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Happy/Sad.

1/3/2022

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Christmas was pretty complicated at our house this year.
 
It hasn’t always been that way—at least, not for me. For me, Christmas has always been pure joy. It’s my favorite holiday, and I have nearly four decades of happy Christmas memories, all made of love and connection and celebration, of singalongs and game nights, of delicious cookies and even more delicious anticipation and, best of all, the people I love and care about most.
 
We always spend Christmas Eve with my parents and siblings, and I was thrilled to have my adopted daughter, current foster daughter, and former foster son joining us. I wanted to give them the same sort of joy and love and connection that I share with my own family. I wanted to do everything I could to give them a good Christmas. I went all out, and so did my family.
 
And it wasn’t just good. This year, it was great.
 
It was one for the ages. It was magical, filled with love and laughter and joy, with card games and too many gifts, with hugs and snuggles, with carols sung around the fire and way too much food, and the sweet, sweet comfort drawn from the simple company of those who truly love and accept you.
 
But that joy proved too sweet for some.
 
I did not think such a thing was even possible, but it happened when one of my kids broke away from the game we were playing and asked for my car keys, saying he needed to get something. I couldn't imagine what, but I gave him my keys anyway. 

He didn't come back inside.
 
After some time, I followed him out to the car. I assumed that something had set him off, that he’d gotten an upsetting phone call from one of his biological family members. But that was not the case. He was just sitting out there, in the dark, alone. I asked him what was wrong, and he could only shake his head, but we both knew what it was.

It's always the same thing, after all.

He had felt the joyful magic of Christmas, and that was exactly the problem. This joy was a glimpse into the life he’d been denied. He had retreated to my car to escape, to hide from the joy because all that sweetness was just too much.
 
Like a toothache.
 
Having these kids with us was beautiful, but any joy they experienced with us was undoubtedly tempered by the knowledge that they were not experiencing it with their biological families. No matter what I did, I would never be able to fill that void for them. I had wanted them to experience pure joy this Christmas, but the best I could give them a diluted version that we’ve learned to call happy/sad.
 
I wish I had a better word for it, but I don't. Happy/sad is a very real emotion. It's not quite the same as bittersweet. It has the same juxtaposition and contrast of pleasure and pain as bittersweet, but there’s an element of competition and confusion that happy/sad has—an internal war is waging. Sometimes, there’s a third contender, and it’s happy/sad/mad. You don’t know what to feel, what you should feel, but you feel it all, all at once, and it’s overwhelming.
 
Adoption itself is happy/sad. So is foster care. There’s always that stab of pain, that element of loss. Nearly every holiday and milestone we celebrate with the kids in our cares come with this complicated feeling. We have come to expect this, and we are doing our best to help them endure these emotional tsunamis. I spent an hour crying outside in the cold in my pajamas on Christmas Eve, apologizing through the window of my car for things that I knew were not my fault but felt bad about all the same. When happy/sad struck him, I wanted to help, but the only things I could only offer were my presence, my tears, and my reassurance.
 
It didn’t feel like enough. (It never does.)
 
My mom told me that there’s nothing worse than watching your children suffer, and I know now how true this is. Watching my kid experience happy/sad made me feel a version of the same. I did my best, but I couldn’t get him to come back inside. He just wanted to be alone. He asked--begged—me to leave, so, because he asked, I did.

I returned to the house alone, with puffy eyes and shuddering breath and a heavy heart, and when my dad asked me what was wrong, I started to cry again. I felt awful, like I’d been caught inadvertently flaunting my happiness. Dad saw my pain, put on his coat, and went out to talk to him. His efforts were successful, and they returned together and shared a hug.
 
Happy/sad—that I have a loving biological father, yet he does not.
 
My foster daughter saw my crumpled, tear-ravaged face, and she opened her arms to me. “It’s okay,” she said. “I get it.” I fell into her arms and cried into her shoulder.
 
Happy/sad—that she cared about me yet likely felt the same thing he did.
 
Happy/sad—the feeling is maddening.
 
This Christmas had been joyful, and my kids did enjoy the holiday—they told me so, all three of them. But there will always be an underlying sadness there that no amount of sweetness will ever soothe. This will likely always be the case when celebrating with children who have endured foster care, and that’s happy/sad for me, too. I love sharing the holiday with them, but I am saddened by the pain and grief that the joy of this holiday evokes.
 
Family is about finding those who will help us weather the storms of our feelings. Sometimes, you’re born surrounded by them; other times, life brings them to you. Either way, I’ve been blessed by both kinds. I know I’ve experienced my own share of emotional tornadoes, and I’ve been unconditionally sheltered by my family circle as they’ve raged. I’ve had a good, steadfast example, and I believe it is my calling to go and do likewise, to build a shelter around these kids and help them withstand their storms.
 
