For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:9 I like this verse but so often I find myself trying to “steal the pen” while God is writing our story.:]
I would like to share our story with you, my hope is to give you an idea what real life looks like when parenting a child who has come from a hard place. But most of all Id like to encourage you. Older child adoption is soo rewarding and there are many, many children out there right now, just waiting for someone like you. Someone that’s willing to walk by their side, to cheer them on and to love them unconditionally. Will you be that someone?
Our Story begins…
In January of 2019 we had finished our foster training, and started submitting on the many children who are waiting to be adopted. Foster parents have turned down the chance to adopt them due to age, health problems or behavior problems.
The children that reach state websites like Adopt Us Kids or A Family For Every Child are the ones foster families have passed up, which instantly labels them as hard to place or special needs. While sometimes this is an unfair label and the only thing against them is they turned 7 and suddenly nobody wants them, there are still many that foster parents turned down for a very real reason… The first time I went on a foster site it was humbling and almost nauseating, as child after child’s troubled eyes looked back at me, some were neglected, some sent there because of poverty, many had been abused or had special needs… But each one had one strong common need, they were desperate for someone to care.
While we could see there was a real need for families to do older child adoption we excused ourselves, our doctor had told us there’s a good chance we’ll be able to have biologically children someday, and we had signed up, did a home study and became approved for domestic infant adoption and we were excited about that! However with time our hearts began to change (although we still really hope to be able to do a domestic infant adoption someday! 😉 We started thinking of those 100,000 plus children eligible and just waiting to be adopted. In the one infant agency we signed up with, there are over 250 families waiting for infants! So we sat down again and this time we changed our focus, we started thinking about if we could make even a small difference in one child’s life and give them another chance, wouldn’t it be worth it! And instead of thinking why us, we thought why not us? We had been warned again and again that raising a child that has suffered neglect, abuse etc. and has been in and out of the foster care system is nothing like raising a biological child. Even our social worker advised us to foster she told us.
” The children on websites are really troubled, you would be better off fostering, you will get much younger children that way.”
I believe that was the moment I knew for sure God wanted us to walk this path and give those children a voice.
So that’s when we started doing some serious research and we began to get a deeper understanding of the work, stress, tears and joy that would likely become our daily walk of life if we went down this pathway. We know there’s no way to fully prepare ourselves and yet we wanted the clearest understanding we could have, on what we were signing up for. We appreciated how honest the social workers have been with us!
We then signed up and took our training to become licensed foster parents. We had a completed home study through our infant adoption agency but this wasn’t enough, as technically we would be “fostering” any child we get matched with for six month until we can finalize the adoption.
Getting home visits done wasn’t hard. They did a walk through of our house and we needed to get background checks done and our water tested etc. They asked quite a few personal questions but overall were kind and easy to work with.
Here is a bit taken from my journel:
We have now left the home-study stage behind us; our home is approved and they have proven we aren’t criminals. Lol Now come the exciting stage where we scroll through hundreds of photo listings and start submitting on children…(*Submitting is writing up an article on why we feel like we could be a good match for a particular child or children. You have to do that based off a very brief summary of the child, which is all you are given at first. You then attach your home study and a picture of your family and email it to the child’s case worker. It’s a time-consuming process, but the more caseworkers that have your home study the better your chance is of getting matched quickly.) While doing paperwork was a bit of a chore it doesn’t compare to this new stage we are in, I never guessed it would be this emotionally exhausting to read children’s long reviews where they tell you everything they know about the child. It really varies, some children have much more background info than others… I get way to emotionally involved in each case… but how can you not? You see the innocent expression of a child in the picture and then you read the cold black and white page of the child’s history, mental illness, depression and anxiety run thick in families, drugs and abuse is almost always there, you get to read of their broken families.. grandma usually always have some of the siblings, mom and dad and uncles and aunts have often been in and out of prisons… And you read lines like “speaks more curse words than English” (this was on a 5-yr. old boy) and I shudder to think where and how he had learned those words. And then after each case you have to make a decision whether you want to move forward… (this does not mean you are matched, only that after reading their background that you are still willing to be considered as a prospective adoptive family.) So, our next days are filled with praying and trying to mentally envision these children in our lives and the constant question runs through our minds, are these the children God wants us to have? And then I start googling… I google there adjustment disorder, and the many other things they are diagnosed with, I google the big long name that they gave me of their eye problems, I sigh with relief when the name ends up being something much less scary then the big long name itself, but I mentally add eye appointments to my list of how all this child will all change our life and I wonder for the umpteenth time if I can handle it.. And then comes that really hard decision comes of saying no… In reality its one simple email that says, Due to____ we regretfully remove our interest from this case. The social workers are very understanding, but ooh we long to take them all!
