They came, they saw, they conquered!

Everyone is trying to adjust around here.

Wanted to fire off an update this morning on the pandemonium that has been the last week and a half, as I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever have the chance again. Since we got the call last Monday that three children would be coming into our home, our lives and surroundings have been transformed.

Tuesday of last week we prepared the house all day for a home visit from our caseworkers at the agency. We will now be switched from our pre-placement caseworker to the post-placement girl. Wednesday they both came with a binder of forms we will have to keep up with. Doctor visits, allowance, incident reports, activity calendar, clothing inventory, and a page for every pill that goes in a child’s mouth - it all has to be documented. Quite a task, but they did tell me teachers (like myself) are usually great at it. I can understand why. We walked through the house and re-checked that all the safety requirements were still being met.

The remainder of the week is a mind-boggling rush for everything you need – and some stuff you don’t – to care for three kids. I’ve been living at Target; we’ve been through Babies R Us, Big Lots, consignment stores…and then there are the helpers – our friends and family who have taken us shopping, given us gift cards, even taken up collections of stuff from generous supermoms who have never met us or the kids. These new belongings are both wonderful and intimidating. I’ve stood in aisles of stores near tears because of the choices I don’t know how to make. Last night I asked a stranger in the Target diaper section what to do about our two-year-old (since they haven’t given us her weight, and diapers are by weight). You could see the confidence in my parenting skills all over his face.

Then there’s our house. Shawn and I have joked for years about a line from the movie/musical Dreamgirls, the Beyoncé version. In one of the newer, Oscar-nominated songs she belts out, “I am alone at a crossroads! I’m not at home in my own home!” When I say we’ve joked about it I guess I mean I’ve sung it loudly and he has laughed at me. Regardless, suddenly I am not at home in my own home, not in the least. What was our guest room is now the girls’ room complete with bunk beds and toy storage and lots of pink. The office/library? Gone. It’s now the boy’s room, covered in footballs, baseballs, basketballs…It never occurred to us where OUR stuff was going to go. For right now, the answer to that is a bunch of boxes in the garage.

We found out late last week that we would get to have one visit with the kids before they came. That visit was Monday morning, at our house. We worked tirelessly to get things ready. I wanted the rooms to look just right so the kids would know we made a great space for them. The usual Sunday night dinner with my family centered on what snack and activity to have ready. It was a long, nearly sleepless night for me as we waited to see the children for the first time. And then there they were!

Out of the cars of our caseworker and their CPS social worker tumbled three sleepy little angels. Shawn and I stared through the front windows to catch the first glimpse of what may someday be our children. They were shy at first, but warmed up quickly. The oldest girl is the leader and the most outgoing, surprising me with bold statements like “I want to see my room” and “Can I put my pillow pet on my bed?” The boy is the most active, and also the most particular. It’s common to see some OCD from kids who have lived in chaos, and I’ve already spotted it in him. And last but not least the tiniest little punkin, barely two, clutching everything she carried close to her chest and eyeing us suspiciously. It took her almost an hour to let go of the doll, blanket, pacifier and backpack that she surrounded herself with since she stepped out of the car. She never did let me hold her. But that’s normal.

They tore through the house, playing, observing, questioning. They had apples and Oreos. They colored. They jumped all over the new bunk beds. They met the pets, or at least the ones that weren’t hiding. At times I wanted to hide myself. What do you do in that situation? I watched them in disbelief. They are very cute. They’re tall. The girls have brown hair and huge brown eyes. The boy looks like Shawn’s coloring, hair that is more sandy blonde and eyes some mix of blue and green. They seemed to understand they are moving here. They asked if they could call me “mom.” What a loaded question that is. On the one hand, it’s what I’ve been waiting for all this time. On the other, it’s a sad indication of how they’ve been raised…in homes where whoever is in charge is your mom.

The kids filled our home with excitement and our heads with responsibilities. I learned so fast that it’s not really possible to watch all three of them at once. Even with Shawn, myself, and two caseworkers, we had our hands full. Still, the children were polite and cleaned up after themselves and were easily redirected from misbehavior. They were dressed very nicely and clean and happy, at least on the outside. Once Shawn saw their little faces plastered with smiles and their general joie de vivre, he was at ease. I was more concerned with how WE were doing, asking the caseworker, is this ok? The room, the snack, the toys…are we doing this right?

Now, it’s T minus two days until they come to stay. On Friday morning our caseworker will come early with more paperwork. At around 10 a.m. the kids will arrive with their CPS caseworker in a van with their only belongings, whatever they are. Our to-do list is evolving from the larger car seat and bunk bed items down to the day-to-day minutia type stuff. Since there’s no way to really be ready I’ve been focusing on the basics. What do we need to be able to feed, bathe, clothe, and care for them starting August 2^nd. There’s so much more to do, like finding day cares and schools and therapists, and in two weeks I’ll have to report back to work. But for now I’m hoarding bug spray and body wash and baby wipes and desperately wanting to know how anybody does this. How my parents did it. How will I do it? We’ll know soon enough. I’m just so glad we get to find out.

