Breath......OK here we go.

I was putting this post off until I felt a little bit more like writing it. Well it turns out, I will never be ready to write and share things that are deeply personal and painful for me. They are just plain not fun to write. I also knew however that the daily questions of "what happened?" could not easily be ignored, so I thought it best to just go ahead and get it out there.

I am going to write it in three sections, so that I can keep my thoughts organized. Please read all three section before commenting, or passing any judgment. I am not saying you are not entitled to judge, just try and wait until I have written everything. The three sections will be, "What happened", "How I feel", and "What I am learning".

What happened.

For at least 6 years now my husband and I have been considering adoption. We have not always talked seriously about it and sometimes it was just one of those things where you say "Maybe one day...". However, when we got the one year orders for a job in Oklahoma through the military, we finally decided that maybe this was a good time to really pursue it. So in January, we started our homestudy (basically a thorough background check and in depth interview into who you are and why you are adopting). We then started the foster and adoption classes through DHS (department of human services). At this time we were not really considering foster at all, but the classes for foster or adopt were the same, so you took them regardless of which one you were doing. My husband and I briefly discussed fostering and after a few nights discussion, realized it was a not a good fit for our family, or our time line. So we stuck with the plan of doing what we needed to do for adoption, and if God opened a door, we would take it.
Jump forward several months and we have both finally completed all of our classes and our homestudy. Our worker calls me on a Wednesday and we set up an appointment for a Thursday to discuss where to go from here. My thinking was that I was going to get more information and be told a little bit more about the whole process. Since I knew very little about how it all worked, I went into Thursdays meeting very ignorant. However I did know that they were more than likely going to ask me to try fostering while I waited to adopt. They are in such need of good foster families, that of course it's a given they will ask. So the night before the meeting I started to reconsider my stance on fostering. Mostly I thought whimsical ideas of shy children whom I would love and hug until they were whole and healed, and then be told "Valerie, would you like to adopt these precious children?" to that of course I would answer "YES!". I knew it wasn't realistic, but I let thoughts roam anyhow.

