2012 ~ To Tell The Truth - Please Stand Up

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

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You STILL can't lose Christmas, Ralphie

"You can't lose Christmas. That's it. No details. No exceptions. Period. Finito. That's that. The same goes for birthdays. I have literally said to my children, "You can burn the house down. We will move into a hotel until the house is rebuilt. We will collect insurance money, rebuy gifts and still have Christmas. Because you can't lose Christmas."" You STILL can't lose Christmas, Ralphie - Christine Moers ...

Abusive parenting techniques to treat reactive attachment disorder?

Some more to think about during Nation Adoption Awareness Month: Please go read this article Abusive parenting techniques to treat reactive attachment disorder This is my comment in the proper order: "I am really very saddened to see members of the attachment community come out and being defensive about a situation or several situations involving the abuse of adopted children post placement. This would be a wonderful opportunity to come out and discuss what is appropriate therapy for children suffering from “reactive attachment disorder” (RAD) or more commonly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There have been several cases of the abuse involving adopted children and the withholding of food. Three that I can think of that it made the news in recent weeks. In fact the state...

National Adoption Awareness Month

Many of you may know in November has been declared national adoption awareness month. Many of my fellow bloggers deal with the issues of adoption and foster care have made the commitment to write a blog post each day during the month of November in honor of national adoption awareness month. You will find links to many diverse adoption and foster care bloggers in my sidebar on the right hand side of my blog, I would encourage anyone interested in learning more about adoption and foster care to check out my fellow bloggers. I have been reading many excellent posts on on several aspects of adoption and foster care. If by chance your fellow adoption or foster care blogger that I have a relationship with and you do not see a link to your blog, please let me know, and I will add your blog....

Please Take the Time to Watch This

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Musings of the Lame: Life as a Birthmother: What's Wrong With the Adoption Tax Credit?

Please scroll down to the bottom of the page where it easy to let your law makers know that we will support a bill that HELPS FOSTER CHILDREN find permanency through adoption. These bills (Senate companion bill (S.3616 ) to H.R. 4373) actually will encourage domestic infant and international adoption and once again leave deserving foster kids out in the cold! Please speak up NOW! Let us remember that the adoption industry is over a 5.8 billion dollar annual industry. Historically, as the adoption tax credit went up, so does the adoption fees. In other words, the US government subsidizes the adoption industry this way through the Adoption Tax Credit. In addition, by giving added incentives for adoptive parents to spend more money on adoption, they will look towards international...

Dear Mr. President, Here’s What I’d Like to see in your National Adoption Awareness Month Proclamation « Land of Gazillion Adoptees

Each November brings about National Adoption Awareness Month. This month was originally a State-based initiative that was founded to encourage the adoption of children (who are legally cleared for adoption) in the U.S. foster care system. It has become a Nationally recognized month, and unfortunately, it’s commonly accepted meaning has changed. Rather than sticking with the month’s original intentions, various adoption groups, agencies, and adoption facilitators alike have used the awareness of adoption this month brings to advertise all types of adoption. The misinformation that is spread as a result of aggressive marketing is only part of the problem: the actual purpose of the month is negated because attention is diverted away from the needs of those children...

It Really Is This Simple

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As thousands of parents are deported, US citizen kids face fallout

"Behind the statistics are the stories: a crying baby taken from her mother's arms and handed to social workers as the mother is handcuffed and taken away, her parental rights terminated by a U.S. judge; teenage children watching as parents are dragged from the family home; immigrant parents disappearing into a maze-like detention system where they are routinely locked up hundreds of miles from their homes, separated from their families for months and denied contact with the welfare agencies deciding their children's' fate." Read More: As thousands of parents are deported, US citizen kids face fallout; some placed for adoption Have we really done so well at taking care of the children that we already have in the foster care system, that we should be creating more so-called “orphans”...

Foster Parenting Adventures: What is wrong with the System part gazillion

My predictions for the future include the possibilities/probabilities of further placement disruptions, continued sexual acting out, increased aggression, school expulsions, teen pregnancies, depression, sociopathy, possibility of future residential treatment or jail. Because this is how and why it happens. I just gave you the recipe. Foster Parenting Adventures: What is wrong with the System part gazillion I want to scream! Yep, the system is broken. Again I say, there are not enough good foster homes, how long are we going to keep doing the same thing and expect different results? ...

