intensity of therapy.

T Two

Recently we have been working on a theory that there are two T's. The first we call "T Number One." He is generally balanced, perhaps a bit mischievous, mostly compliant, and approaches life with reasonable moderation. He accurately perceives the world, and has the capacity for judgment. He is generally optimistic, or at least practical.

The second, "T Number Two", is self-destructive, angry, defiant, and extreme. He damages friendships and other relationships, and makes dangerous decisions. He has distorted, negative perceptions of the world.

This week, unfortunately, we started strong with T Number One, and then by Wednesday, we were living with T Number Two. That pattern isn't unusual - his number one trigger is school, and he rarely holds it together for an entire school week. I think often of the wisdom of something Foster Cline says: assume that the child is doing the best he can. T tries hard every week. It is agony for him to be unable to modify his self-destructive behavior. And this is the best he can do right now. We try to stretch the capacity of T Number One to hold it together, and right now we can't get past Wednesdays. If we get to Thursdays or - one can only hope! - Fridays by the end of his junior year, it will be a monumental achievement.

I don't mean that T literally has a split personality. In the professional writing on such subjects, I guess you'd say that T number one is "regulated" and T Number Two is "dysregulated." His periods of dysregulation come on like bad weather - you can see them approach, they are intense and disruptive, and they pass.

I love him so much and feel so much wonder at the progress he's made and the meaning he's brought to my life that I probably do not always state clearly how difficult it is to be his parent. I'd hate for any parent of a traumatized kid out there to feel like I'm having an easy time of it while they struggle. I am as vulnerable as anyone else and I feel beat up and victimized by his behavior sometimes. He is intensely angry for many very sound reasons, and that anger has festered in him for many years until he doesn't even know it's name and when it takes hold of him, he is formidably difficult and frankly abusive. I am a strong personality myself, an "alpha" as I have said before. And yet when he takes revenge because we've withheld his allowance because he's using it to buy drugs, or when he rages at me that he is going to tell the social worker on me because I have restricted his privileges after he was picked up by a truancy officer, I feel despondent and exhausted.

At those times, I do sometimes withdraw from him. I cannot always maintain the authoritative parental stance of being strong, wise and compassionate. I get rigid and angry. I want him to just go to school, to hold it together just for five days on end without getting high, cutting class, interrupting my workday with calls from the dean's office. I lose my ability to communicate compassionately.

When that happens, I wait. T Number Two is not reachable, but he also doesn't stick around for long. He is a construct, a puffed up angry false self, perhaps produced by extreme duress to protect a tender T Number One when he was younger and constantly under siege. Indeed, when the storm moves on, T is often unusually tender and communicative afterward. He is apologetic, but he's also very receptive. He reaches out with many little tendrils of attachment to make sure you are still there, and upon finding that you are, grows very soft.

I worry over how little time we have to try to help him learn to regulate his feelings and modify his behavior so that he can hold it together in the grown up world. He is okay when he is with us - weekends and holidays are invariably peaceful. But a child who cannot make it more than three days at school without a meltdown is likely to have similar difficulty holding a job, or getting through college. Someday soon, he will be out of high school, out of the foster care system, and (eventually) out of our home. He will have to make his way in a world that takes him at face value, doesn't know or much care about his history, and delivers harsh and sometimes long-lasting consequences. Preparing him for that world is a daunting challenge.

Raising Alpha

I'm taken with Cesar Milan and Dog Whisperer right now. I watch it at the gym. Something about the formulaic drama of a dog, usually raised without proper discipline and order, trying to fit in to some family or other, and humans who do all the wrong things for mostly loving reasons I find...gripping. The dogs who pull at my heart strings are the alphas who don't have a pack to lead, or whose humans have let them run amok.

I often find myself musing on the fact that T. is an alpha. I don't mean that he is any way like a dog, or anything less than a fully human young man. But in the dynamics of the fear, aggression, anxiety and uncertainty of confused alphas that play out on Dog Whisperer I find a certain...poetic resonance.

Tim is out of town right now. When he leaves overnight, T. gets temporarily confused. I think he wonders whether, with Tim away, my power might be diminished. He also feels more vulnerable. Tim is a steady rock. I have a tendency to serve meals late and to "innovate" with household routines. That, coupled with the fact that I'm female, and nine inches shorter than T., leads to extra alpha behavior. He startles at unexpected noise. He checks the locks on the doors before bed several times. He hovers near me instead of relaxing at home. He thinks he's in charge. He's trying to help. I find myself being extra authoritative.

I think alphas are oft misinterpreted. In his assertiveness, physical strength and controlling behavior, T. doesn't intend aggression. He never hurts anyone--never even comes close. In his world, he's helping. If nobody is in charge, well then somebody better be, and he figures "It may as well be me." He is leaderly. He once told me in a quite guileless way "I have to test my teachers; I see if they are in charge of the class, and if they aren't, I take charge!" He said it in a very sunny way as if he were saying he picks up trash on the playground. I realized that on some level he really intends it as a service. LOL. (I don't have to tell you that his teachers aren't so grateful.)

When he is relatively secure, his alpha qualities have many lovely manifestations. He cares for young children at the hospital, and he loves his uniform and his responsibilities. Every night at our house, he makes a thorough investigation of every room before bed, turning off lights and tidying things up. In a former foster home with six children, he woke early every day so he could rouse the other kids and get them showered and off to school in an orderly way. (When the foster mom refused to drive them all to school one rainy day, he also led a "sit in" in the living room until she called the police.)

