Saturday, April 28, 2012

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...

Thursday, April 26, 2012

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,...

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

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...

Monday, April 23, 2012

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...

Thursday, April 19, 2012

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...

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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...

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

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...

Saturday, April 14, 2012

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...

Friday, April 13, 2012

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...

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

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...

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

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...

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