Noah baby • Severely beaten child was under county watch

Yet another case of a foster child being abused by his caregiver Noah baby • Severely beaten child was under county watch My comment: “Sometimes I think the problem that no one wants to face is that there NOT enough quality people who can and will become foster parents. Instead of accepting and licensing people who “will do” are supposedly “good enough” we need to take fewer children into the system. In cases like poverty driven neglect, or the type of generational “ignorance” I see every day we need to do a better job of supporting and educating parents. When children need to be removed for safety, maybe it is time we start looking at small professionally staffed care homes instead of continuing with a system that doesn’t work OR protect children. I know nobody wants to go back...

I Am Here

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So Proud!

Tomorrow is payday, I am flat broke and jonesing for a Diet Coke! I ask my oldest if she has any money. She says, “Yes. But you have to pay me back…. Double!”...

You Never Know How They Interpret The Things We Say

They are short staffed, so I have been working “like a dog” this month. That phrase sent Miss CoCo into an uncontrollable laughing fit. Since unlike seeing me coach gymnastics, she has never seen me doing this job, where “I work like a dog.” You know, where I crawl around on all fours with my tongue hanging out, lifting my leg to pee on things. ********************************************************************************************** As I was leaving for work yesterday morning, CoCo asked where her daddy was, she remembered that I had said that I was going to work and that daddy would be home with them. I said, “Daddy had to go...

“Orphan” and Poor are NOT Synonymous

This is a FaceBook comment I made regarding the Pat Robertson video, I just posted: As an adult former foster child I find is implication that those of us who have survived adversity are profoundly and permanently damaged and not worth the effort offensive, and clearly untrue. HOWEVER, when we talk about so-called “Orphan Care” worldwide what we are talking about is “Orphans,” the majority of whom have one living parent and poverty is the overwhelming factor in their availability for adoption. When people quote: “James 1:27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” I am always struck by the fact that it says AND, The fatherless AND widow, it says nothing about...

“We love Orphans”

“We minister to Orphans from all over the world, thousands of them. We love Orphans. We love helping people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to take all the Orphans from around the world into my home.” ~Pat Robertson Classic! As offensive as I think this clip is… As much as it makes my skin crawl… I would bet there are some “good Christians” and the children that they adopted, only to try to return, re-adopt out (disrupt) who would agree....

We Made Them a Promise

And those years that we were "protecting them" and "giving them a better life?" We've all heard the horror stories. We ourselves have a son who was neglected in his birth home because of a birthmom's drug habit. He wasn't getting enough supervision as a toddler and so he was removed. He wasn't abused though .. .until he entered the system. Seven years and 15 placements later, he now had a history of sexual abuse, physical abuse that was so calculated and deliberate that it almost makes me vomit, and years of emotional abuse. And then the "system" made the decision that it was OK for him to be separated from his younger birth siblings. As a woman I met with yesterday said passionately, "who thinks they have the right to make the decision to separate people from their siblings???" And, because...

Sometimes You Need a Little Trauma–Versary to Remind You That You Really Are O.K.

I want to go ahead and wrap up my posts about my little trauma–versary . Part I Part II I can be walking down the street all grown up with a family of my own and I can make a conscious connection that reminds me of a fun filled family vacation and another near death, sibling experience. I can smile, laugh, shake my head and say to myself, “good times.” Little did I know that behind my conscious memory of our family trip to Oklahoma, was a deeper painful semi-conscious remembrance that through the connection of the present day fireworks to my trip to Oklahoma was only pulled forward enough from the back of my mind, that just the emotions and the feelings of fear and loss were accessible. Yet, the memory of the cause of fear, pain and loss remained tucked away and elusive. let me just...

Socks For Smiles

About Socks for Smiles I am eleven-years-old and have a goal to collect colorful socks and other personal items, such as underwear, for foster kids. I was in foster care for five years. I was mostly given plain white socks to wear. I hated those socks! The other kids had colorful socks with fun designs and cartoon characters. It was another way I felt different. I haven't worn white socks at all since I was adopted in 2010! Now I want to help other kids feel special too. Socks may seem like a small thing, but it's sometimes the little things that mean a lot to a kid Please Help! Go check out my young fellow Foster Care Alumni, How cool is this!?...

The Anatomy Of A Trauma-Versary Part II

PART I I love my mother-in-law. “I have left Jimmy in more places, more times than I can count or remember. …But I always went back for him.” She shrugs and laughs. And she always did. Family lore has Mr. Sunday being left behind at home, at church, in stores, in the Upper Peninsula, in Wisconsin and so on. Being the youngest of seven kids, quiet and always having his nose in a book, somebody seemed to think somebody else had gotten him, they would eventually figure out nobody did and return to find him usually in some corner reading a book before he even discovered he had been lost. He seems no worse for wear. My sister is 5 ½ years older than I am. She has always relished her role as a mother to me and our brother. When she was in Jr. High she made he and I matching outfits for her...