Matched!
The end of April we were matched with a 7 year old boy from Florida! Three month from when we started submitting on cases. We talked back and forth with his social worker numerous times, we had only saw one photo of him at that point and it was not a good one. His face had a strained stressed look and it was taken at an odd angle. It was likely taken in his psychiatrist office.
After praying about it we asked both our families for advice. They were very supportive and encouraging! Without them I’m afraid fear of the large unknown, of taking a child like this into our home might have got the best of us. So, with time we gave the social workers our “yes!” It was such a relief to have that part behind us. At this point we still had very little info about him. This is pretty much what we knew.
- He hated women.
- He could make a sailor blush with his language.
- He was on photo listing sites because of his severe behavior problems.
- School is no problem.
- IQ tested in the normal range.
Our home study, picture and online profile (that told what type of child we are interested in adopting) then went before “Buddys” team for them to decide if we were a good fit. This is considered the matching stage. Often there can be quite a number of families applying for the same child. The team then picks the family they think is the best fit. It can go months before you hear back, however we heard back so quickly that we had been chosen we are rather suspicious that we could have been the only family. The bad picture and his few facts written online like “hates women” probably scared many people off. After we got the call that we were chosen they then sent us a cd of several hundred pages of his past (his redacted files) I wish I could remember the exact number of pages. It was very difficult to read. He had been removed at 4 and had been quite an astounding number of homes in his 3 years of being in foster care. Due to his behaviors nobody stuck it out long. Social workers had documented doctor visits, text messages from foster parents, stuff Buddy said etc. The pages were messed up and had many duplicates. Just trying to piece together who his family is proved difficult. We also learned he was on medications and was diagnosed as ADHD. We started feeling pretty nervous at this point. We could still back out? After all Buddy didn’t know about us yet. We had some sleepless nights. But we couldn’t get his scared big eyes out of our minds. There were so many questions and so few answers. We asked Buddy’s team some more questions…they answered the best they knew how but told us on foster children it’s just a lot of guessing on all the horrors they have or might have been through. The supervisor told us one thing I can tell you! If you are wondering if it’s going to be easy, smooth sailing I can assure you right now it won’t be. She said Buddy has had a lot of relationship breaks in his past and that is one of the most damaging things that can happen to a child. We were glad she was being honest with us but a little surprised when the questions that were asked were all answered in a negative way. She probably had seen to many failed placements to continue to be positive. Another thing one of the workers asked was, “So what’s he going to need to do to make you guys send him back?
At that point we decide we need to quit trying to figure out who he is etc. and simply make our decision in faith. After all people who are blessed with bio’s know nothing about their child beforehand either. When we looked at it this way we felt better. God had brought us this far on our journey we weren’t going to turn back now. After we read the redacted file, they set up a conference call with us, Buddy’s foster parents were on the call and also 4 or 5 people from Buddys team. We were then allowed to ask any questions and we got some more answers!
Then visits began, we went to Florida twice and the worker flew Buddy out to our place for a couple days.
We then got to wait and wait on out of state paperwork to be completed. This was hard as we had already met Buddy and Buddy could not understand WHY he couldn’t come home with us. We felt like we were betraying him. We could do phone calls over that time and weekend visits but with being out of state we weren’t able to do many wknd visits.
Gotcha Day!!!
On September 20th the long-awaited day finally came, we got to pick Buddy up and bring him home! He was soo excited and the first half of the trip was rather rough he couldn’t stay buckled and just when we were wondering how much more we could take he relaxed and fell asleep. We stopped as little as we could and drove through the night, straight home! We arrived home Sat morn around 5 am!
Our very busy new normal began. He was constantly going and his attention span was only a couple minutes, even the shortest books read in the most dramatic voice didn’t hold his attention. Swear words were mixed in every sentence. Hubby took nearly 3 wks. off work (research reassured us that it’s worth the sacrifice and will really speed up the bonding.) I don’t think it would have been possible without Hubby doing that. We parented one hour on one hour off. On our off hour we would go in the bedroom to “try to” sleep, (normally it was too noisy to get much sleep) and/or read some more books on parenting a traumatized child. His behaviors started to really worsen (we reassured ourselves that books/class teacher said this is a good thing. It means the honeymoon stage is over and the child is beginning to trust us.)