When he's not so secure, he has some more annoying alpha behaviors. He'll stand in front of you when you're trying to pass from one room to the next, effectively blocking your route and forcing you to interact with him. He issues demands, orders and prohibitions. He plays rough. He's just kind of bossy. Yesterday he texted me at work "Buy me some Cheez Its." Um, no.

I love my alpha child. I was an alpha child myself. I ran for student council class leader every year. I edited the newspaper. I dominated in sports. I was taller than everybody else. It's just how I was. I think it takes an alpha to parent an alpha. Without an alpha parent, an alpha child can reach for power that isn't appropriate. Alpha children need to be challenged with complex tasks and given constructive ways to demonstrate their strength under the guidance of alpha adults, but they also need to be kids, unburdened with responsibility for everyone else.

I think living with two alphas is a little hard on Tim because he isn't naturally an alpha parent. Tim is a negotiator; he is a classic beta. He isn't insecure or uncertain; he's just mellow. He is happy to be next in line, after the leader. When T. asserts his alpha-ness, part of Tim thinks "Okay, you're in charge." Then another part of him thinks "Wait, I'm the parent--I must be in charge!" and still another part of him thinks "Lulu is in charge, and she's gonna be mad at me for letting T. take charge!" He looks befuddled by the competing voices in his head. He is so important though - he is teaching T. to be respectful in the way he uses his power and showing him that there are multiple models of masculinity.

I think being a good alpha parent is about calm, confident, decisive discipline--but it is mostly about providing: protection, safety, predictability, food, money, shelter, advocacy and affection. T. doesn't need to do anything to get those things; it is our responsibility, being in charge of the household, to provide them. When he no longer needs them (at least not daily), he'll be ready to be in charge of his own pack, even if its a pack of one. Until then, it's our job. He can "help" - but he doesn't need to take over.

Good at Family

One of the things I admire so much about our foster/adoptive teenage son is what I think of as his skill at family.

It is beyond comprehension where he acquired these skills, unless you either accept that such things are innate, or decide that it's possible to learn positive skills through negative examples. In any case, I believe he is good (and getting better) at key aspects of family life: attunement, organization, reconciliation, and play.

Attunement: To me this means knowing how to get in synch with another person. I am pretty sure he developed this capacity through trauma - I'm sure it's quite useful when you're living with a severely abusive adult to be able to read and respond to their moods. However, he's able to carry this skill forward in more healthy environments. We noticed it early on. If you hum a song, he picks it up three rooms and way and finishes the tune. If the mood tilts too far in one direction, he'll switch it up to establish equilibrium. Sometimes he'll start an argument, just to get us back on the same page - he's like the princess with the proverbial pea under her mattress if there's something that needs to be aired and he won't rest until it is.

Organization: There is seemingly no end to the chaos that a life in foster care can wreak. T. has been in sixteen homes. He's had multiple caseworkers. Some of his case files are in another county, on paper, and thus not accessible to his current caseworkers. His birth family, for various reasons, had severe difficulties such that the whereabouts of his father and his siblings was difficult or impossible to track. He told me recently that he's not sure how he's actually related to the person he calls "grandma"; he's pretty sure she's his second or third cousin. Perhaps in response to all of this upheaval, he's quite orderly. When he first came to us, he was TOO orderly - I believe the clinical term is "overly compliant." After that eased up, he became just garden-variety organized. He keeps his important papers in a neat stack in his desk drawer. He remembers dates and appointments and names. He knows the phone numbers and birthdays of all his nearest and dearest by memory. He's taught me that children need organization, and that lack of organization is a cause of significant anxiety, especially for traumatized kids.

Reconciliation: Living in close quarters with others produces intimacy and some bumps and scratches. I greatly admire his capacity to resolve the inevitable misunderstandings and hurt feelings before they fester. He has bursts of temper like any teenager. But if we sit still on the sofa afterwards, he circles back repeatedly, "pinging" us with little attempts at reconciliation. If we respond with openness, eventually after a few "pings" he settles in for a "big talk." He doesn't get up until everyone has said their piece and we've moved along. Often he stays on to chat a bit, euphoric from the feeling of having been heard. It's a great skill, one that really surprised us the first few times we saw him in action following a conflict.

Play: One day when T. was telling me some anecdote about a previous foster home, I had an epiphany. He was talking about how he'd been disciplined, and what he'd done wrong to deserve it. I knew him when he was in that foster home, and I was familiar with the environment there and what his life was like then. "You know what always bothered me about that house?" I said. "I think parents have to give guidance. It's part of what we do. But we also have to bring the fun. That house didn't seem like there was much fun going on." He looked surprised, and he agreed. We play alot. T. likes to lick us by surprise sometimes - he'll sneak up and lick us on the cheek just to hear us squeal. He hides sometimes when we come home so we have to look for him. He loves to flop on our bed and tickle our feet, and he's very quick to pick up a silliness and turn it into an inside joke. We sass each other and tell each other the things that nobody but your family will ever tell you, like "your feet smell." He's just fun.

In all the writing about foster/adoption of older children, I think the basic skills of family living are often given short shrift. We navigate many complicated issues with him, ranging from substance abuse to grief about the relatives he's lost. His skill at attunement, organization, reconciliation and play are a big part of building the day to day bonds that support doing that work.

Parenting Child Survivors

I've hesitated to write about this topic for fear of exposing confidences. But this blog has deliberately been made anonymous, I don't share it with people who interact with us firsthand, and I want it to be a place where other parents of traumatized kids can find some common threads. So I'm going to try to address this.

I want to share some thoughts about parenting a teenage survivor of sexual abuse. I think there is way too little said about this issue, given the sheer number of people (one in three children, by some estimates) who are survivors of sexual abuse. Frankly, some of the training we got as we were getting our license to foster/adopt was misleading and barely touched on the things a kid like T. goes through.

