Balancing Act

There are an awful lot of times when I feel like, at 33, I am already way behind the curve.

I'm one of those people who nailed school.  Like, hardcore, it was my thing, I sailed through it and I set myself challenges when things felt too easy/tedious.  One example: I was the first person to ever test out of English 11.  Frankly, I think I was the first person to ever request to test out of English 11.  It conflicted with another class I wanted to take, so I just spent maybe a month or so that summer reading through all of the books and stories and then took a bunch of tests at the beginning of the year and that was that.  Math was my weakest area and I still finished calculus in my senior year with some form of B (that year I also had AP English and music theory/music history, for which I came to school an hour before the normal start time to take it via distance learning; that was my third year in a row of taking what was called a "zero-hour" class that met before school started).  I was involved in easily a dozen extracurricular activities across 8 semesters of high school, and held a very part-time job in my senior year (ten hours per week closing for a preschool classroom at a local daycare center).  In college, I was nearly as engaged, even if I did spend an awful lot of time flailing around for a major.  The problem was, when I graduated, I had spent 18 years basically following the school script, and when I was ejected out into the real world, I hit this very strange vortex of feeling at loose ends combined with feeling my future tunneling down to years of corporate sterility.  And then I spent the next 7 years trying to figure out what to do with my life, and then 2 more years trying to figure out how to square my personal philosophies about education with the jobs I was taking.  Remember when I said I've had 12 jobs in the past 10 years (not counting the couple of stints of being a SAHP)?  Yeah.  

So, I've really struggled to figure out how to adult adequately without the scaffolding of following a step-by-step guide to other people's expectations of me.  Which, hint hint, is where a lot of my personal philosophy of education came from: I realized how gross it was that I could be so successful following the script that was laid out for me, and then fall so flat on my face in crossing the finish line when I was suddenly expected to figure out my own path in adulthood.  It seemed to me that academic intelligence didn't actually equate to success in adulthood if I was struggling so badly to figure out what I was doing.  And when I finally veered back into teaching a little over 5 years ago, I entered via a two-year stint at a private Montessori school after tutoring some of the middle school students.  I spent a couple of summers, in and around foster care and getting pregnant and having a second baby, attending a Montessori teacher training program in Cincinnati, which continues to be hands-down the best teacher training program I've ever had the privilege to attend.  And then I decided to take the full plunge and become a state certified teacher through an alternate route program, which grants an interim certificate for up to five years to people with at least a bachelor's degree in another area who complete a certain number of core courses and pass the state exam in their endorsement area(s).  Being an overachiever and also paranoid that I wouldn't get a job with just one endorsement area, I ended up taking and passing five tests, so that for two years I taught on an elementary (1) certificate with endorsements in math (2), science (3), social studies (4), and health (5).  

And then I started teaching in a "real" school...and I hated it.  So I found another job three months later...and I hated it, too.  The schools were public charters (this will be a whole separate post for another time) and the amount of resources available to me varied, as did the amount of support I received as a new teacher.  But, basically, I felt like I was being thrown to the wolves every single day and expected to deal with it while also preparing those wolves for standardized exams that would determine my adequacy as a teacher.  It would not be hyperbole to say that I nearly got to a point where I wanted to kill myself.  I was crying every night thinking of having to go back to work in the morning.  I was literally hiding under my desk with the lights off during my prep period (on days when I had a prep period), trying not to panic about having to teach again in less than an hour.  This was what I had been so excited to do??  And if I couldn't hack this...what the hell else was I supposed to do with my life??  I had to work; going back to school had boxed me into the debt corner, and now we had a house and two babies, as well.  There was no option to go back to staying home, even if I had wanted to continue doing that.  Quitting the second job in 6 months felt really scary - it had to be the last move I made, or I believed I was seriously risking any other school taking a chance on me in the future (given the current teacher shortage crisis in Michigan, this was probably an inaccurate belief, but I felt like enough of a flake already that I did not like the idea of continuing to trash my image).  There was a school at a residential treatment center that had posted earlier in the year for a middle school teacher, and I had considered applying, but didn't, and then it had closed.  But in the middle of my second school crisis, the position opened again.  I called the school and inquired about the spot.  The administrative assistant encouraged me to apply; I did, holding my breath the entire time.  Then the principal called me and asked if I was looking for something now or if I was looking to wait until the fall.  I admitted that, if necessary, I would stick it out where I was, but I was really looking for something that would start immediately.  She asked me if I could interview on a particular date.  I agreed.  On that morning, I spilled coffee on my shirt during my drive, and wound up buying a new sweater at Burlington, thanking my lucky stars that I had taken the day off from work altogether and had the cushion built in.  I went to the interview, we chatted about my philosophy and my views on classroom management and trauma and student behaviors, I spent some time in the middle school classroom observing and speaking with the teacher whom I would work alongside if I were hired, and an hour or so after I had left the interview, I received a phone call and an offer.  On March 5th, I started working in my first alternative school, and it was there, where the behaviors and the needs were even more intense than they'd been in my first two classrooms, that I fell in love with alternative education.

