Panda Plans

I have been having this conversation with my daughter a lot lately.

P: Mama, I want a sister. We don't have enough kids in our family. A's family [our dear friends] has three!

me: I'm not having another baby, honey.

P: Well, can't you just get a kid? Isn't there, like a place you can go to for one? Lots of kids don't have families you know. We could adopt!

me: ...ermm...it's not so simple....It's not like it's Target, sweetheart.

P: But--

me: I'll talk to Papa, okay?

She's had the same discussion with her father. I know, because one night S came rushing into the bedroom, adamantly wishing to know if I had promised Panda that we were going to get her a sister. (I hadn't.)

 The thing is, we've never mentioned adoption to our kids. I suppose they may overheard one of our late-night chats, but I think that Panda just has a heart as big as Ontario. She needs to help. She's fascinated with the idea of rescuing people/pets/random spiders. Also, she may or may not have watched 'Oliver and Company' on repeat once too many times on a long road trip. She is convinced that she needs a new sister exactly her age who loves Frozen as much as she does, who could be the Anna to her Elsa. Each time she brings it up I am treated to a righteous little lecture on how there are kids who need families because their mommies and daddies are mean, and like, pull their hair and stuff. And each time I try to explain that yes, there are kids whose mommies and daddies - for whatever reason- can't take care of them properly and keep them safe, it is true, but it is a loooong process to adopt a child, and anyway, does she realize she'd have to share her toys? And her brother?

But it doesn't put her off. She's determined. I'm worried that when we do finally tell them -we are holding off  in hopes of avoiding as long as possible the adoption version of the question "are we there yet?", incessantly repeated at regular intervals - anyway, I am worried that when we do finally tell them, she will think that we are doing it because she talked us into it. And if the transition is rough with the placement, or the kids fight a lot, I am worried that she will blame herself. 

Of course, she might just be mad at us, because are hoping to adopt someone a year or so younger than Pickle. Our daughter has never held the opinion that her executive powers should be less than that of adult, and  I can just hear her sighing deeply and patiently explaining to us that we were SUPPOSED to get a girl. Her age. Who likes Frozen. And then giving us that eyebrows-slightly-raised 'are we clear now?' look, and expecting that we'll obediently toddle off back to the placement worker and put in a request for a proper sister.

And if we ever decide on place to move to, and get through the application process in that new province... who knows? Maybe she'll get one. Is four that much more work than three?

Fostering Frustration

Remember when I said we were waiting for a letter in the new year to see if were accepted for fostering? Not going to happen - I got a phone call instead. Apparently, we need to have a bedroom available for every child even though our two kids have chosen to share. Now, I sort of get that. I agree that the foster child should have a separate space that's just for them. What I don't get is what that has to do with my kids, who share a room not only quite happily, but tenaciously, stubbornly, and resisting all efforts the contrary. Even though their beds are only two feet apart, we still end up with this....

(It's a wonder anyone fits in there with all those stuffed animals, much less two kids and a cat!)

It's frustrating, because we have the space in our hearts and the space in our home right now. We plan - and  have always planned - on looking for a place with a yard. Now that place needs to be larger, and in the meantime our application is stalled. We can't move until after the school year, and that is assuming we can find a reasonably-priced house in a decent area. Our contact did make a point of saying more than once that space was the only thing that stood between us and applying, and that as soon as we had a lease or a mortgage, the application would be in the mail.

It's frustrating, because at no point during either meeting were we told that every child needed to have a separate bedroom. I feel that this kind of restriction has the effect of heavily  favouring the chances of the rich or the childless in the selection process. It limits people who already have young children and want to grow their family to one child at most, because how many people have a five bedroom house?

It's frustrating, but I have to let that go and focus on the positives. They think we are good candidates.  Yay! It gives us a push to make a big decision, and since we are the king and queen of fence-sitting we need a good shove now and then. Yay! Because since would have to move, we are seriously considering making it a big one, and starting all over again in another province - one with a better economy.

How far would you go to put yourself in a position of being able to apply as a foster parent? Would you move to a larger home, knowing that your application may still be rejected? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

First Date

So, I promised you all out there on teh interwebz (because I prefer to labour under the illusion that people actually read this thing, thankyouverymuch) that I would write a little bit about our first selection meeting for foster adoption.