Like many children who weren't adequately protected growing up, T. was subject to multiple forms of abuse not only by his primary parent, but also by other adults who surrounded her. Her parenting skills were so compromised that he was unprotected and therefore vulnerable to many misfortunes.

His history of sexual abuse didn't appear anywhere in his (already harrowing) case history and he never shared it with a social worker or foster parent. (I would advise potential foster/adoptive parents of children coming from severely traumatic backgrounds to assume there is a lot that isn't in the child's official record.)

I think the number one thing a kid like T. is checking for as they gradually disclose what happened to them is: Will you feel differently about me because of this? Do you think I did something wrong? He is also looking for compassion as he struggles through the aftermath in the best way he knows how. He is saying "I do the things I do for a reason, and I need you to understand."

Knowing what happened to him helps us better understand his physical boundaries. We let him come to us and dictate how we would share affection - tickling and bear-hugging contests were his earliest solutions to how to get close without giving up control. Grooming is also very important - helping each other touch up a hairline, for example. Those are respectful, manageable ways to be physically close, things that he associates with care. He is working out how and when he likes to touch at his own pace. Lately, he flops on our bed at night when he feels like chatting. Coming into our room and lying down on our bed is a big step and you can see in his eyes that he is experimenting with this new lowering of boundaries and find that it's not only safe, but very fun and funny to boot. He tests intimacy and physical affection like a scientist, making studied experiments and processing data before returning for more forays into family life.

Knowing what he's been through also helps us better address other parenting issues, like substance abuse. I think all parenting is a balancing act between guiding behavior and nurturing underlying needs. I find that in grappling with substance abuse, it's easy to become all about policing behavior. As we've learned more about his past, we've been better able to understand why he's drawn to numbing experiences and things that help him relax and dissociate. It's not too hard to understand why, when nobody listened to him as a child, he eventually grew into an adolescent with a weakness for anything that will help him forget. He is very brave for actively remembering now, and sometimes it's overwhelming and he retreats to old unhealthy behaviors that nevertheless feel like familiar friends to him.

A certain type of person reminds him of a perpetrator, and we try to gently redirect him when someone triggers a trauma response, stepping between him and someone who makes him feel unsafe. We've learned that means taking a stronger hand in determining his teachers, among other things. We never question why he wears three layers of clothes in even the hottest weather - there are good reasons for that. I make sure his clean laundry always includes all three layers - he has rules about what he wears on top of what.

I think adolescent boys sometimes process the experience of abuse and its aftermath through the lens of their emerging masculine identity. I see T. fretting over whether he is strong, whether he should have done more to stop what happened to him and his younger brother. I see that he feels unspoken anxiety about sex and at the same time, he feels pressured by other boys and men to express sexual confidence. He wonders if what happened to him "changed him" in some way. By way of helping, I try to be very straightforward, positive and informative about sex, to balance some shame and confusion that linger for him. We try to be proactive rather than reactive, chatting often about issues like consent, safe sex, and intimacy. The car is our Camp David for sex talk.

The adoption process itself can exacerbate his struggles. T. really wanted to be adopted, but he was told by social workers that he probably wouldn't find adoptive parents, because people want babies and younger kids. He is smart, and he understood that potential adoptive parents are looking for kids "without problems." That played into his shame and guilt about what happened to him. It caused him to suppress his child-like tendencies and put himself under enormous stress as he tried to hide all his "problems" in order to get adopted. What a hideous thing, to be made to feel like you have to mask your pain in order to be a "desirable" child.

Parenting an older child (we started the adoption process at 15) with this kind of abuse history, is beautiful and rewarding. My partner and I are the consummate amateur parents. Aren't all parents amateurs? I believe in the power of amateurs. A child like T. knows the difference between a professional who is paid to treat him and a volunteer parent who just loves him like crazy and does their best for that reason.

There is also tremendous grief in parenting him and I imagine that is to be expected for any parent of a traumatized child. I feel deeply sad that I wasn't there earlier, that I can't do anything to take away the pain of what already happened. Although it's not rational, in some sense I feel like I neglected him by not arriving in his life on time. It's part of the crazy bottomless love of being his parent. I feel hugely sad that there is no perfect thing I can say or do when he confides in me to make it go away. It's not that I don't see the value in listening and responding with compassion. But I'd be lying if I said that I ever feel like it's enough. When he mourns, I mourn.

Lest anyone who is thinking about adopting an older child be deterred, I can also say that the conversations I've had with T. about his history have been the most honest and profound in my life. Kids like T. have shouldered incredible burdens, and survived shocking things. Surely, sometimes their minds and hearts break under the stress of what they've endured and professional help can be critical. But they are not a clinical problem to solve; there is so much more than that to be done and so much reward in doing it. Becoming a "chosen family" together makes me aware of the better parts of being human like never before.

I love the Hemingway quote "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong in the broken places." In part because of what he's been through, T. is deeper, more considerate, more articulate, more emotionally intelligent than any teenager I've ever met. When he decides to tell us something that he thinks we need to know, his self-possession and introspection take my breath away. I never feel "sorry for him" - his greatest fear. I always feel awe, and a great deal of humility and respect. There are lots of kids who, in clinical terms, are "healthy" whom I find materialistic, narcissistic and boring. T. struggles with depths of pain beyond what most adults I know have endured and, among other things, it produces in him an extraordinary wellspring of compassion and soulfulness.

I think as a culture we have strange ideas about childhood, and we tend to feel frightened by children who have been hurt and who have special needs as a result. But a child, like T, who has been hurt and still seeks and builds relationships with adults who will listen and understand is the most wonderfully innocent child in the world.

