Foster Parenting
Laylay arrived one sunny March morning with a van load of stuff including a huge Barbie house. Foster kids usually either attach right away to those around them or withdraw. Laylay called us both mom on the first day.
Small for 7, she was agile and coordinated. She had bright knowing eyes, a whip smart sense of humor, and no front teeth. Dazzling and outspoken, she could command and charm a room full of adults. I love a headstrong and opinionated kid and Laylay and I instantly connected. Preferring a quiet and agreeable child, one who didn’t talk back or cause a fuss, my wife didn’t feel the same way.
The simple part of having Laylay with us was letting my parental instincts kick in. Everything else was a nightmare. We did an adequate job “good-enough parenting” Laylay for the 5 weeks she was in our lives. It was 5 only weeks but everyday was a month. We were trained to think of the red-tape, zero parental rights, and every decision being run through case workers as “team parenting.” We didn’t feel like parents though, but more of a weigh station or shuttle service.
One afternoon Laylay and I walked to my community garden plot and I encouraged her to put her hands in the earth.
I gave her nibbles of things like herbs and kale flowers, and on our walk home something wonderful happened. She became curious about the natural world around her. Before this point with us, curiosity wasn’t her approach, but rather a know-it-all-ness.
“Can we eat this?” she asked pointing to a tree.
“Yep,” I said, explaining what parts of the Oak were edible.
“What about this?” she said gently pulling at a rosemary bush growing over the sidewalk.
“Absolutely. Pinch the leaves and smell them.”
“Wow!” she sniffed, her giant eyes getting even bigger.
“I know, right!”
“We could cook with it!” The whole walk home was her in exuberant curiosity.
I’m sure there are research papers on how trauma shuts down curiosity but I haven’t read them. I’ve observed though, that it’s hard/impossible for curiosity and the 4F trauma responses (fight, flight, fawn, and freeze) to coexist, and if we can get to a place of cultivating and practicing curiosity, then we can pull ourselves out of a 4F response and into a place of being able to respond to what’s so in current reality.
Walking also helped her sleep through the night so I started taking her on long walks. After just a couple of them she begged to walk everywhere and would all but melt down if we couldn’t walk. I applauded her wise little system for knowing what it needed and we walked as much as we could.
Even though we’d been told she had “no behavioral issues,” among other things, Laylay angrily punched me everyday. When we tried to talk about this with her therapist, the therapist looked at us skeptically and said no one had ever reported this behavior before. She acted like we must be incorrect or lying. Laylay’s blows didn’t physically hurt, but energetically they took a toll. It didn’t matter how many times I said, “this is a no hitting household. I will never hit you and you also don’t get to hit me,” I still got punched. Had my wife and I been on the same page, I could’ve perhaps weathered Laylay’s physical processing on me while we troubleshooted a solution. I wish I’d have installed a punching bag for her or something. It wasn’t Laylay’s fault that she punched me everyday and it wasn’t personal. She was a child who’d been through way too much in her short life, of course she needed to punch something. She had every right to be angry at her circumstances. I just didn’t have the skills or support to get Laylay the right outlet for her justified anger.
Though this could never have happened, I suspected that if she could just have been next to my body for a few months, like not leave my side, copying what I did physically and energetically as we moved through the day, that her system would’ve learned from my system, how to “good enough” regulate and begin finding some stability. But that’s not foster life. She had family visits once or twice a week, from which she’d return with a tummy full of sugary treats, often angry and spun out. She had her new school, OT, and therapy twice a week. She would return from these things in various states. Disaffected, silent, moody, hateful. And just when these reactions metabolized out of her system, it was time for another appointment.
It’s my viewpoint, observation, and experience that attempting to parent well in our culture, fostering or otherwise, is to walk on slippery rocks upstream in fast-moving, thigh-high currents. Parenting isn’t hard and there are lots of ways to do it well. The agreement between parent and child is simple: the adults do the things the tiny human needs done and does them to the best of their ability. It is a one-way nurturing relationship. A sacred task as old as time, it’s fabulously repetitive, grounding, and rewarding. Parents (and ideally a community of others) create and tend the container of development, boundaries, and nourishment for the child. The child’s job is innocence and growth, and the adult’s job is grounded loving structure and foundation. When this simple sacred contract hits Brokenhearted Culture things get messy. Collectively, we don’t have a container that supports parents parenting well, and therefore our kids can’t kid well either.
Complications arise if the parent won’t or can’t be the mature adult the child needs. Turning the tables on kids, like needing them to do something for the adults, anything besides be in their child-nature, turns the sacred relationship upside down. We call these things parentification, growing up with emotionally immature parents, abuse, neglect, etc.
The split between my wife and I grew. Becoming parents had been in both of our online dating profiles. She had an ex who had a kid. My wife had no legal rights or claim to the child but was attached to her. Knowing this from the beginning, I’d supported their relationship, under the impression it was more of an auntie role, not a second parent role. In the same way she didn’t resonate with Laylay, I didn’t resonate with her ex or the child. My wife was not open to shifting anything about this arrangement once we had Laylay. It was really hard to try to establish our parenting habits together, especially since I knew she didn’t resonate with Laylay. It felt like she had one foot out the door parenting with me. My animosity grew. And my wife was coming to terms with her truth: that she already had the family she wanted.
There are so many other things that happened and so much more I could write about, but in the end we couldn’t do it. We were exhausted.
Even though we agreed to tell her together, my wife told Laylay she’d be going to a different home while I was at work.
“But we agreed to tell her together,” I said.
“I thought you’d get too upset so I told her myself,” she replied.
We tried to stay in contact with Laylay after she left our house, offering to be weekend respite or babysitters anytime it was needed, but that’s not how the system works. She was moved on, a tiny shell crashing on the shore amid the tide and waves of a broken system.
I think about her often. About us sitting on the porch while I combed and braided her hair, making up fanciful stories for each other. I think about how well she fit in with my extended family and how much her first grade teacher adored her. I think about her vocalizing and dancing in the bus tunnel to the beat in her head as we waited for the Light Rail.
I think about the day I had a migraine and how, while I was in bed with a washcloth over my eyes, Laylay came in and began doctoring me. She hemmed and hawed over my condition. She put her hand on my forehead and took my pulse with her tiny fingers. She pulled out a clipboard and paper from somewhere and asked me to fill out both my primary and secondary insurance information. She rubbed my temples, gave me water and health recommendations.
Our plan had been to foster another kid, to find one we both liked. But at the same time, the state changed the laws and told us to close down our vacation rental business if we wanted to continue fostering, an action that would’ve cut my income in half. To get licensed we’d made the units completely separate and you couldn’t get between them without going outside. Yet someone could be a foster parent and live in an apartment or condo. It was the last hypocritical straw I could take from the system. We turned in our license and though we tried to salvage our marriage, we separated about a year later.
It’s a lot to process these experiences, to claim the title of childless parent. It’s been my aim not to deny or diminish my experience, not to harbor too much resentment towards my ex-wife for her humanity and shortcomings. Or towards myself that I couldn’t just have worked out how to keep Laylay in my life.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do better by you, little one. God, I hope you’re okay.”
I send her blessings often. She’s a teenager now and my hope for her is that she landed somewhere soft and stable. That she’s surrounded by magnificent good-enough adults and that she’s planning her high school years and beyond.
