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!

Finally

We "finalized our adoptive placement" tonight, which means we signed a million pieces of paper, got T's history from the adoptive social worker, and have entered the final legal process, which will be expedited because of his age.

Looking through those files, my heart breaks. It's odd to parent a child for years without anything to go on other than what he's told you (his social worker gave us a one-page summary of his early history when he moved in with us and that was it), and then receive such a thorough history only now. The information contained in these reports would have been extremely helpful at several junctures last year when we were having a tough time. As it is, we figured out what we needed to know. There were few surprises in the papers, but a lot of confirmation of what we found out just by loving T and gaining his trust and listening to him and observing his behavior.

Of course I'm not going to share what we learned. But I will say this. There were an awful lot of people "evaluating" him over the course of his childhood, and not enough people loving him. It makes me very angry to read those reports. They are written in pseudo-medical language, while it's clear that T was howling in pain. Reading them, one wants to reach backwards across time and just make it stop.

It feels to me that there is so much that was missed in all the discussion and diagnoses - so many positive qualities that must have been apparent even then, that are bypassed in favor of shining a spotlight on his imperfections. To diagnose a child going through what he was going through feels to me like approaching a weary soldier in the midst of a losing battle to ask him how he's feeling. How objective a sense of who that person really is can one get at a time like that? What might he be like when he's calm, and safe, and understood? We know the answer to that question now - in fact, we've just come off a month of intense togetherness during which T, because we're now homeschooling him, is mostly calm and connected. The child we know doesn't appear in the reports, because that child was never allowed to emerge.

You can't order someone to love a child and stick with him. But looking back over his turbulent life in foster care, it's plain to see what's missing. On his second weekend visit with us, I recall asking him how he thought adoption might be different than living with a foster parent. "When you get adopted, they love you like their own and work with you on your problems and stick with you no matter what," he said. And he was right. That was exactly what was missing.

Now

We are making the rounds of mental health professionals at the moment. We have a great substance abuse counselor whom we love and who has proven a good match for T. We had a family therapist who wasn't a good fit for us, with whom we recently ended our relationship, and a psychiatrist who has seen T intermittently and still oversees his prescription. Since hitting a really rough patch a couple months ago, we've been looking for a trauma specialist to do some cognitive behavioral therapy, in addition to the substance abuse counseling. And coming up a bit short.

I value therapy and I've been impressed by providers who really know what they're doing with traumatized kids. But those providers seem pretty few and far between. I'm a little exhausted by the convoluted mental health bureaucracy and the general difficulty in finding experienced providers who are comfortable with a child of T's age and experience. At the same time, I find myself grappling with what, for me, feels like a very personal, very maternal instinct, to protect my kid, and make sure he is surrounded by people who love and "get" him. This instinct is almost feral, it's so strong and instinctive. I didn't expect to feel this fiercely protective, and it's exhilarating and exhausting. T is very smart and self-aware, perhaps painfully so, which makes it all the more difficult to endure the awkwardness of finding him the right therapist. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the right thing in promoting therapy at all - he has a very strong spirit, and occasionally I wonder if I ought to just focus on cultivating his relationship with me and Tim, and providing him with the time and peace to heal on his own.

I've written before about how I sometimes feel intimidated or just undermined by mental health professionals and social workers who seem to me to treat me like a paid babysitter, rather than a parent. When Tim and I are really overwhelmed, I've found it useful to ask "What would we do if T were our biological child?" just to be sure that we aren't being swayed by the system into anything less than parental authority and judgement.

I think what I'd say today is that I'm conscious right now of a certain toll that T's pain takes on me. At times I even follow his lead, taking his advice on when we "don't need to talk about it right now." I don't generally focus much on my own discomfort. The role of advocate parent suits me well and I enjoy it. But at the moment, perhaps because T is stable and calm and introspective and therefore doesn't need me so much, I feel bruised. I feel very aware that I feel some level of grief for the times I could not be there for him - for the things that happened before I met him, and for the suffering he endured when he didn't have any parent advocating for him. I respect him tremendously for the hard work he did to survive and raise himself in those circumstances, and deep compassion for the symptomatic behaviors that plague him to this day. I love him the same or more than I would if I had given birth to him myself, so the blunt fact that I didn't arrive in his life until it was too late to help him with his many traumas pains me greatly. It pains me all the more because he trusts me now and has recently started to refer more freely to what came before. I want so much to be worthy of his trust. It's a tremendous responsibility. My career, my relationship with Tim, my health, all struggle to compete with the obligation I feel to be available and worthy of providing stability for T. But I also know that it's extremely idealistic to subject oneself to that sense of obligation, and that if I fail to take care of myself and Tim, I'm sure to fall short.