Women

I'm not really one for assigning essential qualities based on gender. But being T.'s parent has got me thinking about attachment and bonding and the role that gender plays in a new way.

Tim and I are very different people, so of course we have different dynamics with T. But that aside, I think it's accurate to say that T. is psychologically preoccupied with his female caregivers, and his anxieties about abandonment tend to attach to women. His mother left him when he was four days old and didn't reenter his life until he was 14. He has grown up by stringing together a series of temporary living situations, all of them headed up by single moms. Each of those situations ended in a way that was traumatic for him, and he missed and longed for and felt angry with the (female) parent who couldn't keep him anymore.

I didn't really think about any of this until I noticed that T.'s behavior was a little off recently. Like all teens, T. is pretty moody and he gets frustrated and angry sometimes at parental guidance. But recently his anger seemed to be running deeper and lasting longer than it usually does. It felt more fundamental.

I was musing over why he was being so unusually unforgiving, and I started to wonder if maybe it had to do with a recent change in our routine. Last week, I had a business trip, and I was away for three days. When I returned, I was really busy at work, and I left the morning and after-school rituals to Tim, whereas we usually share those duties. Tim is frankly the far-better parent in terms of day-to-day consistency and there is plenty of warmth between him and T. Regardless, T. was getting more Tim and less me for awhile. During this time, he started avoiding meals - he skipped breakfast, and often grazed at will then dodged dinner. He also started to direct angry barbs at me. He'd be sweet with Tim, and then when I got home from work the mood would suddenly sour. Something seemed to be seething beneath the surface.

I made a point of giving him more attention. I got up early, made his breakfast, and left it in his breakfast spot. He stumbled through the kitchen, did a double-take, noticed his breakfast sitting there, gulped it down, muttered "thankyou-" and staggered into the shower. He never says thank you for his breakfast! A clue. I drove him to school and picked him up. The next day I did the same. That night he invited me to watch a movie with him. At bedtime, he came and gave me a winning smile for no reason. He was just happy that I was looking at him.

Ugh, stupid me. He missed my attention. He's been so grumpy lately, and his behavior has required some extra monitoring and discipline. I forgot to think about the fact that he's ATTACHED to us. When we aren't there, he misses us. And we aren't interchangeable - he needs me, and he needs Tim. Tim is patient, nurturing and he does all the cooking. I'm the crisis-fixer, and he talks to me about clothes and girls and the warts on his finger. We represent different dimensions of his reality.

The other day, he came into the living room. He said he wanted to ask us something. "Would you say you guys ever fight? Do you ever...disagree?" he asked. He wasn't being cute - he was almost angry when he said it. He followed with "What would you say about me if you DIDN'T like what I was doing, and I wasn't around? What do you say to each other about me?"

I realized that living with a couple and grasping the dynamics of adult couplehood is a change for him. He has never lived with an adult man before, nor with a couple. I don't believe it's better or worse for a kid like T. to be parented by a couple versus a single parent - we just happen to be a pair, and that's how we parent. And it's not something he's familiar with. So of course he finds it weird that we're ALWAYS on the same page when we give him guidance, and of course he wonders what we say to each other about him.

I'm reminded that he needs exclusive attention from both of us. He needs to feel he has a distinct and special connection to each of us as an individual. Just one of us being away, or busy, or preoccupied (and particularly me, for the reasons I describe above) is enough to trigger his anxiety, even if he is still at home getting plenty of attention from the other parent.

Parent the Need, Not the Behavior

In our MAPP training, the instructor often repeated the refrain "Parent the need, not the behavior."

I find myself chanting that over and over on the treadmill sometimes.

It's alot harder than it sounds, like most things to do with parenting an older kid out of foster care. I mean, it's one thing to parent the need rather than the behavior when your three-year-old is having a freakout. It's another to sort out a 16 year-old boy.

Nevertheless, I find it a useful, somewhat meditative thought. When I'm overwhelmed by the behavior (skipping classes, for example, is this week's hot topic), I switch my focus to the need for awhile. It gets me out of policing mode and puts me back in touch with the love and the fundamental bond. It doesn't necessarily make me more effective, but it reminds me why I'm doing this and alleviates the feelings of futility that sneak up on me occasionally when the behavior feels out of my control.

I've learned never to ask him "Why are you doing this?" It sounds desperate and ignorant. (Gentler versions like "Tell me how you felt when you decided not to go to class?" are okay, but rarely result in a meaningful response because he doesn't have that self-awareness yet.) Anyway, one can pretty well guess why he's doing most things.

You only have to look at his life to figure that the realm of unmet needs is so huge you can kind of aim in a general direction and be pretty sure you're gonna hit something significant. I'd say his list of needs goes something like:

- the need to know you have a place to sleep and food to eat every day and nobody is going to come take that from you today

- the need to have one adult you can call for help when you are in trouble

- the need to be safe at home, to not be violated or hurt

- the need to be recognized for who you really are

- the need to make sense of your life and your story at your own pace

- the need to be allowed time and space to change as you're able

- the need to feel you have some control over your life

So when I get tired I aim for at least one of those needs.

He's twice had foster parents who called in the notorious "7 day notice" (a demand that must be met for the county to relocate him within a week) for infractions similar to what happened this week. In those earlier situations, he came home one afternoon, a social worker was there, all his belongings were in garbage bags (no time or money for suitcases) and he was driven to another county and dropped off at a new home in a place where he knew nobody.