If I'm being honest, alternative education was something I had thought about for some time, though never with any serious intent.  From the time I read Helen Keller's Teacher and wrote about my mysterious plan for teaching students with special needs, that idea of working with some population outside of the traditional general ed students had nestled in the back of my mind and always got a little stirred up whenever I thought about becoming a teacher.  I had even considered going into special education, and might have, if it weren't one of just two endorsement areas that require a whole degree in order to be certified in it - I didn't have the money to pursue a master's degree.  Now that I've had some experience in the education field, I would not choose special education, but I admire anyone who is willing to write that many reports and legal documents on top of working directly with students with special needs.  Special education teachers deal with a lot of stuff that I don't have to worry about as the gen ed teacher, and thank goodness for them for that.  Anyway, alternative education had entered my orbit in early 2014 or so when Kiddo was struggling at the local public high school and we decided to transfer him over to the alternative high school to see if a smaller learning community might be more beneficial for him.  At that time, I wasn't yet teaching at the Montessori, but was tutoring privately in the evenings and spending the days home with Froggy, so I was often available to handle school things for Kiddo, as well, and I found the alternative school intriguing.  We ended up transferring him back to the regular high school after a short period because they had more ESL resources than the alternative school did, but the experience there joined that little nesting niggle in the back of my brain.  Scoring the job at the residential treatment center pinged every little piece of me that had been yearning for a non-traditional teaching job before taking and since leaving the Montessori school.  It was hard, it was challenging, it was disheartening (that was mostly due to receiving, in my second year of teaching, a "does not meet expectations" on my evaluation from my newly-assigned supervising instructor with my alternate route program when she came to conduct my first observation), and it was incredibly fulfilling.  My days felt renewed with a sense of purpose.  I didn't love waking up as early in the morning as I had to in order to get Froggy to school before I had to report for work - it was over an hour of commuting every morning, and the same in the evening - but I loved seeing my kids every day.  The only major struggle I had was with the culture of mistrust between the staff and administration; even if I hadn't had to leave in order to pursue Stargazer's adoption, it's almost certain that I would have been looking for something else for this school year, anyway.  But I would have finished out the school year if the timing had worked out that way.  Unlike the first two schools, this one never felt like a place I would desperately flee from in the middle of the school year.

One of the toughest things, of course, about being a teacher is the amount of work that ends up coming home with you.  I think that I managed to reduce my workload a little bit each year that I taught.  Partly it was due to having more experience with what was necessary to work on at home ahead of time and what I could reasonably accomplish on prep and before and after school during my contract time, but mostly it had to do with choosing positions that just didn't require as much prep work.  Having solid work-life balance is one of those things that people talk about but which seems really elusive as a teacher, even with experience and prep time.  After I left the residential school, I went back to a traditional school, where I hated my life and had no time for my family in the evenings if I wanted to be an adequate teacher.  I knew I couldn't go back to that.  I could feel the crushing pressure of years of excruciating day-in, day-out teacher life agony tunneling down on me again.  The panic started to set in once more: What was I going to do with my life if this was what I was forced to do and I hated it so much?  I had an elementary certificate.  The odds of finding another middle school job in alternative education was very slim; most programs are for high school students, and I couldn't teach high school on my license.  I spent the summer applying to other middle school positions - on the plus side, I had narrowed down my field of interest to science only, so I was ignoring all of my other endorsements - and doing interviews.  And then I poked around to see what kinds of high school jobs were open.  One was an opening at an alternative school.  For a science teacher.  On the one hand, I couldn't teach there on my current license.  On the other hand...I could go back into the program and start again on a secondary certification.  I could apply to this position, and the worst case scenario was that I would explain that I wasn't actually technically qualified for it but was willing to do what I needed to do to become qualified for it and they would ignore my application and choose somebody else.  I found myself holding my breath again as I put together my cover letter, my resume, and my application.  I waited.  I heard nothing.  So I went on applying to other jobs.  And then, about three weeks later, I got a call.  Well, I got two calls.  I got a call to interview for a middle school science position at one school, for which I was already qualified, and then I got a call to discuss the high school science position.  The lady asked if I would be interested in hearing more about it, so we talked for a little while.  Then she asked if I would still be interested in interviewing with the superintendent now that I knew more about the position.  My heart leaped.  Yes!!  Maybe we could make it work!!