IT'S ALL HAPPENING! We are foster parents.

Visual approximation

They say the only constant in life is change. The bunk beds being installed in our guest room today are proof positive of that. This post has been percolating in my mind for five days. It occurs to me that I never thought in advance how I would write this one. The one where we got kids. 

At approximately 3:26 p.m. on Monday, July 22, 2013, Texas Child Protective Services confirmed with our adoption agency the (pending) placement of three foster children in our home. At long last! For better or worse, Shawn and I are going to be parents. In a great big hurry. Like ripping off a band-aid. 

How can I make this announcement sound traditional? It’s a girl! And a boy! And another girl! Bless their hearts. And they will come to live with us on Friday. Details! I will share all I can. As these are children in foster care and not legally ours, confidentiality must be maintained for the time being. I can say that they are a 5 year old girl, a 4 year old boy, and a 2 year old girl. They’re from a mostly rural background, they’re white, and they need a lot of help to overcome the abuse they have endured. The reason they’re coming to live with us so quickly is that CPS is removing them from their current foster home and wants a new placement right away. Two of the kids require play therapy, and their foster parents of the last year or so can’t meet that need. With children in foster care, meeting these needs is not optional – it is state law. So the state’s caseworker began searching for a potential foster-adoptive family, even though the kids aren’t legally free for adoption at this time. The state’s goal is unrelated adoption, as they expect that the children will not be able to return home to their biological family. This is in line with our plans to foster what they call “legal risk” children until they’ve achieved termination of parental rights and we can adopt them. 

So. 

The rest is a blur. I really don’t even have time to write this. I’m doing it for myself, so that I can take a minute to look at what is happening to us and maybe remember how I felt in the dozen feverish days I had before we became a party of five.

I could not write anything two weeks ago when Shawn and I were selected for another ‘staffing’ call for three Hispanic girls in Houston. It was once bitten, twice shy for me as we waited for the results of the caseworker conference call to come in and again, we weren’t chosen to be the family for those girls. I’d been losing faith in a system that hadn’t given us kids for two years. Two agencies. Three different adoption paths. Two chances at being picked that both fell through. Financial barriers. Heartbreaking risks and disappointments. A while back I took my little collection of if-we-get-kids stuff and put it in the closet where I couldn’t see it anymore. I was giving up. A week later, my phone rang.

She got the call today,
One out of the gray.
And when the smoke cleared,
It took her breath away.
She said she didn't believe,
It could happen to me.
I guess we're all one phone call from our knees. 

“Closer to Love” – Mat Kearney

We had four hours between the time the phone call came in and the time CPS confirmed they were placing the kids in our home. Now we have 6 days until the punkins arrive. We get to meet them only once before then, on Monday, for an hour. Right now we don’t even have a photograph. The growing pains are unreal. My emotions change every ten minutes, vacillating between joy, excitement, doubt and terror. My phone rings even more often than that, with calls from the agency and close family (the only ones who knew – until now!). Our to-do list is unreal. How do you prepare to raise three kids you don’t know in two weeks? Finally we are the ones ordering bunk beds and calling family and making plans – it’s all happening. Fast. This week has been the maybe the most surreal of my life. I thank God for our families. They are living proof of why these kids are so important. Family can be everything. And ours have done more in this one week – already – than I can ever repay them for. Bunks and books and toys and bedding, advice and infinite research on school, daycare, healthcare...We have car seats and mattress pads. We are going to have to buy DIAPERS. We’re swamped with paperwork, rules and regulations. As Shawn said, it feels as if we’re moving, but in our own house. Suddenly our books and trinkets are being packed away to make room for little clothes and toys.

We’re making room in our hearts as well. Just two weeks to adjust after 12 years together doing whatever the heck we wanted to do, whenever we wanted to do it. Shawn’s working on what will be our new daily routine. I may have to trade in my car. We wonder what is going to be the last movie we see together in a theatre.

We know it’s not about us. It’s about these kids. Three little ones who are about to have one of the worst weeks of their short, painful lives so far. On Tuesday, they go to a meeting to say goodbye to their biological mother forever. On Friday, they leave the foster home where they have been for over a year. And after all that shock and trauma, they will land here. I know there’s no way any of us will be ready – in any sense of the word - for what’s coming. Shawn compared it to standing at the edge of a cold pool. “You know it’s going to be cold and painful but you just hold your breath and jump in.” Just in case, though – could somebody keep a life preserver handy?

My momma told me to pick the very best one. And you are not it.