Now, let me say that I understand what drove those foster parents to do that. They felt they could not parent him effectively anymore, that his behavior was disrupting their lives and their available attention for the other kids in their homes. But I also understand that T. felt that they "threw him away." It reinforced his belief that he's bad, that people grow tired of him and want to get rid of him, that he matters to nobody and nobody understands him.

When managing his behavior is wearing me out, I find it relaxing to remember that there are PLENTY of other adults on hand to help with the behavioral aspect - including his social worker, our new therapy program, certain teachers and his school counselor. But when it comes to addressing his deep underlying needs, it's mostly just us. We are the only people who can be there in that way right now.

Some days I'm afraid I won't live up to the promise - he'll do something that I just won't be able to handle. But as my mom says, what parent of a teenager hasn't felt that way?

Age is Just a Number

The other day, we were out to eat and T. (who can be extremely controlling about food) announced that he didn't like the choices at the Mexican restaurant and he wanted a burger instead. I said, "Great, I'll give you $10 and you can go across the street to the diner and get yourself a burger."

"I'm only 10!" he yelped. "I can't cross the street by myself!"

In earlier days, I would have been completely confounded. I might even have teased him. Now I know, although he's just hit his 16th birthday, if T. says he's ten, today he's ten.

He didn't pick that number at random. He was ten when he was taken away for the final time from the relatives who were caring for him. He was ten when some of the worst things that happened to him in his life had just taken place. He was ten when he realized he'd be in foster care for the rest of his childhood.

He probably didn't even think when he said it. The unconscious - especially when we're playing - has a way of telling the truth.

I suppose one could be spooked by a 16 year-old who occasionally thinks he's ten. I take it as an indication of where his needs are coming from. When we were fulfilling our county-mandated parenting classes before T. came to live with us, I recall the teacher saying "Parent them where they are, not where you think they should be."

There was an interesting model in the class. It showed the cycle of need and satisfaction that attends to early infancy. The teacher explained that an infant lives in a constant cycle of need and gratification, and that the average infant goes through ten thousand cycles of need and satisfaction before developing a secure attachment to its adult caretaker.

T. was born premature and drug-addicted, and he went through eleven foster homes as an infant before a cousin took him in. It's hard to imagine he got his ten thousand cycles of gratification.

I think about that when he's annoying me now. He calls out for snacks when he could easily get them himself. He asks to be picked up from school when he could easily take the bus. He wants us to be close at hand when he goes out with friends.

The other day he announced hopefully "You can clean my room." In different circumstances, it might have been annoying or just lazy. It felt different. When T. was little - around five years old - he did the ironing for a household full of adults, and if he didn't do it well, he was brutally punished. He told me that if he didn't clean the whole house properly, he had to stand in the corner facing the wall, and often the adults would get drunk and go out and he'd eventually fall asleep standing up and awaken when he hit the floor. When I met him, he lived in a home where there was little affection but lots of chores. One of his most familiar words was "mandatory", as in "Is it mandatory?" I laughed the first time he asked me that - I think I had suggested we see a movie.

So I clean his room. I love doing it. It's a way of taking care. No one has ever cleaned his room for him. I also wash his clothes. When he started doing weekend visits, I told him he could drop his dirty clothes in the hamper anytime and we'd wash them. He didn't acknowledge. After a few consecutive weekends, I found one pair of socks gingerly resting in the hamper. I washed them and left them for him the next weekend when he returned. That weekend, I got a pair of socks plus an undershirt. A few weeks later, his favorite washcloth. I knew we were on track when he started leaving his undershorts behind to be laundered between visits. By the time we all agreed to adopt each other, it was raining dirty clothes - he brought clothes from his weekday foster home and piled them in the laundry basket, deliberately leaving more and more clean clothes behind in what would be his room. It's such a simple thing, but it's a give-and-take rhythm of being cared for that was most unfamiliar to him.

I don't want to let him control the household. But there's an aspect of his behavior that I think is driven by unfulfilled early childhood needs. If he needs to be ten, or two, today, then I'll parent him like a ten or a two-year-old. He saved those parts for someone to satisfy, and by some miracle of personality, he is still largely receptive to having those unfulfilled needs parented.

Nest

We're coming up on T.'s sixteenth birthday soon. Milestones can be tricky things and this one has him in a reflective mood. We were bracing for some difficult behavior - Christmas, in retrospect, was really rough, as he processed all sorts of emotions and divided loyalties. But T. is a regular mind-blower and he's in a different frame of mind lately- one more befitting of an 80 year-old than a 16 year-old.

Last night, we fell into a most unexpected conversation. I was trying to head off some brewing mischief he's concocting for his birthday, and he was trying to earn a little money by finding extra chores he could do. In jest, I said, "You can tell me the secret you're keeping and I might pay you for that!"

He loved that and agreed immediately. I said, "Okay, we'll cover our eyes while you tell us, so you don't feel embarrassed." Somehow that opened the most astonishing floodgate of confession.

It began with a pretty ordinary sort of teenage secret, related to his birthday. Apparently that went so well, he moved on quickly to some huge and long-impacted private torments. One minute we were clearing the table and joking around, and the next, we were listening quietly to some harrowing details of his younger life. He followed with a strict instruction "Just listen and don't SAY anything!" We stayed quiet, and just showed him warm eyes and a soft expression. A little further down the conversation road, we offered a few quiet compliments about his exceptional wisdom.

We all came away happy, rather than sad - most unexpected, because his early life is a study in every conceivable kind of child abuse. Sometimes for traumatized kids still reeling and in pain, I think telling means reliving - but in this case, the telling of it was different from the living of it. He and Tim reorganized the kitchen cabinets afterwards, and that sort of mundane togetherness seemed the right transition back to everyday life. He was able to release what he needed to tell and we were able to show him, by staying calm and warm and quiet, that he can set those burdens down and nothing about our life together will change.

