Parenting
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Learning Lessons from Being Wrong
Every once in a while, I realize exactly how lucky Pop Tart is to have C. I do not mean in a way that she is lucky to have been adopted (because if she were truly lucky, she never would have ended up in the foster system to begin with). I mean that there is C to balance me out. I am the bad parent. I am the unsympathetic parent. I am the parent who does not naturally react in the way her therapist thinks we should, because it goes against my grain. Tonight, C kicked me out of the house. I was planning on going out to write anyway,…
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Sacrificing a Dream
Not too long ago, Elle Décor published a personal essay from a woman who said she and her husband sacrificed having a third child in order to have their dream home. The article received a lot of back lash. And while my opinion is that they chose NOT to sacrifice their dream home/her ability to be a stay at home parent to have a third child, the point of this post is not to bash this woman further. She and her husband made a difficult choice. To her, it feels like she has given up something important, even if that something was just a dream, in order to have something…
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Mothers’ Day is Complicated
Mothers’ Day (and Fathers’ Day, too) is complicated. Can we all just agree on that to begin with? There are mothers, step-mothers, women who have acted like mothers in our lives. There are mothers we talk to every day, and mothers we only call on Mothers’ Day and major holidays. There are mothers who have passed, recently or not, who we can never talk to again. Mothers we never wish to speak to again, by our own choice, because of what they have put us through. There are families with two moms in the home, and families where surrogates were used. And let’s not forget the single fathers or male…
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The Honeymoon is Over
In foster care, as with many things, the start of a new placement is often referred to as the “honeymoon” period, where the newly placed foster child is on their best behavior. For those kids, I tend not to think of it as “honeymoon”, which has connotations both of choice and happiness (neither of which are often true in a foster placement) and instead think of it as the “scared out of themselves” period, where they are afraid to truly be themselves, for fear they will be sent away. However, “honeymoon” might be the way to describe that period from the foster family’s point of view, especially if they are,…
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Looking for the Good
When Pop Tart first came to live with us, she had a general anxiety disorder diagnosis. Almost two years, lots of hard work, and more coping mechanisms than I can count later, she still has symptoms of anxiety but no longer a disorder. Still, a generalize feeling of fear or anxiety can over take her at just about any time. In addition, she is one of those sensitive souls that FEELS (and yes, all caps) everything. One of the things we have struggled with as parents are school reading assignments that have dealt with death (in 4th grade, 2 classroom books assigned back to back dealt with child death and…