Mother’s Day is bittersweet around here. On the one hand, I’ve got a wonderful mom. She’s so smart, thoughtful and caring. She kept our elbows off the table. She managed to raise three girls who are able to navigate this challenging life, which is more than foster kids are equipped to manage, not to mention most of my students. I’ve got an amazing grandma too, still loving and funny and kind at nearly 90 years old. I’m so thankful to be able to spend time with them today, on their special day.

On the other hand, we lost my mother-in-law a year and a half ago and I miss her a lot. Nancy was one-of-a-kind; her spirit stays with me. And my father’s mom, the closest thing to a role model I had in this life, has been gone now seven years. Things haven't been quite right since she left us. And then there’s me. I’m not anybody's mom. Still.

I got really close the other day. I haven’t been able to write about this until now. Shawn and I got the call on a regular Thursday in early April. My students were out of control – you can’t leave them for a second – as I tried desperately to hear what our caseworker was saying on the phone. She was saying we had finally been chosen for what they call a “staffing,” which is essentially a conference call between caseworkers on which you may or may not be chosen for some actual real life KIDS. Kids that would come LIVE in our HOUSE shortly thereafter. Kids we would adopt. This was the real deal. We were being seriously considered. At last.

The first question that comes to your mind is WHO? Which kids that we submitted for was she calling about? At any given time there are up to 30 possibilities for whom we've submitted our home study. This group was a sibling set of three, Houston area, 2 girls and one baby boy, half white half Hispanic, one in elementary and the other two younger. Their caseworker was considering us for placement. We would find out in a week if we were to be the parents of three children.

I’m pretty sure my husband spent that week in shock. He didn't say much. My mind was reeling with the changes that would come if we were chosen. Car seats! Diapers! Schools! Chicken nuggets! We wrestled with whether to tell anyone. Should we get our close family and friends excited, when the potential for disappointment was so great? You see, on this staffing phone call there would be three families considered, not just us. So we had a 33% chance of getting them, and a 66% chance of nothing. My husband is the optimist. When I see a 66% chance of rain, I know it’s gonna rain.

In the end we told some people and not others, kind of weighing who could best handle the potential loss and whom we wanted to spare. Our caseworker was to be on the call one week later, so the following Thursday we waited with bated breath for the call to come through. I had to be at work – we were reviewing for the STAAR test – so I tried to maintain appearances while I watched the phone. She called around 1:00 pm. I could hear it in her voice when I answered. They chose another family.

It’s hard to know why we weren’t the best pick for the kids. We don’t get to make the case for ourselves. The staffing is caseworker-to-caseworker; each agency presents their family to the CPS worker on the phone, one at a time, and in Houston she said they usually call back an hour later with their decision. They don’t say why we weren’t selected. The only thing we know is the family that got the kids was Hispanic; maybe that was it, a culture thing. We kept picturing the new parents as gorgeous rich people with doctorates in Early Childhood Development.

I know it doesn’t really matter why. I know if you are like 90% of the population you’re thinking to yourself, everything happens for a reason, those weren’t your kids, your kids are still out there, everything in its own time, etc. And I thank you, because I know you don’t mean to sound cliché and obvious and hollow. You haven’t worked and waited and wondered and worried. You’re trying to be nice.

If you’re near your kids today, take a look and imagine if you had to fight for them like we are. If you had to be fingerprinted and evaluated and inspected and interviewed, just to get a phone call saying not yet, it’s not you, not your time. We chose this path, but it is hard and we’re in a heartbreaking phase, the part where some other couple is buying bunk beds and painting pink walls and calling family with good news. Maybe think of and pray for the foster kids out there that are lost in transition, traumatized and separated and sad and lonely because of the mothers and fathers who let them down. We got a broadcast this week for two elementary-age kids whose parents are in a cult. A cult. And it was our turn to say no, those aren’t our kids.

Once I was in a parking garage and came across a woman who was disoriented and bawling. She had clearly been drinking. I asked her what I could do. Did she need help? What she said was so surprising. “I’m a terrible mother.” And just then I knew she wasn’t. Because she was there, in a dark garage alone, crying over her children.

One of my students refuses to understand why I want kids. He says that I think it looks easy from the outside but I’m going to get more than I bargained for. And he could be right. But he doesn’t understand that’s how all of life is, how it’s going to be for him as well. Harder than you thought. I told him I want our family to grow, I want to share our love and wisdom, I want to read books at bedtime and cut up food and care that much about someone, even if I have to worry that much more, work that much harder. Even if I’m exhausted. Even if I’m not the best mom ever and I end up sobbing in a parking lot somewhere. I’ll take that chance.

Ultimately I want to say thanks, thanks to the mothers who are just out there doing their best. That’s all you can really do. Thanks to the supermoms with the crust-free sandwiches and monogrammed blankies. Thanks to my students' moms that do the unimaginable, working long hours into the night and still keeping their children fed and their clothes washed and letting them know they're loved, making something out of nothing day in and day out. And a special thanks to those who go out of their way to be mothers to the motherless. I hope someday to join you.