It’s a holy calling, even if it’s a happy/sad one.
 

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How Doing Foster Care Changed My Views On Abortion.

9/9/2021

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I wasn’t expecting it, but doing foster care radically changed my views on abortion.

I once rather staunchly opposed abortion on religious grounds—the sanctity and value of human life were of the utmost importance. To me, it seemed like a black-and-white issue. Killing is killing, and killing is wrong, no matter what.

​Life is precious, after all.

But I did not really understand how precious life is until I found out that my husband and I could not create one. When our decision to start a family was hijacked by infertility, abortion seemed so wildly unfair. I could not comprehend such a choice because I had not been given such a choice. Infertility made my opinion stronger—​abortion seemed even crueler after I knew that I would never be pregnant. There were women who were literally having fetuses sucked from their uteruses only to discard them, and I, despite my best efforts, despite my aching desire to be pregnant, would never know the feeling of carrying life inside of me. 

Abortion angered me because it wasted what I could not have.

When we decided to grow our family through foster care, we opened our doors to kids in desperate situations. We called them ours for a time, and we learned about them and their families. The relationships were always complicated—these kids loved their parents, and their parents loved them, too, but that love wasn’t enough to keep them together. Other things kept getting in the way: drugs, sexual abuse, domestic violence, severe mental illness. It was absolutely tragic, watching this kids, these human beings, come to terms with the fact that they had been taken from their homes because their parents were seen as abusive, neglectful, or unfit.

Foster care was a crash course in the value and sanctity of human life.

To value a specific human life outside of your own family, to truly cherish it, is a concept that is absurdly foreign to most. Those who have never been foster parents cannot comprehend the kind of dysfunction that exists within the foster care system. They have never seen a teenager removed from a shoddy trailer illegally parked in front of the home the parents were evicted from, a trailer housing three adults and eight dogs without electricity or running water. They have never seen a mentally ill woman with no teeth stand before a judge in court and vehemently refuse to relinquish her parental rights and then have the audacity to request that her child be placed back into foster care. They have never seen a child waiting at a scheduled visit from their biological parents with hopeful eyes, only to be stood up. They have never had to drive home from these visits with the child sobbing in the back seat because the visit didn’t happen, or because it did happen and it went incomprehensibly poorly.

There are no words to say in these moments.

Shock steals them from your mouth.

If you have not done foster care, you simply cannot understand it.

And there is a shortage of people willing to take on the challenge.

You cannot truly be pro-life if you are not actively involved in the foster care system. I’ll say that one again for the people in the back: you cannot truly be pro-life if you are not actively involved in the foster care system.

Abortion is a desperate act. I don’t think any woman would make such a decision lightly.

But doing foster care has radically changed my views on the sanctity of life. Birth is a miracle, yes, but it’s a small fraction of what constitutes a life. It is easy to speak in sweeping generalities about the sanctity of all life, but it is another thing entirely to examine a specific life and determine its unique value—the sanctity is often forgotten in individual cases.

Foster care confronts this very conundrum.

Something happens during the course of that life when it loses its value to humanity at large, when that life is no longer considered precious, when it is deemed ruined and incapable of redemption. Babies are innocent and precious and helpless, but if they are raised in a desperate situation, they will grow into children who act out, into teenagers who lash out, and suddenly, those lives lose the sparkling, precious value of innocence.

Kids raised in desperate situations are forced to respond to the chaos and turmoil and instability around them by trying to get someone’s—anyone’s—attention. They struggle in school. They misbehave. They are desperate themselves, adrift in a culture of normality they do not understand because they have only ever known dysfunction. Teachers scowl when they enter the room. Principals are well-acquainted with them. They are written off as problems and told they will never amount to anything.

They believe this, and the prophecy fulfills itself: They seek fulfillment in relationships with other desperate people, give birth to another generation of desperate children, and the vicious cycle continues.

People born into desperate situations know only desperation and are often doomed to live what they know—how could they be expected to do anything else?

Life extends all the way to death, and what must be truly valued is everything that happens in between those two points. There is an epidemic of desperation out there. It is a mark of your privilege if you are unaware of it. It’s largely invisible, but it exists nonetheless, a seedy societal underbelly, and there are very few support structures in place that can help those people in need. The foster care system is overwhelmed nationwide, and social work is an undervalued, underfunded, high-burnout, high-turnover field.

Very few people are taking action to remedy this problem.

Until people rise up in mass numbers to value the lives that are already here, regardless of their innocence, until people rise up and act on behalf of these forgotten children, I’m afraid I can no longer consider myself pro-life.