Buddy sure did a good job of breaking us into being “parents.” He hid food under his bed, pooped in his bathwater, peed on my toilet paper rolls and on the laundry room floor, shouted more curse words then I ever heard before, we were called anything from rotten little pshyco’s to words to filthy to print. He went into meltdowns over the slightest things like a boot not going on or a pen lid not coming off the first time he tried, or bigger things like being asked to pick up his toys, or do his homework. During his meltdowns he’d scream nasty things at the top of his very healthy lungs and threw barstools, end tables, glass jars really anything he could reach, another favorite thing was to push over our kitchen table in his fits. He was operating out of the reptile/ survival part of his brain. If he couldn’t flee the only thing he could do was fight, in his brain he was literally fighting for his life. Any attempt at reasoning with him at this point is useless, the brain is hard wired for survival and won’t be able to comprehend spoken language. The best thing to do is make him feel safe (talk in a soothing tone) and wait until it blows over. Just knowing all this really helps in not taking anything personal! Most times it’s actually not that bad to be on the receiving end of these angry outbursts, it’s all he knows to do.
We really appreciate Heather T. Forbes outlook and techniques on helping traumatized children. We have several of her books. We had both read them prior to Buddy coming and they made a lot of sense to us. She believes there is only 2 base emotions: Love and Fear. Every other emotion stems back to one of these 2. For example, anger traced back far enough will lead to fear. After Buddy came we started to understand just how difficult it is to love a child who’s outwardly controlling, overbearing, demanding and downright disrespectful. We reminded ourselves daily that this child is terrified, he doesn’t want to be who he is. So much easier said than done sometimes, I had to remind myself of this over and over… For example, id open a window a crack and he would scream What the ***** are you doing?!?? Shut the window!!!! I feel air!!! Its freezing!! Is that what you ***** want? Me to freeze to death?!! I’d take a deep breath, picture him as a baby freezing (while I don’t know if this ever happened, I do know up until he was removed at the age of 4 his mom and him were homeless much of the time. So, I can easily imagine there were cold nights. So, id hug him while I do my best to calmly reassure him that as soon as we start feeling cold, I will shut the window right away and none of us are going to freeze. This normally helps him to get out of the survival part of the brain and back to the front part of his brain where he can then think logically and realize neither of us are going to die.
Despite being big for his age and his rough, behaviors we soon started to see a very very scared child. We were also very encouraged to catch glimpses of a sensitive sweet child underneath his rough exterior. He could verbalize a lot which helped us immensely! One day I was reading him (yes, I said reading! Believe it or not within two weeks he started bringing me books! We were delighted to have a new pastime that didn’t require energy on our part! 🙂 a book, it was a toddler book with the cutest, softest picture of a rain forest. After looking at brightly colored parrots, cuddly monkeys etc. I said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to go to a rain forest sometime?” His loud defiant response was “IM NEVER GOING! (he hasn’t learned yet about an indoor voice) I questioned him why he wouldn’t want to go. He then replied in a more normal tone that the animals would HURT him. I told him that he’s absolutely correct and that it wouldn’t be wise to go by ourselves but we could get a guide to take us because he would know which animals are safe to get close to. His response, “WHAT! I’m not going into the jungle with some guide?! He’d probably try to kill me!” It really helped me realize how deep FEAR was ingrained into him. While I saw a baby book with brightly colored pictures. It had instantly pushed him into his survival/reptile part of his brain. He saw yet another threat for his life. Another thing I quickly learned not to do was say “I wonder who’s coming”. This would bring an excited “Where mom where? Who’s coming? I can’t see? Where? Where? Who is it? He’d nearly tear down the curtains to see. I’d tell him, slightly annoyed, to calm down it probably just a tractor. (while I know it’s ridiculous to tell a child like him to calm down, I still can’t seem to stop myself from saying it:/) Several days later he helped me understand this much better! It’s so much easier to be understanding now.:] He was playing with his Legos and came across a little toy gun about ½ inch long. He came running to show me saying “the mom that had me used to have a gun” I responded really! What did she do with it? Hoping to gather more info from his past. He instantly replied she’d shoot at people when they’d try coming. Knowing his mom’s past, I believed him. I can now easily understand why someone coming to our door brought so much loud excitement (fear) from him.