Tim calls this vicarious PTSD and I think he's right. I am sure that if you bond strongly to an older, traumatized child, when you bond with them, you open yourself up to absorbing some part of their pain and some part of their difficulty navigating the aftermath of what they've endured. I like to think that in absorbing some of their suffering, you are lessening their burden, but I'm not sure that's really true.

It's a juggling act, with a whole bunch of needs and sensitivities up in the air, all of the time. I suppose that's how any parent feels.

In Tribute to My Friends

My friends rock. Two of them particularly rock.

My Friend #1 is a private investigator who investigates the social history of people on death row. She worked in a foster group home for a couple years right out of college and her parents adopted an older child from foster care.

My Friend #2 is a licensed clinical social worker who supervised a program for homeless teenagers for many years, worked with traumatized kids in Kosovo, and now runs a free medical clinic.

They will both touch many lives in the course of their careers. But this week, I get the benefit of their wisdom. Tim and I are getting four full days off, thanks to them.

This is how it came about: I have a business trip to my hometown this week, and decided to take T with me. I figured I'd put him to work and pay him a bit for his time so I wouldn't have to worry about what he's up to while I'm away (winter school break is interminable this year thanks to LAUSD budget cuts). Of course that also means struggling to keep him occupied while I go about doing my job, being with him 24/7, juggling his needs with those of my coworkers. I booked a hotel suite for us with cable, video games and room service and hoped for the best.

Well, unexpectedly, T. announced that he'd be staying with Friend #1, who lives in the town where we're visiting, instead of with me at the hotel. This news was shocking and delightful, because he does not easily take to strangers nor to spending the night in unfamiliar places. Some months back, we had dinner with Friend #1 and her partner, and I guess he was captivated by her stories about her current case, involving a young man who grew up in a prison camp. I think he was also struck by her low-key compassion and hard-to-impress demeanor. So he decided to make himself her house guest. She loved the suggestion, and immediately got in touch to let him know that he should bring his xbox and come prepared to entertain her new pit bull puppy. His complete confidence and comfort about staying for five nights at her house is really touching to me.

Then my blessed Friend #2, who also lives in the town where we're visiting, offered to have T work at her health clinic for a day or two while he's staying in the vicinity. She knows that he wants to be a nurse, and arranged for him to shadow a male nurse at her clinic as he goes about his day. She isn't bothered at all that just three weeks ago I was ranting and raving to her about my problems keeping him in school, off drugs and out of trouble. Like Friend #1, she's pretty hard to impress and she's seen plenty of complicated teenage boys in her time. She has taken the time to listen to him and recognizes who he is, underneath the misbehavior. Like all kids, he rises to the level of expectation, and he responds to her respect and good humor.

One of the hardest things about becoming T's parent has been the isolation. We moved to Los Angeles just two years before we met him. That's not enough time to form deep friendships in middle age. We do pretty well, and we get home to our friends and families often, but I wish sometimes that we had stronger local bonds. It can be isolating enough raising a traumatized kid, because his intense needs and struggles have a way of drawing all of our time and attention and energy. Living in a town without close friends and family makes things harder and we almost never get even an hour off, much less a day.

So this week, I'm exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to distribute the wonders of T.'s company across the safety net of my two friends. He trusts them and feels he can be close to them because he knows how much they are a part of me, and that makes me feel good. Visiting with them gives him a chance to grow and experiment, and it gives me a chance to relax.

I hope every foster/adoptive parent of a traumatized child out there gets a break like I'm getting this week. Knowing that someone you trust who "gets" your precious, complicated child is going to stand in for you for just a little while is SUCH a huge mental and emotional relief. And for T., finding surrogate parents who are willing to open their homes and lives to him sends a profound message about belonging to a family, growing into an adult, and the value of strong friendships. They are my family, and now they are his as well.