I’m not pro-abortion, but there is nothing wrong with choice.

Life is precious, and there are lives here and now that deserve to be seen as such, and giving those lives—the foster children and their biological families—the attention, support, and care they need to make changes toward restoration and reintegration must become part of the pro-life movement if it is to make any true headway.

Abortions are a last resort for the desperate.

How desperate will we allow people to get?

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Teacher/Mother, Oil/Water.

4/23/2020

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We are all carrying a heavy burden right now.

We have engaged in this distance learning experiment with a begrudging willingness because we love our children, because we care about their education and want them to succeed. We do this because we understand the necessity of social distancing and want to do our part. 

But sometimes, it’s a real bitch.

Right now, I am watching my child smash her fists into her computer keyboard while she screams at the screen that the computer is wrong, that she did type the correct answer to that math problem. Her breathing is fast. Her cheeks are red. She’s near tears.

Governor Walz just announced that Minnesota schools will be closed for the rest of the year.

So I will have to go through this with her every single weekday until June.

I’m near tears myself.

I know my child doesn’t behave this way at school, even when she’s frustrated with the work. She has always struggled with math--she receives reduced assignments and extra help from a para, but in spite of this, I have always heard reports of her “cheerful” disposition. 

It’s hard to imagine that when she is punching her tiny fist into the “frickin’ stupid” textbook. 

Her words. 

(Mine, too, if I’m completely honest.)

Even though I was quite good at math in school, even though I am explaining this as clearly as I know how, even though I am a teacher by trade,  I have no idea how to help her learn this stuff. 

My explanations and efforts are not enough to make her understand. 

I have a teaching degree and over a decade of experience. I have cried after a day of teaching exactly one time--my first (and last) day as a kindergarten substitute on the east side of Des Moines. That venture included no class roster, no seating chart, no lesson plans, no paras, no help of any kind, just me and 30+ screaming, combative five-year-olds who knew entirely too much about domestic violence, reproductive organs, and curse words and not nearly enough about sitting down and shutting up.

It was like trying to herd cats that were both tweaking on meth and lit on fire. 

When I signed out for the day, I was in tears. I told the secretary to never call me again, and she glibly responded, “Yeah, we hear that all the time. No one ever comes back to sub here.”

I am no stranger to difficult teaching scenarios. I am battle proven. I have earned my stripes. 

But this--working one-on-one with my own child--somehow feels more overwhelming than anything I’ve dealt with before. 

I have cried more times over teaching in the past month than in the past decade. There are days when I would prefer herding those flaming meth-cats to helping my own child solve an algebraic equation. I feel a lot of guilt about this, and the only reason I can come up with for why this seems to be true is this:

It is very, very hard to be Mom and Teacher at the same time.


It also seems to be very, very hard to be both Daughter and Student at the same.

In a simpler time, we played these roles separately. When we were together, I was merely Mom and she was merely Daughter. If I helped her with school work, it was as Mom: my role was only to ensure that she completed it, not to step her through the entirety of the lesson. I did not have to be Teacher, and she did not have to be Student. She was just Daughter. 

Student and Daughter are two conflicting identities. Daughter whines and throws her books across the room. Daughter rips up papers and screams at Mom. But Student, I am told, is "pleasant." Student is “a ray of sunshine” who is "cooperative" and "well-behaved."

I guess I wouldn't know. 

Daughter pushes Mom’s buttons. Daughter tests Mom's boundaries. Daughter has always taken out the school day’s frustrations on Mom. 

Daughter uses Mom as an emotional punching bag.

Teacher has thick skin. Teacher knows not to take harsh words from kids personally. Teacher is professional and strong. Teacher maintains an emotional distance. 

But Mom cannot seem to do any of these things. 

Mom’s skin is onion-paper thin because Mom is completely in love with Daughter. Mom takes every harsh word she utters like a dagger to the heart.  

Mom is vulnerable. 

Mom is emotional.

To be honest, Mom is kind of a mess. 

When Mom wants to quit, Teacher wants to keep going. When Teacher says, “It’s time for school,” Mom wants to give up, to throw that “frickin’ stupid” math book across the room and light it on fire. 

It is a strange tug of war within me. Sometimes Teacher wins. Sometimes Mom.

Teacher is oil and Mom is water. 

They can be poured into the same vessel and shaken, but they will never fully combine. 

Many days, I am overwhelmed by this strange solution that I carry within me: the oil of Teacher and the water of Mom. That oil sits on top in fat, round globs, covering the water in a slick layer, but the water of Mom always is beneath it, bearing the burden of its weight. 

They are meant to be separate things, Mom and Teacher. 

But for now, they must coexist. 
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