He's nesting now. He's incredibly long and lean (more than six inches taller than me now!), and when he winds his long limbs around us or moves in for a quick hug, or to touch foreheads as we do now at bedtime, I find myself holding my breath sometimes as if trying not to startle an exotic wild animal. He's taken over the house with his teen detritus, and established his own strange patterns of feeding and other daily routines. He brings little bits of his past now and then - a photo of his mom, a fact about what happened to him- and adds that to the insulation he's building around himself.

It's humbling to watch. Sometimes I think we are like the stagehands in his life. He is like a great actor, the star of his own life, but he had no reliable place to perform and nobody to pay consistent attention before. We construct a comfortable, intimate place for him where he can act out what needs to be aired. When he's done, we appreciate. And then he rests. My favorite times are when he rests peacefully, knowing he spoke and was heard.

On the Other Hand

Heading into month three of full-time pre-adoptive "placement" as the county likes to call it - which just means "parenting", really. And we're doing pretty good...depending how you look at it.

On the one hand, T. got caught (by us) getting high at school last week. His behavior tipped us off, but we had to insist on searching his backpack and school clothes in order to catch him out in the open so we could deliver a consequence. He was extremely upset and angry for about twenty-four hours. (As a quick aside: although we were upset that he'd lied to us and used drugs at school, we weren't too shocked, as we've been working with him on his marijuana habit all along, and we were more or less ready to respond.)

When he's upset, he often stares into my eyes with an incredibly mournful expression as if to transfer his feelings to me. The day after our confrontation, he was doing that and he looked utterly heartbroken. I took a guess and said something to the effect of: "I know right now you dislike our rules and the consequences. But I want you to know that even though we're arguing, we NEVER, EVER feel differently about you, and you are very dear to us." After that, his grief and rage started to subside. I find every act of discipline needs to be accompanied by an expression of commitment or he thinks his world is coming to an end.

Oddly, it turns out that he adores being grounded. He lost all priveleges for two weeks, including: going out without us, having friends over, playing x-box, using the computer, and using his cell phone. And we've never seen him happier.

My mom nailed it. She observed that he's overwhelmed by his social life right now. Deciding what to do and with whom every weekend means choosing between old friends and new friends, and between following our rules or reverting to old behaviors. He's got a crush on a girl and she's reciprocating, which means managing a host of expectations around what comes next. All of this makes him anxious, and being grounded simplifies his life and gives him a reason to hang around the house with us contemplating but not acting upon his options.

In addition to the security of being sequestered and secluded, I have a hunch that his happiness in the midst of discipline has another dimension: we didn't tell his social worker what happened. She visited a couple days later and we didn't lie, but we didn't offer the story either. He noticed. Our feeling is that we're the parents and we've delivered a consequence and discussed our expectations with him and that's the end of it. Now he gets a chance to try to meet those expectations without an atmosphere of lingering resentment.

T. hates his primary caseworker. She took him out of more than one home over the years, moving him from place to place without warning. She has a tendency to belittle and berate him, and to say disparaging things about his mother. (His adoption worker is a different story, and we tell her pretty much everything.) Usually, in her wake, we experience a prolonged bout of sullen angry behavior because she insults him so deeply. Not this time. He bounced back immediately after she left, chatting and playing with us.

He was utterly loving all weekend. He voluntarily cleaned the bathroom for me. He opened his arms on Sunday night and gave me a huge unprompted hug - something he's never done before. He confided in us about some problems some of his friends are facing right now. Yesterday he told me proudly that he's not getting high at school anymore. He did decide to sit out his PE class "instead" which I don't love, but I'll take a failing grade in PE (he gets Bs in everything else) over drug use at school.

T. struggles with symptoms you might call PTSD - he's overwhelmed by noise, crowds, physical proximity - and I understand why he tries in his own immature way to regulate his experience so he can get through the day. We'll grapple with these issues for as long as he's with us.

So as unpleasant as busting him was, it's been a good couple weeks. Finally he has evidence that we truly will not "give him away" when he misbehaves, that he has one set of rules and one pair of adults who offer both discipline and unconditional love, instead of a committee of bureaucrats who tear apart his entire life for infractions real and imagined. He's somehow managed to remain receptive - to love, stability, reason, and hope - and it's when he's made a mistake or misbehaved that his receptivity is most evident.

The Truth About Adopting A Teenager

Is it wrong how much I want T. to go back to school? He was placed with us in a "pre-adoptive" placement just over a month ago, and he's been on Christmas break for the last two-and-a-half weeks. We owe DCFS for the brilliant timing and total lack of support around that set of circumstances, but that's a matter for a future blog post.

Mary the Mom, one of my favorite bloggers and most supportive foster/adopt resources, recently told me I make adopting a teenager look easy. I'm philosophical by nature, and I think that inadvertently inclines me toward a reflective wisened tone. But I just want to be clear that I'm not that way at all in real life. I don't want to mislead. This isn't easy.

Yes, adopting an older kid from foster care is incredibly rewarding. It's the most significant thing we've ever done in our lives. It's incredibly profound to intervene in someone's destiny in that way. And I'm sure I'll feel particularly good about it decades from now when I reflect on the meaning of my life. Meanwhile, there are plenty of times when it seems like a terrible idea.