Friends

For a year now we've been full-time parents to T. Our dynamic at home is highly idiosyncratic but it works for us. However, we're fairly isolated. We don't know many parents of teenagers and we don't know anyone who has adopted an older child.

Over Thanksgiving, we made a week-long visit to my hometown. The best part was spending time with my oldest and dearest friends, who finally got a chance to get to know T, and with my dad, who genuinely likes T. and connects with him. It was relaxing to share T. with other people who know us well, who don't puzzle over our choice to adopt a teenager.

One of my friends is a licensed clinical social worker who once worked with homeless teenagers. Another comes from a family where she had a foster sibling; she now works as a private investigator specializing in family histories in death penalty cases. Traumatized children are not new to them; they are easy and accepting with T.

One evening, we all went out to a trampoline park, and then out for dinner and arcade games. T. astonished me with his glorious behavior. He was polite, quiet, engaged, playful and outgoing. Often, he has a low tolerance for time spent in public. He can be very sensitive to noise, crowds, and chaos. However, this evening, he rolled along with the plan as it unfolded spontaneously, even eating dinner with the adults in a crowded noisy seafood restaurant where his cheeseburger did not meet his exacting specifications.

He is not a kid who attaches easily or indiscriminately. And yet at the end of the evening when one of my best friends invited us to her house, he announced that yes, we would be going, and that he would be riding with her in her car. This was most astonishing to me. As they pulled away from the curb, he gave me a playful wave from the passenger seat as I stood on the sidewalk with my mouth gaping in surprise.

The next day, he said to me and Tim: "I was so good last night! Wasn't I good with your friends? You could say that I was...at the center of things!" Gleeful smile.

From time to time, I am struck by the thought that it is very important to him that he be successful in his new role as our kid. As a young child, he intermittently lived with a cousin whom he loved. But it's clear that he never thought of himself as her kid - she had biological kids in the house who filled that role in his mind. The county located her and urged her to take him and his brother in and from that moment on, he clearly thought of himself more as a house guest.

He's an introverted person, so his feelings are rarely obvious. We catch glimpses of his internal life now and then. When we were preparing to become parents, I read a lot of books about traumatized kids, adoption and attachment. I think they led me to expect that his internal life would be filled with suffering, anger, confusion and grief. And of course, he experiences those things too, more than most kids. But what I didn't prepare for were these expressions of joy, pride in being successful in his new family, and love.

As an aside, my friends and my father all said to me at different times that despite his age and formidable height, T. struck them as a much younger child - about five years old. That's exactly right. When he is happy, he often seems about five. Not coincidentally, that is when he was first taken away from his cousin's house. Something froze then, and when he is feeling happy and secure these days, he appears to pick up where he left off.

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.

Quoted

Tonight just a quick post to capture a conversation we had tonight. We were out for a late night walk - I pay T. $3 to "train" me by jogging around the neighborhood before bed a few times a week. I get my exercise, and he gets to chatting. Rather like driving in the car, being side by side in the dark, rather than face to face at home frees the tongue.

So tonight, we were talking about why I'd like him to get involved in activities. But I was also trying to explain that this is a goal, not a criticism. So I added something like, "You know, you've accomplished a lot. You found yourself parents and got adopted your freshman year. That's huge. That's bigger than any high school accomplishment I've ever heard of. That's just so impressive."

And that's when he said: "You feel me? You know what the social worker said? Back when I was living at Ms. (former foster mom)'s house? The social worker came and she and Ms. (former foster mom) were sitting in the living room. I said I wanted to be adopted. And they said "Oh, people don't adopt teenagers. People want to adopt LITTLE kids." Man, I just went in my room. That made me feel so bad. Like, I'm gonna be in foster care forever? For my whole life? Like I'm gonna die in foster care. That just makes a kid feel, like, so hopeless."

Yes, exactly.

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.

What does it take?

Recently, I was reading Faith A's blog at Adoption Under One Roof about what it takes to parent a traumatized older child. The comments got me thinking about my own answer to that question.

My list goes something like this (and I certainly don't possess all of these qualities, though I strive for them):

- Honest acceptance of your own personal history and mistakes.