So the next day I walk in my social worker's office with my two curious and excited homeschooled children. We exchange pleasantries, and I start asking some basic questions. She answer's my basic questions and then asks if I am ready to foster. I tell her that my husband and I had decided not to foster when we were doing classes, but that we are not saying "NO, NEVER!", just "we are not sure its a good fit for us." One reason, although there was many, was the school age factor. Being that we homeschool and it is illegal to homeschool foster children, we thought that might be a hard adjustment for a school age foster child to be the only one sent off to school everyday, when the rest of the family stays home. Then it happened. She held up the paper and my heart melted. She told me she was in dire need of a foster home for a 3 year old boy (to which my son shouts in my ear, "yeah mom a boy!") and his 3 month old baby sister (to which my daughter shouts in my ear, "yeah mom a BABY!"). She offers me no other information besides gender and age, I being new, didn't know what else to ask. My hearts starts to melt and race all at the same time. I become absolutely engrossed in these two precious children, and all other reservations against fostering go out the window. I tell her I must call my husband and ask him and that I would call her within thirty minutes of leaving her office to let her know. I no sooner walk out the building and I am on the phone with my husband. The two children and their precious little ages touches his heart the same as mine and he says "yes". I call the worker and I am told I will be placed with them the very next day. My heart was racing with excitement. I went to Goodwill and purchased some small inexpensive baby things and some little toddler toys for the 3 year old. I make phone calls and for the next 24 hours friends drop off pack and plays, clothes, toddler bed, bottles, pacifiers, and blankets.
The children arrive the next afternoon by a social worker who also knows very little about the children. You see every foster or adoptive family has their own social worker kind of "assigned" to them and every child in the system has their own social worker "assigned" to them. These children had a social worker who knew all about them. Their history, their temperament, the reason they were put into care in the first place, how many times they had been put into homes, and if there was any behavioral issues. However, their social worker was out of town on vacation during all of this, so I was placed with the two children by a worker who did not know the children nor anything about them, and placed into a home that knew even less. I cannot go into too much detail but I will do my best to sum up what happened after that. I came to find out that very day through a friend who does emergency foster care here (and has done foster and also has adopted through the system for 12 years), that there was several people who knew the kids and were very shocked they were being placed together and that they were being placed with a "new" foster family. I just took that warning as "they doubt my abilities". How prideful I was. It turns out the baby, was incredibly needy. She needed to be held constantly and would cry often if you laid her down. She also suffered from colic and reflux both of which (along with the added stress of me not being familiar and her brother screaming all day) kept her up a good majority of the night, and not very happy at all from about 5pm to 2am. The boy on the other hand had no problem sleeping. It was the daytime that was his trouble. He adjusted OK the first day and a half, but then the tantrums went from screaming to pure rage. Anytime he felt frustrated at anything, food, toys, sharing, going to the bathroom, or getting in the car, he raged. He screamed, hit walls, threw toys, and eventually hit my son and myself. I stayed calm and consistent with him. I calmly talked him through, and did consistent time outs. If I had to put the baby down to go speak to him, hold him, or place him on a time out, my eight year old daughter shouldered the burden of taking care of the baby so that I could. Usually at the little boy's loudest points, my six year old son would find a place to go sit and put his hands over his ears. My daughter and I felt such sadness and compassion for this boy that it brought us to tears many times during the day. The tears of sadness for these precious children were shed during the day, and my tears of hopelessness and exhaustion were shed at night. We kept on. I kept holding and rocking the baby in between putting the our foster boy on time out and keeping everyone safe from his rage. Also within this time we realized I could no longer go to the grocery store with my children like I used to. The little boy would get frustrated with wanting things and scream as loud as he could in the store. I tried going to the store once and that was all it took to realize that I could not do it. The grocery store was not the only thing to go. I could not even get one dinner meal on the table. Also all cleaning, homeschooling and spending time with my two children went out the door. I was so tied up with the two very needy and almost "special needs" children that my two had to wait until bedtime. We put the other two to sleep and then let our two stay up later to spend time with them. Which posed another problem of my husband and I having any time together. This is when things started to break down. I saw because I wanted to do a "good" thing (fostering) I was neglecting all my other responsibilities. My home, my kids, my teaching, my cooking and providing, and my nurturing of my husband. Other Foster parents that I knew were coming by to visit and saw how things were going. They kept saying "Valerie, this was a bad placement, you can't keep doing this, it's not your fault. These children should not have been placed together". that's when I learned that another section of DHS had been suggesting that the boy not be placed with other children. Yet I had only one question for myself, one that plagued me constantly all day....."WHY can't I do this??!! I should be able to do this!" I just kept thinking that it should all be working out. Maybe it needed more time, maybe I needed less sleep (although I was only going on a few hours a night). I could not understand why it wasn't working. I was a strong woman. My kids were great kids. I knew how to handle children. I kept my cool. I stayed consistent. But inside, my husband and I had no peace. We were in constant turmoil over this decision. Finally, the last night we had them, my husband came home, and he was edgy. He was stressed, and it was showing. He told me he just wanted to "forget the world". I knew my husbands history with alcoholism, and he knew it well too. We did not like what this was doing to our family and our marriage. I called a friend who was a fellow foster mom and broke down and cried. I told her everything that had been going on, what I was feeling, and what my husband was going through. She said simply "Valerie, the kids must go today. They need individual homes and you need to protect what God has given you to protect and take care of." The first four days, the idea of placing them back with other foster homes, was not an option for us. But that day, it became the only option left. I cried the entire day. I called DHS, and we set up a time to place the children back into the homes they were previously in. It was a blessing that they were both able to go back to the homes they had already been in for 6 weeks, rather than go to all new houses. However, I felt like I wanted to die that day. I felt undeserving to be called a "mom", or even a human for that matter. I felt like the lowest person on the planet. I was depressed, and felt I had hurt these children by giving up on them. I could not stop crying the whole day. My husband felt frustrated and overwhelmed too, but he turned it to anger instead of depression like me. He was angry at the biological families, at DHS, at me, and even God. We felt like failures, but we also felt like we were somehow given a "hard time" by God for doing something good. We were confused.

Next post will be "How I feel" and "What I learned", which will talk more about why we were wrong to feel some of the things we felt, how we worked through that, who helped us, and what Truth brought us out it.