This is how it works. First, you call the office and they ask a series of qualifying questions, mostly to make certain that you aren't a lunatic living in a hovel - where do you live, do you have enough space, has anyone official (so, not your kids or your mother-in-law) ever told you that you aren't fit to raise a chicken, et cetera. If you can tick all the boxes, you are invited to attend an informational session within the following three months.

After a number of weeks and some (okay, a lot of) obsessive googling on fostering, the evening arrives. Three or so social workers ply you with sugar, caffeine, and heart-breaking statistics until all your defenses are offline, and then they hit you with the horror stories and the worst case scenarios to see if you'll break and run. If you hang tough, they'll see you the following week (or, you know, whenever you get your shit together.)

This is where the selection process starts. At our meeting, we all had to stand up and say who we were, what we did for work and leisure, and to say what our experience with children was, and our motivation for attending. The hardest part was to describe ourselves as parents in one word. What? As you may have noticed, I can't describe anything in just one word. Apparently a lot of others felt the same, and since there were about forty of us, it took some time to get through us all. Of course I was last, so I had a lot of time to build up all that public-speaking anxiety we all know and love. Naturally S nailed it, and I muttered something incoherent about how all I really do is read and aren't epigenetics interesting, then got red in the face and sat down. All the words I wanted to say in a clear and logical manner got tangled up in my larynx and fell over their feet before making it out of my mouth. The social workers were taking notes the entire time and I'm sure the ones on me say something like "??? couldn't understand a word, no apparent hobbies. Husband bright and articulate."

We moved on to a questionnaire, and let me tell you, that was definitely designed to weed out the crazies. Because, you know, my one year old baby is totally able to keep himself safe around dangerous objects, and my four year old always meets me at the door with a perfectly mixed Manhattan after a hard day at the office. Not. Some questions were harder for me because my answer really depended on the kid, because you parent the child you have, not the ideal one you expected, right? Right. So I wrote a paragraph on a few of them before we even got to the essay  questions.

Which were actually pretty easy; I just answered them all with examples of how I would  deal with my own kids. So I guess if we aren't passed to the next level, maybe I am not fit to raise a chicken! I felt like a high school kid again when we handed in all our 'tests' - nervous and just hoping for a passing grade.

But we won't find out until the new year, so here's hoping for at least a B.

Thursday Thoughts

A quick rundown of a few things that have happened lately....

·     We took a day off yesterday and stayed at home all day waiting for  the new washer and dryer to arrive. We installed them, and the heavens opened and a choir of angels descended. Magic machines  that can turn seven loads of laundry into three are fan-freaking-tastic. Mt. Laundry, I’m -a comin’ fer you.

·         Pickle stayed home too. After watching Kung Fu Panda, he announced he was the Furious Five (all of them at once, apparently) and leapt off a kitchen chair. I thought I was supposed to catch him, but instead he tried to turn a mid-air somersault. (‘Cos that’s what they DO, Mama!) He landed right on the top of his lil’ noggin, and the Furious Five fast became the Wailing One. Luckily, S was is the middle of washing the kitchen floor and had moved the chairs to a carpeted area.

·          Holy crap  S scrubbed the kitchen floor! Apparently, it’s tan with a pattern. Who knew.

·         Panda grew out of all her jeans last night. I swear they fit last weekend, now they look like capri leggings.

·         Date night… We went to the first selection meeting for  fostering/adoption last night. I’ll write more about it later when I have had time to process.

·         I am taking a day off tomorrow to ‘love-bomb’ the Panda. I can’t wait! I’ll report back on how it went.

·         Panda got her report card, and I realized I still haven’t conquered my problem with authority.  “Must learn to co-operate better and  listen more closely.” The first thing that popped into my brain is “don’t you tell her what she ‘MUST’ do, Mr. Gym Teacher-man”. The next fourteen (or more) years of my two (or more) kids public schooling will be …fun. Maybe I should just turn this one over to S right now for all our sakes?

·         I lost the Swype Keyboard on my phone and can't figure out how to get it back. The Samsung one is driving me mad and may just end my love affair with my phone. I think it’s all a plot by Apple to drive us apart.

• This happened:

The kids have been loving the first snowfall and can't get enough, Panda seems convinced that if we can just find the right magic carrot, we can make an Olaf come to life.

