http://yougottabelieve.org/coney-island-

http://yougottabelieve.org/coney-island-coasterthon/ Another innovative way to help You Gotta Believe find permanent homes for teensThanks.

Some thoughts on Loss, Rejection, ETC…

Loss:   At the heart of every out of “home” placement is a child’s unrelenting sense of loss.  At the core of significant numbers of  adoptive/foster care placements is the parents unspoken belief that somehow adoptive/foster placements are a poor substitute for “real”/traditional  family building.   Adoptive parents often lose out on the critical support pieces that are so easily given to their non-adoptive traditional counterparts.   Feeling alone and isolated from friends and family that “told you so” or are just plain tired of your “complaining” is a terrible yet treatable condition.

LOSS: Is the unavoidable residue of being adopted or being the adoptor.  Embrace it and see it’s power diminish with every passing encounter.  Deny it and the shadow it casts will make dark and dangerous the most mundane of everyday slights.  Don’t hide it divide it, yours, mine and ours, recognize that it’s presence in your relationship is merely a place holder that means you no harm.

Rejection:  Having spent the better part of 20 years advocating for the placement/adoption of teens and preteens rejection is always a major part of almost all my conversations.   If you were to line up ten random people on the street, ask them would they be interested in or even seriously consider adopting or having a teen placed in their home you’d be met with a chorus of no’s!  The out right rejection of taking in teens is the norm.  That being said we have an obligation to these youngsters who through no fault of their own need family.  Coincidentally all families can benefit from a good dose of perspective. What most of us miss everyday is the thousands of interactions big and small that are so common place and reliable as to become invisible.  Home is more than where we keep our stuff.  Home is our moral compass, our true north, our center of gravity.

Rejection:  Is an idea generally based on the generic rather than the specific.  When rejection is the obvious anwser one learns to increase the odds by seeking first anyone and everyone that already accepts the needs of a specific young person.  Being perceived as a “foster child” is dehumanizing in many ways not least of which is it’s power to relegate children and adults to “less than” status.  Less than status allows the world to treat children living in foster care as somehow unworthy of what the majority of folks take as a child’s birth right.

Anger: Anger is a funny thing. (not funny ha ha but complex/dynamic)  There is great power in anger.  The power to motivate, innovate create and destroy.  We sometime fear our anger and the anger of others.  Some folk attempt to avoid the sting of anger by marginalizing themselves to the brink of extinction.  Anger is sometime forcibly pushed into unrecognizable expression.  Anger will not be denied and seeps out behind pretense and rightous fury.  The angry are not always easy to spot to the untrained eye.  But anger is everywhere.

Anger: Is like fire in it’s potential for great human benefit or castastrophic consequence.  Anger in parenting  and adoption is a double edged sword swinging for good or ill dependant upon the situation and/or the angry.  Parents must help our children harnest their fury and channel it into motivation and inspiration.    

Shame: Shame Kills. Not necessarily in the cardiac incident manner but in the stifling of a thousand dreams and all hope for redemption.  Shame kills spirit and drive.  Shame steals curiousity from the young heart and replaces it with fear.  A fear so deep as to make decision making virually impossible. Shame seeps through our pores and into our very bones.   Shame makes us small and relegates us to a life of impotence.

Foster Care needs parents dedicated to encouraging the expression of a full range of emotions by and for the children that live in it’s system.  Foster Care needs parents willing to bare the burden of being an island of sanity in a chaotic storm of instability and ambiguity.  Foster Care needs parents who have come forward to be the missing link between a life from which they come and the one that they can someday create.

Foster Care needs parents that are strong enough to want more for their young charges than they want for themselves.  May is National Foster Care Month and thousands of children still wait.

May is National Foster Care Month:All th

May is National Foster Care Month:All the sweetest moments in my life have been spent loving and being loved.

Every child needs at least one functioni

Every child needs at least one functioning adult with good sense, a willing heart, indomitable courage and a supernatural desire to parent.

The moment a child is born, the mother i

The moment a child is born,
the mother is also born.
She never existed before.
The woman existed, but the mother, never.
A mother is something absolutely new.
~Rajneesh

New realities frighten us all yet there is comfort in knowing that the fear is true for everyone. Congratulations new mothers. Remember it doesn’t matter whether your baby is ten minutes or fourteen years old You are a new creation!

Mother’s Day is coming fast. Get your c

Mother’s Day is coming fast. Get your cards, candy boxes, dinner money whatever the tradition, routine or dance you do ready to acknowledge the one person who always had your back.

Few things in life are as complex and challenging as being a good parent. One of those things is the state we call motherhood. When someone commits themselves to another’s best interest for life that is an impossible gift to repay. All we can hope is to offer our own lives to the betterment of the species. Call your mama she loves you always has.

All we can do…

Just how much is “everything” we can do?   Is everything just another way of saying everything I am willing to do? Or is it possible to actually be out of options and possibilities?  In my experience “everything I can do” generally means all that I intend to do or I will not try again to achieve whatever the set prize is.

I’d like a little more honesty in our declarations of surrender.  I’d like to hear some folks say “I just plain don’t want to do anything else.”  That at least sounds like a genuine statement of position.  “I have done everything” is a lie and a cop out because done everything is a physical impossibility.

Will bare bones honesty of this nature make the situation any less complex or gut wrenching?  Will it decrease the sting of rejection? Lessen the bitter taste of another failed intervention? Make sitting through another series of bold faced lies and half truths easier to swallow? Ease the embarrassment of this or that one little bit?

No.  Clearly the victory would be only moral and the end result disasterous. When we choose to give up on our children we give up on our dreams and aspirations for them and ourselves.  We give up on the ideals that set us on this path to parenthood.   Parents don’t give up on their children.  They bend into unrecognizable shapes and may even break in places.  Wise parents understand that the work of parenting is the defining credo of child rearing and often where the real treasure rests as we are forged into kinship and unity through the ice and fire of  our shared challenges and triumphs.

All we can do is by any means necessary never forget that only everything is everything and that’s a whole lot of somethings.