The middle school called back first after both interviews were over.  Honestly, it had not been a great interview and I was positive the offer was going to someone else.  The high school one had gone much better, and the superintendent had just about said everything except that the job was mine if I wanted it, but it had been a few days and I was feeling less certain about it.  I told the middle school that I would think about it, but that I was expecting a call from another school, as well, and could make a better decision once I knew what I was working with.  Fortunately, barely an hour later, the superintendent called me, thanked me for a wonderful interview, and offered me the job with the highest salary I'd ever made in my life.  I accepted, and then I put in my application to start the alternate route program all over again.  I was able to teach my first semester on a permit; I finished my core classes in December, and last week I received my new official state certification.  

But the best part isn't even the salary, although I can't say it hasn't been a welcome relief to have finally reached a point in our adult lives where T-Rox and I aren't stressing out about all the bills every month, and where, at 33, I'm finally starting to feel like I'm contributing something of value to our financial and familial stability (bless him, he's dealt with being married to this hot mess for the past decade and counting, and hasn't had a mental breakdown yet).  The best part is that my alternative school uses a virtual curriculum.  Students earn credits by completing online classes while they're on campus, and with the exception of one period of "live" (face-to-face, teacher-led) class, I don't have to do any lesson planning.  Grading is built into the curriculum, so while I do have to do some grading by hand, the volume is low enough that I can get it done while I'm at work.  Occasionally I bring some stuff home over the weekend to catch up on organization and keep track of where my students are in their classes, but it's not often that I do that.

Over the last decade, I've spent a lot of time questioning my purpose, the point of having gone to college, and my ability to adult properly.  I've spent a lot of time comparing myself to my peers, most of whom have gone on to successful, stable careers where they are both advancing themselves and are up to 10 years closer to retirement than I am because it's taken me so darn long to shove myself into a career path in the first place.  My adult life to date has felt like a hodge-podge of mostly questionable decisions based on a combination of trying to do what is expected of me and trying to forge my own destiny.  But I'm finally starting to feel a little glimmer of that elusive balance: I'm spending time with my growing, dynamic, amazing family that includes three people I never planned to meet when I was younger and thinking about my future as a parent and who are such an important part of my present; I'm expanding into new and exciting territory as a foster/adoptive parent and as the client of a foster/adoption agency;  I'm slowly working my way back into having a social life and hobbies that interest me; and I have a career (with a 403b and everything!) that is sustainable and fulfilling and stays mostly confined to work hours.  I still don't actually believe that this is my final stopping point for my career - I have lots of plans for the future - but I can believe that this will be a nice fermata.  And as far as feeling like I'm behind the curve for retirement planning?

Well, we're Millennials.  It's not like any of us are ever retiring, anyway. X'-D