- Gallows humor.

- A strong belief that no life is ever "ruined".

- Street smarts.

- Endurance.

- The ability to parent today for the sake of today - an acceptance that it might not "work out" in the long term and the child may end up in residential treatment, embroiled in legal problems, or otherwise struggling and that your decision to do this work now doesn't depend on any "result".

- A healthy skepticism of the system.

- Scientific curiosity. Why is my kid doing this? What happened right before he did this? What environmental factors can I change and how does he respond when I do?

- Empathy for the depth and range and duration of grief.

- Being cool with being different so you can weather the occasional social isolation of adopting an older child with "issues".

- Chemistry: one person's problem child is another person's "special someone". I can confidently say that, had I known the full facts of his case before I met him on his own terms, I would not have offered to parent T. And yet the three of us "clicked" and that natural chemistry ignited a deep mutual affection that gets us through things none of us would have signed up for on the face of it. We fit like puzzle pieces.

- Understanding that how far someone has come depends on where he started.

What did I miss?

Adoption Isolation

Sometimes I have the sense that adopting a teenager is so unusual, it makes us a social oddity and a subject of speculation. I had a breakfast meeting this morning, and a client asked the inevitable "do you have kids?". I said yes; he said, how old?; I said 16; he said he was suprised; I said, we just adopted him, and then....well, you know how it goes. The conversation kind of dies while the other person tries to figure out how to make sense of what you just said. Awkward.

Life in a fishbowl makes me acutely aware of what I call adoption isolation: the feeling that you're in uncharted territory and while everyone seems to have an opinion, very few actually have any idea what older child foster-adoption is really about.

We're a biracial family now, and the difference in our physical appearance is probably one factor that gives people pause, but the predominant reaction is to T.'s age and, secondarily, to the fact that ours is an open adoption, meaning we know and spend time with his relatives.

People ask us outright all the time why we would ever want to adopt a teenager. I tell them teenagers still need parents. There are 12,000 kids in long-term foster care in Los Angeles, and 7,000 of them are over the age of 12. Of all the kids adopted out of foster care in LA over a ten-year period, only 3% were T.'s age or older. One in three kids in long-term foster care who "age out" end up homeless. One in five end up in prison within two years of leaving foster care. T. knew all that and he spent two years searching for adoptive parents against the odds, going to adoption fairs and trying his painful best to make a good impression on strangers in the hope they'd rescue him from the odds.

Kids in long-term foster care who can't return to their birth families need parents. Is that really so hard to understand? Even though they aren't "little" anymore, they are still children - they can't work, they don't have the full cognitive capability necessary to make adult decisions, they are vulnerable and malleable. They want, need and deserve protection and guidance. They aren't gross; they aren't damaged beyond repair. They have special needs, and satifsying those needs can be really profound and...fun!

Those who don't balk at the idea of adopting a teenager balk at our choice to be in contact with his birth relatives. I believe in the merits of open adoption, particularly for older kids. It's very difficult - there are enormously complex issues of divided loyalty, unresolved trauma and loss, cultural differences and more. T's birth mom probably hates me, but we talk. We do our best, so he can integrate his past and present. I want the stability we provide him to be a home base from which he can explore his feelings about his birth family and understand where he came from and make sense of his history. But the idea of a family that combines blood and adoptive ties confounds people more than I expected.

Here are a few other juicy questions we commonly field:

Why would you want to adopt a teenager?
Read: Teenagers are gross.

What happened to his family?
Read: There must be a sordid story here and I want to hear it.

What do you call yourselves? Foster parents? Adoptive parents? (This from his school counsellor, prompting me to reply "We call ourselves parents" in my best don't-fuck-with-me tone of voice that made T. laugh with delight.)
Read: You're not his real family.

On some level, I probably like to be different, to make unusual life choices - and I know I have to accept that doing so implies some degree of self-isolation. But if I were advising someone else who wanted to foster/adopt an older kid, I'd tell them to get ready for a lot of intrusive questions and grow a thick skin. And I'd tell them to seek out other adoptive parents of older kids, because some days it feels like there are three other people on the planet who understand that this is just another way to be a family, and that parenting is parenting, no matter where the kid comes from.

