Dave Grohl is a genius.
He sings my heart, and his voice is one of my favorite sounds. (Especially when he screams.) I have several beloved Foo Fighters songs, but one that has always made me cry is “Best of You.” The first time I heard it, I really only paid attention to the chorus, which asks, “Is someone getting the best of you?” I thought it was a profound, beautiful question, and I assumed that it was asking if you were giving your whole self, your “best,” to someone you loved. When I hear it, I always think of my husband. I ask myself if he’s getting the best parts of me, if he’s bringing those best qualities out of me, so hearing that question sung always brings tears of mingled conviction and love. It makes me stop and examine myself. It makes me want to be a better person, to love him the best I can. May is both National Foster Care Month and when Mother’s Day occurs, so this question has weighed heavy on my heart: Is someone getting the best of you? I’ve got another confession to make: Having a young foster daughter has been trying. She is constantly redefining love for me in confusing and frustrating ways, and lately, I haven’t been able to give her the “best of me.” I haven’t always wanted to, to be honest. Things have been exhausting and hard, and I have found myself wondering if I am emotionally strong enough to do foster care anymore. At times, she is downright cruel to me. At times, I am downright cruel back. (We both have hearts to protect, after all.) So listening to the song again lately has given it new meaning: “Is someone getting the best of you?” Yes. Someone is. She is “getting the best of me,” in the other sense of the phrase. She is gaining an emotional advantage over me, and I find myself scrambling to keep her from doing it, so the cycle of cruelty continues. We exist in a strange tension of suffocating closeness and cool indifference, and we are each trying to one-up the other, to have the upper hand, to hoard our love instead of sharing it. So I am acting like an eight-year-old. I’m engaging in this awful dance on her primitive level, and it’s embarrassing. I am ashamed of myself. I want to do better. I want to be the saint I’m often made out to be by virtue of being a foster parent. (I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase, “You’re a saint” in regards to our fostering. It’s a daunting compliment.) But right now, I am no saint. I am a mess. I am plagued by self-doubt and discouragement. I’m a human being. So is she. That little girl is torn between two worlds, and her confusion and pain are coming out in ways that frustrate, annoy, provoke, and hurt me. The unspoken question of, “Will we still be this family in six months?” is the proverbial elephant in the room. The closer we grow, the larger that elephant grows. It is a terrible ratio, and it is impossible to ignore. I’ve been reacting in ways that are not giving my “best to her.” We’ve reached a level of closeness and comfort that is scaring us both, and there is no deadline, no closure, no assurance that we will still be together in six months, so it is easier for both of us to shut each other out than to invest any more of ourselves into this uncertain relationship. We are tied together yet separately bound. I’m letting the stress and circumstances get the best of me. And that’s keeping her from getting the best parts of me.
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I’m in a season of loss right now.
Nothing really prepares you for loss: Not knowing it’s an eventuality. Not knowing that treatments aren’t working and hospice care has begun. Not hearing that the doctor has said it will only be a matter of weeks, if not days. There’s a persistent belief, born of lazy, foolish routine, that forestalls any notion of loss by telling us, “There will always be tomorrow.” Because there always has been a tomorrow. Until there just isn’t another tomorrow. My dear Grams was 88, and she’d been fighting cancer for awhile. I knew she wasn’t going to live forever. Still, she left us faster than I thought she would. She didn’t seem 88. She seemed 50, tops. Sometimes she seemed 25. She wore animal print and flashy jewelry. She watched South Park. She had a Facebook account and a smartphone that she actually knew how to use. Her sense of humor was quick and sharp. Few could match wits with her. She always knew a good joke, and she was quick to laugh. I remember going over to her house once and seeing a cheesy penis straw sitting in the pencil cup on her table. When I asked her about it, she chuckled and told me she’d gotten it at the bar in town from a bachelorette party who was there. And oh, she was smart. Her brilliance was quiet, though; void of all arrogance and pretension. There was nothing showy about it; she had no degree to validate her intelligence. (She went to country school, and I am not sure that her formal education went much beyond the eighth grade.) She knew practical things. She knew about farm living and homemaking. She knew the rules (and strategies) for hundreds of card games. She absorbed everything that happened around her. She was a walking, accurate history of the region where we grew up. She had a memory that was nearly photographic, and it stayed sharp until the very end. But she only offered information from the vast stores within her mind when it was asked of her. She