When he gets frustrated, he instantly starts attacking us, hitting us or slapping our face. In this particular incident he was also poking a pencil into my arm with all his strength. I sighed and thought to myself another one of his fits. Then it hit me you know I have never even talked to him about this yet. So, after I got rid of the pencil and given him time to calm down, I told him I’m really curious why he starts hurting me when he gets frustrated. I showed him the mark on my arm. He shrugged and said “I don’t know.” I answered that I don’t know either but I really wish I could figure out what’s making him do that to me because I’m starting to feel pretty beat up and made a face. He giggled a little at that but then said matter of factly “When I was a baby my mom would do that to me”. He continues to amaze us with being able to verbalize. I praised him for helping me understand that and told him how wrong it was of his mom to hurt him when she felt frustrated. I said, “Now I know why you do that it’s because it’s the only way you ever saw someone show their frustration. He looked relieved and said ya that’s why! I made a note to myself to start talking aloud to myself the next time I’m frustrated and hopefully show him how to correctly handle and work through feeling frustrated.
Another thing that filled my days is play acting. We can do this for hours with stuffed animals. I make my animal talk and he makes his talk. It has proven to be an effective way to show him social skills, how to make friends etc. Some of my animals are so shy he has to get them to talk, some are scared to “go swimming” (all pretend of course) this one was hard for Buddy because he loves water but I was so happy after a few wrong attempts like saying WHY WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SWIM! THAT’S STUPID! ITS EASY! He caught on and said oh I know, “that’s ok we can play in the sand! Which made my monkey very happy! He listened with interest after we were done playing in the sand and my monkey ran home to tell his make-believe mom the whole story of how someone didn’t make fun of him for being scared to swim and played in the sand with him. The second I was done talking Buddy came right over to me, pretended to knock on a door and when I opened, he said That was me! 🙂 lol Another of my animals was so chatty Buddy’s animal told it “You are giving me a headache”! I promptly made the giraffe run back to his mom crying because Buddy’s elk said she’s giving him a headache. (the giraffe was way to chatty but I was trying to help him learn not to be blunt:) Buddy looked thoughtful for a second, it really worry’s him when my animals cry and then he brought his elk over and said “Its ok, I’ll play with you now, I took some headache pills first”! It was all I could do to keep from laughing. 😊😊 We still have a ways to go but that was a start!
He started school, after being with us for 4 days we were so happy, the break from him looked good. However, one hour after being in school we got a call from the school office. He had hit a child, cussed out the teachers and threw things…sigh He went the rest of that day and half of the next. And then the school decided they can’t do this anymore. They told him not to come back the rest of the week and then on Monday come in and we will have a meeting.
We did school work at home for a bit, we actually managed to get quite a bit accomplished but it took me hugging him the whole time and Hubby showing him over and over how to do something. While we had victory, we also had a lot of broken pencils and torn papers and meltdowns. We were all exhausted. About that time Hubby started reading the book “Help for Billy” also by Heather T. Forbes. It’s all about school problems and helping lessen fear in a child and using “relationship” in place of sticker charts etc. It gave us many new thoughts. One of them being, if you honestly thought you would die at any second by just picking up a pencil, you too would do all you could to not do it! This comes from signing papers in courtrooms early in life that ends life as the child knows it or from fearing that if his work doesn’t turn out “perfect” adults will no longer love him and in his brain, this quickly translates to “death”. We started to recognize we were focusing more on getting the schoolwork done and less on him. Sigh We couldn’t deny that we had slipped out of unconditional love for him, rather our own “fear” of him not being able to go to school had started to push us. So, we regained our focus and had a talk with Buddy. We told him that we are here for him no matter what and love him whether he can do his books or not. We told him that only he can decide he wants to learn and asked him to think over what he feels would be the best plan going forward. Through one of these talks he told me he thinks it’s because he’s still so new here, I was quite impressed! While we knew that was some of the problem, (poor child has left everything familiar) I was impressed he realized this. As we recognized now how hard writing was for him, I started writing for him and he simply had to tell me the answers! This greatly reduced the curse words, broken pencils and torn paper. We did this for a while to give him time to settle in, while hopefully keeping him from falling to far behind. He went an hour after school for a bit so his teacher could build a relationship with him. He has now worked his way up to going one hour in the morning with the other children! So that was a victory! (I sit in the school hall and wait the hour; his teacher doesn’t quite trust me leaving yet and its easier for Buddy if he knows I’m not leaving him.) He is also starting to do some writing by himself. We have quite a long way to go on that one yet though. But we are heading the right direction with school but I still had moment when I wonder if he’ll ever be able to do a full day…:]
He brings so much spark to our lives, nearly every evening after he’s in bed we’ll tell each other stuff he said and we get so many good laughs. Watching each other parent has also proved to be very enjoyable! We love pointing out to each other where their parenting methods didn’t line up with Heathers books. 🙂 We continue to slowly fall more and more in love with him each day! I say slowly because with his behaviors many days it’s a little hard to love him. But when I think of how “calm” and predictable our lives were before I realize how much I’m starting to love our new normal. I love what he brings to our family and I love the challenge! And who couldn’t love reading Bible stories to a child who listens with big eyes and hangs on to our every word. It’s so fun to tell those stories to someone for the first time. His eyes are priceless when he learns what the rainbow stands for and how Jesus died for us. He asks really good questions!