BFD

This week is predictably rough. Christmas is such an emotionally laden season ANYWAY. We figured it would trigger some difficulties. Mmmmmmmmm.

I could pick a number of things to write about today, but I'm gonna go with what another adoptive mom of older kids from foster care calls "birth family drama."

Earlier this week, we met T.'s cousin who cared for him off and on from age 3 through about 9. As I expected, she was very warm and pleasant when we met her. She has several birth kids of her own, and we met up at church where we dropped T off to attend services with them. He was removed from her care by the county, but he loves her very very much and says she was like a mom to him.

In the county records, this cousin abused him. But in his perception of things, she loved him in a way his birth mom never did. And he's right - both things are true. He entered foster care when he was three days old and was passed from foster home to foster home (sometimes staying just a few weeks in any particular home) until his cousin took him in for as long as she could make it last.

He can still recall in great detail the time she took all the kids to TGI Friday's on Christmas Eve, and the taste of her gumbo. He was baptized at her church, with her guidance. She gave him some of the touch points kids need in order to form an identity and a sense of being precious to someone. He also bears scars - physical ones, on various parts of his body - she inflicted in the name of discipline. And deep emotional wounds, not only from the mistreatment, but from the trauma of being removed from her home by the county.

For people who wonder why one would encourage a connection to an abusive parent, I'll just say that it's due to her that he has any ability to form a loving bond at all. He texted me from church: "I missed them so much! Thank you. I luv you guys lots."

This is an aspect of older child foster/adoption that is probably not for the faint of heart. Our county mandated parenting classes actually did a great job of preparing us for this part and explaining why one must never criticize a child's relatives nor prevent them from keeping in touch provided the circumstances are reasonably safe. They encouraged us over and over to provide opportunities for the kids to visit with the family from whom they were removed, in the interest of promoting and supporting loving attachments under safe circumstances - even up to and through an adoption. So I texted him back "She's lovely and warm as you described her. I feel honored that you introduced us."

I mostly get it. Life is complicated. I grew up in a strict Catholic school where extreme punishment was still the norm - we had to sit after school for more than three hours in first grade because one kid had thrown half a hot dog in the trash can. The parish priest once forced a boy who misbehaved to bundle up in wool sweaters, then run the track in the hot sun until he got sick. Child abuse? Yes, certainly. But it was a very unfortunate cultural norm that strict Irish priests brought with them from the homeland. So it's not that hard for me to understand that T. suffered the hand of a parent who believed that whippings were in his own best interest. Adults can get their heads all turned around about what's okay to do to kids. Sometimes it takes a long time for intervention to happen. Meanwhile, the kids have to attach to someone.

To her credit, when the county first interfered, she attended all their parenting classes and jumped through all their hoops to try to keep him. It didn't work - she was poor, she was caring for several small children, she had an abusive boyfriend at the time, and things fell apart. But he saw that she really, really tried. It gave him hope and a sense of dignity in all the filth of his years in foster care.

So back to this Christmas. Inspired by his lovely visit with her at church, T. asked his cousin if we could come over to drop off presents on Christmas Eve. She said she and her kids might be going out to the desert to see some extended family and "invited" him to come along. Though when I made a follow up phone call, her plan was vague, she wasn't sure which day this week is Christmas, and it seemed that T. had more or less invited himself along.

The desire to body block all disappointment in his life is overwhelming and impossible. When he figures out he's not going to have a happy family reunion with his relatives this Christmas, I'll acknowledge and name the disappointment and grief - briefly, because that's how he is. And then I'm working on a salve concocted from distraction (I happen to have this fabulous back up plan!), explanation (it's not personal, she loves you very much and things are just chaotic with all the relatives) and momentum (we'll see them next week at church - let's get on with our holiday).

All humans needs to attach and we may attach to some very flawed fellow humans in the course of it, but without any attachment, we shrivel up and die, at least spiritually. She made him feel that he mattered, and his ability to bond with us and love us has a lot to do with the love he felt from her earlier in his life. I'd like to stuff her stocking right now for not being clear and specific with him when any reasonable person could see how high the emotional stakes are for him, but she has her own problems, her own story, and her own blind spots.