The Anatomy Of A Trauma-Versary (Or My New Life As a Circus Mom)

PART II The governor of the great state of Michigan legalized fireworks this year. Yippee! Somewhere around the first thanks to a friend’s FaceBook post I had realized, knowing the family directly across from me the way I do, that I had BETTER start watering my “hay” as my kids had taken to calling my front lawn while they pretended to feed their toy horses. On Wednesday The Fourth we had walked down the block, around the corner to watch another neighbor’s well organized well planned fireworks display, which CoCo, my sensory kid HATED and Mad my anxious kid toughed out. Since I was in the house with CoCo I wouldn’t know, but I am pretty sure the middle kid was wishing she could be the one lighting them off…they all came here with their own personalities. As we made our way back home, rounded...

Since When Is Your Anger MY Symptom?

She’s making me angry! He’s pissing me of! They are making me feel bad! Nope! Not allowed! Rephrase that please. Nobody can MAKE you feel ANYTHING, we are each responsible for our own emotions. - Therapy, Group-home, and Residential Treatment Center 101. That we are each responsible for not only our own actions, but our emotions as well is a concept that had been drilled into my head for YEARS, in some of the very same settings that parents of traumatized (RAD) children turn to (supposedly) get their children the help they need. Now, I feel angry when… because for g-d’s sake it is mine to own, you can’t say I never learned anything in exile. So, when HE makes me angry, I know it is not HIM, it is ME choosing to feel anger about the situation…HE is not MAKING me feel ANYTHING, no other...

You enjoyed the convenience of my solitude

excuse me if I seem a little rude While I was missing my childhood, My brother and my prime You enjoyed the convenience of my solitude I will NEVER thank you for my solitude!...

A new model of family… | The Adoption Counselor

Brenda McCreight July 8, 2012 When is the adoption industry going to move beyond the notion that attachment is the key to everything? I mean really, the myth is perpetuated that once the child achieves the capacity to experience a reciprocal attachment relationship with the adoptive parents then there will be no further problems and the adoptive family will be no different than a genetic neurotypical family. Just look at the adoption conferences – the main topic is generally about attachment strategies. All the conferences and seminars I’m asked to speak at want something from me about how to facilitate and create attachment....

I Feel, Therefore I Am.

I haven’t posted much lately, not because I don’t have a lot to say…that is for sure…I NEVER seem to run out of things to say. Sometimes the past and present collide in ways that make it all hard to untangle and make any sense of…and I get stuck. I took a real job last August which put me in the inner-city and put me (back) in touch with the heartache of poverty, lack of education and hopelessness that plagues a good section of our population…especially the children. It sucks. It is sad and depressing and because I spent a good deal of my childhood in foster care and a fair amount of my youth in the community we serve I can’t seem to build up the callousness and apathy that it requires to not let the whole mess depress the hell out of me. I gotten so depressed, frustrated, overwhelmed and...

Adoption PSA From Second City

Would I find this so humorous if it weren’t so true? Discuss....

The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants - WSJ.com

As a parent who has attempted to medicate a gifted child into conformity, to save her the inconvenience of being exceptional, this article defiantly struck a nerve with me... Looking back, it seems remarkable that I had to work so hard to absorb an elementary lesson: Some things make me feel happy, other things make me feel sad. But for a long time antidepressants were giving me the opposite lesson. If I was suffering because of a glitch in my brain, it didn't make much difference what I did. For me, antidepressants had promoted a kind of emotional illiteracy. They had prevented me from noticing the reasons that I felt bad when I did and from appreciating the effects of my own choices. As medications saturate our culture, we may be growing less able to connect our most basic feelings...

They Don’t Make A Card For That

Not one of these say thank you for: Being there sometimes For abandoning me when the only thing I need was a parent For my 7 years in foster care Visiting me when you didn’t have better things to do Putting your wants before your children’s needs Looking out for Number One For making us number 2, 3, and 4 Occasionally sacrificing a little, as long as it was not too inconvenient, or make you too uncomfortable Nope, not one of them…I know, I checked....