I declare he’s opened a lot more braincells for me. My days are now peppered with questions like; What’s mustard made out of, what do the angels do, why can dad shoot deer but I can’t pretend to shoot people, you mean beef comes from COWS? What’s a chicken? Can we eat dogs? Will dogs go to heaven? You mean we won’t even have to try not to curse in heaven??? When can I go? Will my (foster) brother go to heaven? What are pennies made out of? Why does dad get more mail than me? What’s south Africa like? What’s iron? How did Michael Jackson die? Is Canada part of America? When can we go to Lego land? The list could go on and on… Sometimes I wonder if we are one of the first people that ever tried to honestly answer his questions.
One Sunday, I tried listening into church through the phone but soon gave up? He sat there and listened too; it went like this “Why did the preacher say flesh?” “What does flesh mean?” “Hey he talking about the angels, do the angels have names?” Lol 😊 We marvel at what he retains, pretty much everything we tell him sticks, which is so encouraging to us. He’s very interested in the Bible and we spent a lot of time talking about that. I don’t know if we should be sheltering some of it from him or not, but he’s seen so much more bad things than an average 7 yr. old that so far, we’ve been truthfully answering his questions even about the hard stuff. It doesn’t seem to worry him. One day he asked his teacher “If she’s going to heaven?” She said, I hope so! 😊
He’s constantly hungry, and hoards food, I find dried out bread behind a pillow in the spare bedroom, an entire pack of empty saltines, beef sticks or other food at odd places. The day I found the empty pumpkin pie pan under his bed (there had been 3 fairly large pieces in it) We started the “yes drawer”, I filled it with snack bags full of popcorn and nuts and told him any time of the day that he feels hungry he may eat anything from the drawer and as much as he wants. I also told him that his brain is telling him he’s hungry but he’s actually not, he got a kick out of this, I explained to him that when he was a baby I’m guessing he was often hungry and now his brain continues to tell him to eat even when his bellies stuffed from lunch. He thought about this for a little and then started to cry and said “I was often hungry!” I was glad to be able to grieve that with him, we sat on the couch and felt sad for a while I told him that I’m sorry I wasn’t there to take care of him and how no baby should ever have to be hungry. But God was taking care of him. This seemed to work for him and he giggles now when he asks for another snack and I say “sounds like that brains telling you to eat again”. 🙂 We went from eating around the clock to breakfast, snack at 9, lunch, snack at 3, supper and a bedtime snack!
Another expert from my journal;
We still have moment where we wonder if we are really cut out for this but when we look back to his behaviors five weeks ago, we are really encouraged! Language used to be mixed in every sentence now its only when he’s upset, if we or the dogs would bump/brush into him no matter how lightly he would completely snap, now he can handle that. The other day when we bumped, he said “That’s ok, no harm done! 🙂 Soo much better than before! Another example, This morning he calmly asked me where his toothpaste is? Five weeks ago, it would have been Why did YOU take my toothpaste! @#@$**** Get it right now!
Closing
Wow this got quite lengthy, if you read the whole thing, blessings upon you! Hopefully this gave you a real life glimpse of what our first weeks looked like in older child adoption. Before I close Id like to add yet that out of the 5 facts, we were given about Buddy, three were incorrect. 1. We never saw the “hates women” part, he rarely leaves my side and at first, I would’ve described him as clingy! (Oh, he screams all kinds of hateful things at us when he’s in “survival mode” but I don’t feel like its directed just at women.) 2. School is a PROBLEM. 3. We think he’s extra smart! 😊Lol Ok that was biased. 😊
More updates coming!