That's it that's all.... apparently I need to go make the kids dinner again. They want to eat EVERY NIGHT these days!

How we found the foster/adopt path

I realized the other day that I never really explained here how S and I came to consider foster/adoption.

I don't recall S and I ever  discussing in depth before we got married what our future family would look like. Or possibly even mentioning it all. Perhaps because we'd sort of been friends for quite a while, we skipped over a lot of those important conversations and kind of jumped right off the precipice without looking. We did this a lot with big decisions and yet somehow we always found a soft - or soft enough - landing. This was no different.

As it turned out, we both felt that there were already an awful lot of people cluttering up the world, and so the voluntary human extinction movement seemed to make sense. It fit with our crunchy granola tendency to tree-hug,  and after all, there are hundreds of millions of orphans out there needing families. We reasoned that when and if we wanted to raise a family, we would adopt a little girl from China. We’re an interracial couple anyway, so my lily-white ass would be the only odd one out. That was plan A,  and it seemed perfect until we realized how much it cost. What can I say- we were young(ish) and naive. And broke. So much for China.

We'd mentioned our plan to a few friends and family members,most notably a relative who had worked in social services. She assumed we meant to adopt domestically. She'd witnessed the struggles her colleagues had been through with their adopted kids, and she regaled me with every horror story she could dredge up. It worked; I was inexperienced and childless, and parenting is murky water anyway. I was convinced I couldn't handle it. With foreign adoption a lottery win away and the perils of domestic adoption fresh in our minds, it was time to develop plan B. (Of course, now I realize that all adoption is rooted in loss, domestic and international, and that is a traumatic event for every child...but that is a whole other post.)

Several years later, Plan B arrived, followed shortly after by Plan B Mark II. We thought we were done until the kidlets got much older, when we planned to foster. Then last year, I learned about foster adoption in our province. I read everything I could about the program. I haunted message boards, did some deep thinking and some obsessive googling. I realized that I still wanted this -really wanted this-  and that the relative who had warned me from this path years ago is someone who not only hates to be inconvenienced, but isn't actually all that fond of children. Of course that person would advise against it! Now I was excited. The murky parenting waters had cleared a bit. I mentioned it to S, who was cautiously on board and agreed to attend an info session with me. The information presented in that session made it clear to us both that this was probably the right thing to do for our family, but it was probably not the right time to do it. 

We think the right time is now, or coming soon. Tomorrow we attend the second info session. This is a sort of joint evaluation, I think - they are looking at us looking at them. If we all agree that we like what we see, then they ask us on a second date -they invite us to begin the application process. I’ve been told that is a mountain of paperwork (it can make  friends with Mt. Laundry ) and can take up to a year for approval once the application is in. Then we wait for placement.

We know this won't be easy, but we believe it'll be worth it. We know it’s a hard, long process –and I am not the best at waiting. I find I handle it a lot better if I can plan and research, so I've read anything and everything I can find that is related to adoption, attachment, trauma, and fostering. I am still looking for more. I find it's reawakening my old punk self, tempered now with more common sense but still passionate about advocacy for the overlooked and disenfranchised, the poor and the disdained. My husband’s passion (other than art-making) is  in the conversation  around the treatment of  Canada's First Nations and the residential schools truth and  reconciliation. It is all part of the same whole to us. I think we may have found our thing. 

There is a quote from one of my all-time favourite novels, JD Salinger's  Franny and Zooey:

In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the

world is stirred up by people who aren't using their true egos.

Take your Professor Tupper…. I'd lay almost any odds that

this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego

at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty….

Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher — or, for that matter,

college professor — and half the time you find a displaced

first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason....

Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time 

for any goddam hobbies.

I’m not incompetent at my job, but we want a life where we don’t have time for hobbies. This is one step toward that meaningfulness in our daily lives. Wish us luck.

First Date Jitters

We have a date! We attend our second  session for foster/adoption in mid-November. This is where shit gets serious and they say either "Come on down - you're a contestant on The Paperwork Is Right!" or "Move it along Ma'am, nothing to see here, nothing see here...."