For example: as a result of a severely disrupted childhood and multiple placements, T.'s social skills...well, frankly, they suck. Half his friends are thugs. He constantly tries to buy friendship, unsure that anyone will like him beyond the perks he can provide. He's clingy. He's annoying. And he has no idea how to make constructive plans with peers. My incredibly patient partner Tim, who models unconditional love nearly all the time, referred to T.'s social life as "disgusting" and "repulsive" the other night. I have to say, that was the source of a good hard laugh. Now when we want to run away to Tahiti, we just ask each other "are you disgusted?" and it cracks us up all over again.

Here's more: T. is also rude. I love him, but let's not lie. Once he relaxes (which in our case didn't happen until after about four months of weekend overnight stays in our house) he's utterly rude. Other parents of teenagers that they've raised since birth assure me that all teenagers are obscenely inconsiderate. But he's the only one I've got and, lemme tell ya, living with him is a pain in the butt some days. He blasts his headphones and shrugs when we talk to him. He interrupts important conversations to send scandalous text messages to girls. He refuses to eat most of what we serve and usually gets up and walks away from the table halfway through dinner. Yesterday he gave all the money we gave him for the bus to a homeless man, then called us to come pick him up.

We aren't letting him get away with all this - we usually respond with a calm correction and sometimes a consequence. We're learning that you have to set up the consequences in advance, or you can really find yourself in a pickle. T. is remarkably self-correcting, and even when we think our explanation of expectations have fallen on i-Pod-deafened ears, he often returns and models exactly the behavior we asked for within a day or two. NEVERTHELESS. Having to explain and deliver appropriate consequences and make sure they are implemented is enough to make you want to take a long, long unannounced vacation some days.

We were more or less prepared. I've known a bunch of foster kids over the course of my life, and I've also had quite a few friends who were raised in chaotic circumstances and acquired feral behaviors similar to T's. But that doesn't mean it isn't majorly irksome - after all, alot of the behaviors are expressly intended to be irksome. Maybe all teenagers tend to provoke, but I'd say emotionally distressed teenagers coming out of long term foster care excel far beyond the cultural norm in their total mastery of provocation. They have way more anger to release. They have a compulsive need to try to destroy connections in order to test their strength before they get hurt again. They are hugely confused about loyalties and boundaries and what love really looks like.

So there, I said it. It's working for us - in part, I think, because all along this is the kind of parenting we wanted to do. We didn't want to have babies, we wanted to adopt older kids. We didn't expect immediate gratification- though when we get those unexpected bursts of pure affection from him, it's totally blissful. We waited until we were older - until years of experience at work and at home and with friends and with each other tempered our personalities and taught us that most conflicts eventually blow over. But it's still hard - hard to be patient enough, to be warm enough, to complement as well as criticize, to choose battles wisely and overlook the things that there isn't time to address. I'll try in the future to write more about those parts, because I think it's important for adoptive parents of older kids to be honest about the difficulties so we can be a resource for each other!

The Lucky Rock

We had our tenth (!) consecutive weekend visit with T. and we were particularly merry going into this one because last week we passed three major hurdles on the path to adoption: 1) we finished our six week mandatory county parenting class; 2) we passed our state licensing inspection, required of anyone adopting out of foster care, and 3) we did our home study with the county social worker handling our adoption. (For anyone just catching up on this blog, we've got T. on weekends while we pursue adoption and wait for full-time placement at the end of his school semester this winter.)

This weekend we went camping. It was NOT my best laid plan. In fact, it was one of my worst. The campground was 3.5 hours away, much further than I realized, and although the location on top of a bluff overlooking the Pacific was beautiful, it was absolutely freezing and windy. T. has never been outside of Los Angeles, and he's never been camping. But it turned out okay anyway.

In the big picture sense, I learned this weekend that bonding (at least in the kind of oddball alternative family universe that we are starting to inhabit via this adoption) happens as much through mild adversity as anything else. Packing the camping gear, trudging up a mountain in the middle of nowhere, pitching the tent in the howling wind, and struggling to keep the camping stove lit long enough to cook a meal while T. hopped around with my pajamas wrapped around his neck for warmth got us feeling all family-ee.

We played cards for hours in the tent and saw a side of T. that is probably familiar to his friends, but not the adults in his life - a happy, fast-talking, unguarded teenager, taking great delight in winning (and losing) nickels from us as we just sat around wasting time. Then we all had to pack it in side-by-side like sardines in the tent for a night of sleep amid the howling wind and roar of the ocean.

This morning he wanted to ride horses, but we couldn't make it happen, so we practiced driving (we helped him get his permit recently and we're teaching him to drive) instead. At least equally as thrilling, especially since he did his first highway driving today.

By the time we got back this evening, he was back in teen world, text messaging on anything he could get his hands on - my phone, Tim's phone, the office computer. He was ever so slightly surly at dinner. We actually rejoice when he's a little surly in that age-appropriate 15 year-old way. When we met him, he was so still and polite and quiet, I just felt like the lid was going to blow. He would barely eat and never asked for anything.

Now when he won't look up from his text messages and he shovels food into his mouth and makes sarcastic jokes, we feel like we've made just a wee bit of progress. Of course, he also gives us ample opportunity to parent the younger version of himself that will probably be with him for a long time to come. But we love these periods of normal teen behavior too, because we feel like we've been able to offer him a sliver of stability that allows him to resolve some earlier uncertainties so he can get back to the business of teenage development.

And this weekend, I was reminded that we never know when and in what way we're likely to reach him. At one point this weekend, we went down to the beach for a look at some tidepools, and he showed little interest, so I let him stay in the car listening to the radio. When we returned, I brought him a rock I picked up on the beach. I handed it to him and said, "I brought you a present. It's your lucky rock." I was half-thinking when I said it. Later that night, he brought the rock out of his pocket while we were playing cards, and rubbed his cards with it "for luck". I was so surprised - I thought he'd have forgotten it by then. Then tonight, I let him drive the last mile home. As he hopped in the driver's seat, he rubbed the pocket of his jacket where he had tucked the rock away, for luck before he took the wheel. The significance he ascribed to that rock made me think we should probably be careful, even (especially) when he is being surly and coarse, never to assume he isn't listening.