never showed off her knowledge. I often found myself staggered by the detail and accuracy of her accounts, yet taken with her humble and simple delivery. It was not her way to draw attention to herself. She never complained about her cancer. Instead, she usually just made jokes about it. At her 85th birthday party, she told us, “I have Percocet in my purse in case this party gets boring.” So I don’t think any of us knew how sick she actually was. She didn’t want us to worry. She just wanted to make us laugh. I was fortunate enough to see her in her final days, to speak with her in her moments of clarity between morphine injections; to tell her that I loved her and to hear that she loved me, too; to hear her recount familiar stories about my dad’s ingenuity and creativity as a child (he built a functioning pinball machine out of rubber bands and scraps of wood when he was about 10). Then she told my dad (who had a nasty chest cold) to go to the doctor, with an admonishment not to put those sorts of things off until it’s too late. (Grams’s philosophy about her health was always, stubbornly this: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Grandpa subscribed to the same one. Needless to say, they did not go to the doctor often…) She took both of my hands in hers, looked into my eyes, and told me that I had married well, that my husband was a good man, and she stressed the importance and urgency of telling him this often. “Don’t put it off,” she said. “Tell him, Kirsey. Tell him every day how good he is.” My husband was standing behind me at the time, and his cheeks went fuchsia with embarrassed pleasure. (It was no secret that Grams adored him.) It was clear to her, between the addling morphine shots, that her tomorrows were limited, that she would not have much more time to tell us these things: Go to the doctor. Take care of yourself. Tell people how much you love them, and do it often. Grams taught me lots of things: games, recipes, histories, jokes, patience, good humor, humility, forbearance. She taught me how to age without growing old. But I think in the end, she wanted us to know this: tomorrow is never a guarantee, and it can’t be treated like one. Never put off tomorrow what you should and can do today. This morning, as our foster daughter slipped into her coat to go to the farm with hubby to play with the kitties and roll in the snow-soaked dirt, she surprised us both by testing out the sound of her first name combined with our last name, completely unprompted. Then she put all of our names together, even our dog’s, and pronounced us a family.
My heart turned to pudding. She’s gotten so comfortable with us, and we’ve gotten comfortable with her, too. Having her with us feels right. We’ve fallen head-over-heels in love. It’s not always easy, true, but that’s how love is. The longer we have her, the more she feels like part us. And in a way, she always will be. But I’ve bonded with her in a way that almost feels like she’s actually mine. Watching her play is like watching my eight-year-old self play. We have the same interests, the same hobbies, the same unbridled creativity, the same bad habits, the same taste in literature and movies. We understand each other in a very deep way. There’s a possibility of adoption with every foster case, however remote, but the true purpose of the foster program is to reunify children with their biological families. We know that. We knew it going in. Despite the care we have given her, despite our best efforts and the love we have provided, we are the backup plan, the last resort. If the opportunity arose to adopt her, we’d jump at the chance. But right now, that’s an if. It’s a dream, a possibility, a maybe. This is just hypothetical, and I am not sure how to pray about this. I feel like no matter what I pray for, the prayer will be ugly: if I pray that we can keep her, that means someone else has to lose her. But I have opened my heart to her so much that I do not want to be the one to lose her, either, so I cannot bring myself to pray for any other scenario. I do not want anyone to have to bear the pain of losing her, myself included. Foster care is meant to be temporary. I knew that going in. But love doesn’t exactly work that way. In many ways, it would be easier on my heart to ball up and shut down, to quit caring about her now while the bond is still fresh. But I can’t; I’m in too far. She needs and deserves better than that. We’ve invested our love, attention, and patience into her: only five months’ worth, true, but it feels like she’s been here for a lifetime. We have no idea how much more time we’ll have with her, and that scares me. I want to savor every moment, but with the thought of a possible and unknown deadline looming, that sweetness is quickly soured. It’s a confusing brew of emotions. So praying about her and for her has been hard. I’ve resulted to praying for whatever is best for her with a lump in my throat and an ache in my heart, knowing that it might not be us, and praying for the courage and strength to accept whatever decision the foster system makes regarding her welfare. As foster parents, we have no rights or say about what happens to her. It is merely our job to provide her with love and care. I just hope we have done it well. |
Old Stuff.
January 2023
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