I am fairly confident we will pass to the next stage (famous last words, hah!) S and I are solid, we have done our trauma and attachment homework (by we, I mean I- he gets the Cliff Notes version from  yours truly) and our parenting failures would not make good reality TV.

Fingers crossed.

I am slowly going crazy, one two three four five six switch...

crazy going slowly am I one two three four five six switch

Does anyone remember that old kids song? It's how I feel lately, eleven days in  with no word back on the interview for S, and no idea if we will be moving (and yes, I am totally counting weekends.) The more that I need to wait the antsier I get, not knowing when or where we will start our fostering/adoption training. I kind of wish I had some faith so I could lay it on all God, but I don't think leaving it in the hands of random chance and the laws of physics is likely to have the same calming effect (at least, I assume that is one reason why people have faith.) So maybe I need to look into that whole thing. I wonder if Hestia is taking new patients.

Countdown...

S has been ‘working away’ for four weeks now, which means that Netflix and I are getting along famously, and that the house could use a good scrubbing. (I have two kids, a full-time job, and a streaming plan; I have no time for more than a lick and a promise attitude to housework.) He does get to come home on weekends though, which means that the house get messier, dirty socks start showing up in the most unlikely locales, and the kids are really disregulated. From like, Thursday night to Monday night  Tuesday (and counting). Tears erupt over the slightest slight, Panda gets downright ornery, and there are a lot of feel-better cuddles and snuggles being dispensed. Pickle especially is having trouble sleeping, which means I am having trouble sleeping, which means…more Netflix. 

BUT – we are getting closer to The Day Everything Changed (Or Didn’t) – the job interview is tomorrow! Soon we will know if the family will be together again, or separated for the remainder of the school year, or something in between. We’ll have a better idea of  where we will be going through the entire foster/adopt process as well  (we’d have a choice of two provinces and about three different paths….it is complicated.) We’ll know if I get to sleep sometime in the next six months, or if we should just increase our internet package and buy shares in Tim Hortons. Life ™, because you haven’t got enough to worry about already.

So to avoid thinking about all that, I am instead thinking about this. The Attachment and Trauma Network has been hosting a free onlinewebinar on educating children with complex trauma and attachment issues. It is completely absorbing (and my reaction is further proof that I got completely the wrong degree, and need to go back to school….) There is so much good information in here, whether you are a parent, or educator. They cover special education, virtual education, legal matters, IEPs , brain function and neurology and more. So now, I am feeling like I am prepared to take on  therapeutic parenting (said the chick who hasn’t even gotten her future address straightened out, not to mention the rest.) And of course I also feel that I can never really be prepared, that I know just enough now to be dangerous.

On an up note, Pickle has informed me that he wants two more sisters and another brother. Panda has put an order in for an older sister. We haven’t even mentioned adoption to them yet….

Of Life & Coffee

Can I live without caffeine? Nope.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with the title of this blog. There is an old story of uncertain provenance that goes something like this*:

A young woman went to her mother and complained about how life was so hard. She was tired of struggling and was ready to give up.  It seemed that as soon as she solved one problem, a new one dropped in her lap.

Her mom took her to into the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and when they come to a boil, she put carrots in the first pot, eggs in the second, and coffee beans in the third.

“Wait.” She told her curious daughter.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled out the carrots, eggs and coffee and put them each in a separate bowl.

"What do you see?"  She asked her daughter.

"Lunch?” she replied.

Shaking her head, she asked her daughter to feel the carrots, and tell her what had happened to them.

“Well,” said her daughter  let’s call her Jane.) “Well,” Jane said, they’re cooked.”

“How can you tell?” her mother asked.

“They are soft now,” she replied.

“And the eggs, what happened to them?”

“They are hard cooked now … Mom, what’s the point of all this?”

Her mother smiled.

“Have some coffee,” she suggested.

“Look,” she told Jane when her daughter was seated with a fragrant cup, “all three of these things were thrown into a pot of boiling water. Not so fun for them. One went in hard and got soft inside, and one went in flexible inside and got hard. The boiling water changed them. But the coffee, it changed the water.”

“So, honey, which are you going to be when you get tossed in hot water? A carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?”

I, my husband, and our two little ones are about to embark on a new adventure, one that could bring us a lot of joy and happiness, but also a lot of adversity.

I choose to be a coffee bean.

*rewritten for de-treacling