The Real Mommy War

While we are all getting ready for this Mothers’ Day weekend and debate what makes one and who is a “real” mother, who we may or may not honor, what qualifies one as “The Bestest Mommy EVER!” Let us not forget that across this very country thousands of kids will wake up this Sunday in institutions and in the homes of strangers, and the recipients of their homemade mothers’ day cards and presents will be those temporary guardians or no one at all. I am with Kristen on this one: When it comes to issues of motherhood, there is one issue I care about: some kids don’t have one. All of these petty wars about the choices of capable,...

Life in the Grateful House: Honest

Life in the Grateful House: Honest Please go read this very brave and insightful post by Lisa, whom I am privileged to be able to count among my frien...

The Story Of (not that) Jesus

I read this personal narrative by Jesus Montes (16 years old) over at Cindy’s blog Saturday morning, over breakfast…and since Saturday, been at a loss for words. Please go read it! I mean it PLEASE GO READ IT! For 10 years Jesus has been able to wake up in the same bed every morning. For 10 years Jesus has not been hungry. For 10 years Jesus has been able to have a school, a community and an advocate. 10 years in the same place is huge, for those of us how have had to stuff everything we own into trash bags and move on time and time again…we know. The fact is that there will always be kids like Jesus…Always. And those kids we need to continue to speak up, for those kids we need to fight for openness and honesty, for those kids we need to tell our stories. We owe it to them. And whether...

How One Person’s Source Comfort Could be Another’s Source of Terror

I originally posted this comment over on I Was A Foster Kid and I decided to repost it here, because I think it is another example of how kids with trauma backgrounds view and see the would so differently from the adults who are attempting to help them. Seriously good question LT. I also wonder if in many circumstances, if the immersion of a child in a religion that they do not have a history with…talk of good and bad, sin and sinners, heaven and hell, eternal damnation the “righteous” and so forth isn’t very scary for kids from trauma, whom at their core feel a deep unwavering sense of shame. I had an experience when one of our staff packed us up took us to her church, they took us all aside, prayed over us, told us we had to be saved, and accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior and...

To Wayne, With Love

Today I got to actually use my own computer for a minute to log on to FaceBook (as opposed to my phone), and what do you know but the fact that it was Wayne’s 60th birthday was displayed up there with my notifications. I clicked over to his profile to peck out a quick “happy birthday” on this wall, as we are all so accustomed to do these days. And the moment my curser started to blink in that little box, the tears started to flow. What do you say when happy birthday in 420 characters or less could never do it justice? When I had met Wayne I had already been institutionalized for a year, and I had missed most of my schooling the 2 years before that. He was a bright eyed idealistic hippie-ish grad student at the U of M. I mean he a tall and lanky, scruffy faces, shaggy hair Birkenstock wearing,...

The Healing Power of Calm

I do not talk/write about my story for sympathy, or vengeance. I tell my story so that I may understand and so that others who wish to hear may gain some understanding as well. When I had met Mr. Sunday, I was 22 or 23 years old. Finally the fireworks display that was the adolescent brain had subsided and I was pretty much left only having to wrestle with my leftover anxiety, depression and PTSD, from years of living in the foster care system. Yea me! I had aged out of foster care, I had been homeless, lived the thug life, been quite the party girl, I had destroyed relationships, and many times I had come close to destroying myself. By that time I had hitchhiked across the country several times. Something would happen, I’d screw-up, whatever…I would just throw everything I could carry in...

Being a Child Living With Trauma Feels A Lot Like Being a Backseat Driver

This video is very interesting….go watch it…then come back. Yesterday I was on the other side of town, right where the suburbs meet the city. I am tooling along on a four lane divided highway.I’m driving in the second lane, one lane over from and about 3 cars behind a city bus…because I know better than to get stuck behind a bus. The light changes right as I notice out of the corner of my eye a rather large woman with bags in both hands, doing something that slightly resembles running…but really slow. Over the traffic and the noise of the bus I can barely make out her “hey, hey!” Oh, man! She is trying to make the bus…and there is no way she is gonna. The bus is pulling off and the driver hasn’t noticed her, or he has but he is going anyway. I decide I have to take action, I start...

Funny What Makes Me Smile

The other morning my big girl lumbers into my room wrapped in her blanket and whines, “Mom, I don’t feel good” As she climbs into the now vacant daddy’s side of my bed, and I smile. I tell her, “That’s ok, honey just go ahead and close your eyes. We’ll decide what to do about that when you wake up.” I get the little girls up, dressed and off to school and go back and nestle myself back under my covers. I go on about reading, writing blog posts and accomplishing some of the little things that one can do from the safety of their covers. Occasionally I glance over and see what used to be my baby on the far side of the bed, and I smile. I sit, I work, I drag things out, I think about how rare it is becoming that we two are ever in the same room, let alone within arm’s reach anymore and I...