We're In!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!! Had a GREAT conversation in the car with T. Thanks to my boss who raised two boys and said, if you want them to talk to you, go on a long drive. I picked him up this morning and we had a drive of just over an hour. Instead of playing music, I left it quiet and started with a couple questions about school.

Once he got warmed up, he volunteered, "I talked to April this week." April is the social worker who visited to talk to him about how he's feeling about us so far. I played cool for awhile, and said, "April called us too. She likes to check in and make sure we're doing a good job and not freaking you out." I knew he was trying to open up a conversation, so a few minutes later, I said, "April asked us how we feel about adoption, because some of the people in the Kidsave program want to adopt, and others are more into weekend hosting. So I told her we definitely want to adopt. But if you decide you would rather just do weekends with us, that's totally cool too. We're in it to help you, whatever you decide you want to do."

Bingo! "I want to get adopted," he said softly. I asked him how he imagines adoption will be different than foster care. He had a complete analysis ready to go! Foster parents give you back if you get into trouble or do something bad, he explained, but adoptive parents work on it with you and they are there forever. They "treat you like you're their own," and make you part of their family. I said, yeah, I think adoption is an awesome way to make a family. We always wanted to adopt, and I like the idea that when you adopt you become a family because you all really like each other. I got a little smile for that one so I kept going.

"Well, we'd be psyched to adopt you whenever you're ready, and you can come live with us while we do the adoption if you want," I said (the Kidsave program is set up so that a kid can be placed with you as a substitute foster family as you're pursuing adoption). "And we think you're the best kid in the Kidsave program and we liked you right away. We knew we wanted to do the program, but we didn't imagine we'd meet someone we like as much as we like you!" He was beaming. Hooray!

I also said, "But you know, if we adopt you, you're stuck with us. I mean, you'll be, like, 35 and you'll have your own kids and we'll be calling you up all the time, asking if you're coming over for Thanksgiving." He seemed surprised about that and amused. So I said, "I think that's one of the things that's really different about adoption - it isn't just til you're 18. And I know I needed my parents for a long time - to help me with stuff like college and getting a first apartment, and just giving me advice when I needed it." He was quiet about that part - I think it might be a new consideration. I also snuck in a word about how we would help him keep in touch with his brother. And I asked him who his favorite foster moms have been - which included the one he's with now - and said, being adopted doesn't mean you don't see those people anymore. You can totally keep in touch with all the people who are important to you. He was quiet, but I wanted to make sure he didn't feel like he had to give up what he has.

And OH MY GOD I felt relieved to have gotten all that out. I was really having trouble figuring out how to broach this subject - there aren't a lot of precedents for telling a 15 year old that you'd like him to be your first and only child! I realized last week that I was clamming up because I was uncomfortable with the emotional intensity of the conversation - it took me some effort to get down to emotional brass tacks and set aside my own fear of rejection.

We chatted all the way home! T. totally cracks me up. A little while later, he said "What do you think about tattoos?" I said, "Why? Are you thinking of getting one?" He nodded and smiled slyly. I said, well, for our anniversary, Tim got a tattoo of a big anchor with my name on it, so I think tattoos are pretty cool. What will yours say? "On my arm, it will say Live Life to the Fullest," he said. "And on my back, Liberty." I said, "I like tattoos to mark big life transitions, because a tattoo is forever. Wouldn't it be cool to get a tattoo like Liberty on the day you get free of the foster system?" "Yeah!" he sighed.

Then I realized he's only 15! "Hey wait, can you even GET a tattoo?" I asked. He cracked up and said a friend is going to do it. I said, okay, not with a ballpoint pen, and it's really important to make sure to use clean fresh needles. He nodded solemnly.

I also brought up the school issue - I said something like "I wish we lived closer so that if you decide you'd like to live with us, you wouldn't have to move and change schools." As usual, he thought about that for a quiet minute, then said, "I don't mind moving schools. That's how you meet new people!" I said, well that's an awesome attitude to have! He chatted a bit more - about his mom, and how he was going to live with her, but decided he didn't want to, and how he has a sister that he doesn't really know who has autism. He told me his mom is tall - 5'11" - and that she says his dad was tall, too.

When we got home, I called out to Tim "We're home! And we're adopting T.! But he's getting tattoos, so you better talk to him." T. loved that and totally cracked up in his quiet way - I was checking to see how comfortable he felt with the outcome of our conversation, and that was my answer.

So now we're home and T. is in the den playing X-box live, after we all shared sandwiches. He played with the cat, and we quizzed him about what he does and doesn't eat. It turns out he eats pretty much everything except what we served him last weekend. And he loves sushi! He's still beaming, and quite easy going and talkative today. And he went in his room and took off his shoes and left them there! So I think he's claiming it for himself.

I suppose the next hurdle is convincing DCFS that we all three know what we want, and they don't have to keep worrying about whether he's comfortable with us. But first, we have a weekend to enjoy. And we're planning a camping trip for two weeks from now.

Strong in the Broken Places

Read an awesome article today about how we should change the way we think about so-called "attachment disorders" in adopted kids and give credit to kids who attach and detach intermittently, because they are demonstrating resilience. Highly recommended read. It also includes this Hemingway quote:

"The world breaks everyone. And afterward, some are strong in the broken places."