The Nature Of The Beast

I wish I had a better camera…or my windows were clean, because the pictures do not do the scene justice. I had gotten the big girl off to school, the middle girl was still was still sleeping and the baby girl was all ready and waiting for her bus to pull up in the drive way. CoCo and I were spending a few minutes hanging over the back of the couch watching our backyard menagerie peacefully enjoy their free breakfast together al la Mr. Sunday’s bird feeders. They were all there, Mr. Fatty Pants the squirrel who can reach the woodpecker food if he hangs upside down from Amélie’s bird house. Momma & Daddy Duck who’s babies haven’t arrived...

Borrowing Tools From My Neighbor

So, I few weeks ago, I was really struggling. I was dealing with some triggers that were just flat out dragging me down. This had been an ongoing thing and I had been doing what I thought was a decent job using all of the little tricks and tools I have acquired over the years to deal the occasional anxiety that comes along when you have survived a traumatic past, usually out of the blue. But this was situational, and thing were coming up pretty regularly, and I was handling each trigger as it came pretty well, until the day that my brain snapped, crossed its arms like a three year old and said to me, “Nope, I am not ever going back there. EVER! You can’t make me!” I tried to rationalize with my crazy baby brain. I tried to play little games with it. I tried to trick it. I tried to cajole...

Adoption Ambivalent

Pro-adoption, anti-adoption, adoption advocate, adoption reformer, adoption activist…. I have found in blogging that terms like these are mostly used to discount opinions and shut down discussions and create an us versus them mentality surrounding adoption akin to the sharks and the jets…this is not Westside Story…it is adoption and I honestly don’t know one blogger in the adoption community who doesn’t tell their story, from their perspective without in some way hoping to make things better for kids TODAY. Me personally? am•biv•a•lent [am-biv-uh-luhnt] Show IPA adjective 1. having ”mixed feelings about someone or something; being unable to choose between two (usually opposing) courses of action: The whole family was ambivalent about the move to the suburbs. She is regarded as a morally...

Square Pegs & The Circle of Moms

For those of you who voted for To Tell The Truth ~ Please Stand Up, in the Circle Of Moms top 25 adoption blogs by moms contest, I would like to sincerely thank you! I never expected to see a foster care alumnus blog hang up in the top 25. What happened this week in the adoption/foster care blogging community was truly amazing, and something I think we can all be very proud of. For those of you who are unaware of the controversy surrounding the Circle Of Moms top 25 contest, I would suggest you read Amanda’s and Production not Production’s posts on the subject, they have put it all out there so eloquently, I could not do it justice. The way I understand it, in a nut shell when COM ran their Top 25 Adoption Blogs by Mothers, neither they nor some of the adoptive parents who were involved...

The System Today

In my real-life travels recently I ran into a staff from a residential placement run by one of our states large foster care contractors. We had a chat about what it is like to grow up and work in the system. This staff member brought up several things they found troubling about the system as it is today. It is troubling that in our state there is no avenue to separate kids who enter the system via different avenues. So, as it was in my day…we house kids who come into the system through the juvenile justice system, with those who are severely mentally ill, with those who were abused and neglected, with those who have run of the mill “family problems”. This means that today, just like in my day we can have a child who came into the system for “family problems” walking to school every day with...

The truth is:

The truth is subjective. My truth is not necessarily the same as your truth. My life, my childhood were experienced much differently through my eyes than my parent’s “parenthood” (yes I am using the term loosely here.) was seen through theirs. The way my foster parents experienced my time with them may be remembered very differently than it is by me. And I assume the same could be said for my staff, social workers and teachers. We can only experience and define our own circumstances based on our perceptions which are formed by our experiences and circumstances and it goes on and on like that. The way my children view their childhoods and the way I view them are vastly different. The way others see my parenting and the way my children experience it differ greatly. Most people think I do...

Memories of Crack-Heads, Queens, Dead Prostitutes, Friendship and Survival

del.icio.us Tags: Foster Care,Survival,Aging Out Facebook © 2012 I came home last night from a long day (LONG week), sat down at the table alone to eat the dinner my kids had excitedly told me they had saved for me. I finally pulled out my phone to see what goings on in the social media world I had missed. Little did I know that a FaceBook post my friend Angie had tagged me in was going to bring me to my knees. Angie Yesterday It's funny the things you think about when you can't get to sleep at night...I thought about my old apartment on West Alexandrine in Detroit. This was my 3rd apartment since being emancipated...