Feelin' Special

Most people, if not all, are familiar to some extent with Child Protective Services (CPS) or the equivalently-named branch of the child welfare system in their state that is responsible for screening calls related to suspected child abuse/neglect and then determining, via investigation, if those calls are substantiated or not.  Many people tend to perceive of CPS as the agency that willy-nilly removes kids from their homes, whether it's for a valid reason or not.  I'm not saying that CPS is infallible - it's an agency staffed and operated by human beings, after all - and I'm also not saying that CPS is perfect, for the same reason.  Obviously, I haven't been privy to every interaction that CPS in Michigan has had with every call and family with which/whom it has encountered, so I can't make any kind of balanced assessment of how well it works to maintain children in their homes with support when needed, versus removing children when there is clear danger to their well-being if they remain.  I also fully admit my privilege in being a white woman of the comfortably middle class who is married to a white dude and has a college education.  I fear a CPS call far less than I might were I a person of color and/or single parenting and/or with less than a college education and/or living in poverty or the working class, because I don't need to worry about snap judgments of my parenting based on my appearance or circumstances.  The history of the child welfare system is also quite damning - it began more or less with removing poor children, and disproportionately Black and Native children, and putting them in poorhouses and asylums, whether or not they were truly orphans.  So it's not surprising that people still struggle with the question of whether or not the system can be trusted, let alone trusted to act in the best interest of supporting birth families and reuniting children with their parents.  Find the right Facebook groups and you'll read about the experiences of some former foster youth (FFY) themselves, sharing the mistrust they developed from being involved in the system.  When "more than 85% of children in foster care have had a minimum of two different placement settings within the first 12 months of being placed in the system," it's not hard to understand why CPS gets a bad rap for destroying families and sometimes actually making things even worse for kids.  Nevertheless, this is the system we currently have, and for all of its flaws and need for improvement in places, I do choose to believe that the majority of workers involved with this branch of child welfare do have the best interests of children in mind when they screen calls and go on investigations.

Lest you think that I'm viewing things through the rose-tinted glasses of a "perfect" parent who has never interacted with CPS - or worse, a sanctimonious foster parent who sees CPS as necessary to taking children away from "bad" parents - I will assure you now that I have had my own first-hand experience.  A handful of months into hosting a friend and her two young children for a year while they got back on their feet from an unhealthy situation, I responded to a knock on our front door to find a CPS worker on our porch informing us that we were being investigated for alleged lead exposure.  Now, we do live in a house that is over 100 years old, and our upstairs windows were still the very old wooden framed, rope-and-pulley style, and the frames did have some peeling paint.  We also had some paint peeling on the walls of our back staircase, which we had blocked so that little kids couldn't access it.  In short, it was entirely possible that kids could have ingested paint chips that potentially contained lead, but we thought it was pretty slim, particularly since our own kids had come back from their annual blood draws with no concern for elevated blood lead levels and they had resided in the house for longer than our friend's children had.  The more obvious cause of elevated blood lead levels in our friend's children was that they had recently lived in Flint, where the water crisis was just starting to become recognized on a national level, but that because we lived in the older house, one of the workers who came around for home visits through programs like Early On made the assumption that the children were being exposed there.  This fact wasn't taken into consideration during the investigation, to my knowledge, but since we could readily share the results of our own children's blood draws, and as we had also recently gotten a quote for replacing all of the second-floor windows because of our own concerns about the peeling paint, the case was quickly closed with a finding that it was unsubstantiated.  But for a few heart-stopping moments after that woman introduced herself and her purpose for being on my porch on that beautiful sunny day, I knew the fear of having a stranger enter my house, judge me wanting as a parent and protector of my own children, and remove my babies to the care of someone we didn't know on the assumption that they could take better care of them, and that I would have to start fighting to prove myself as competent on a higher level than someone who had been trained and licensed to raise someone else's children.  And when we started working to become licensed again so that we could pursue adopting Stargazer, we did have to explain to our licensing worker why we had a note about an unsubstantiated CPS investigation on our record.  It will follow us forever, even though it never even came close to our being involved with the courts outside of the incidental event of the worker getting a warrant to investigate our home, and even though it was closed as unsubstantiated.  Any brush with children's services at all leaves a mark.

And yet I still have faith in this system, and our experience is the reason for it.  The system as we know it today was created to protect children, first and foremost, and to do so by allowing - in some cases, mandating - people to call a central intake line to report suspected abuse or neglect of a child, followed by screening the call to determine if it warrants an investigation, and if it screens in, sending workers and police to investigate the situation to see if it is substantiated or not.  If it is substantiated, the next step is to decide whether it's a situation that can be rectified while keeping the children in the home (ideal), or if it requires the children to be removed to a safer environment while the parents receive services to help them better care for their kids.  Children are almost never, or should almost never be, removed at the first CPS visit.  That only happens if the worker determines that the environment and situation pose an imminent risk of harm to the child, and requires that they get an emergency removal order signed by a judge in order to actually take the child out of the home.  I can't guarantee that this is always how things go, but I can reasonably assert that this is most likely how most cases go, since legal orders are involved and it's really more of an event to remove a child than it is to leave them in the home.  Our experience followed this expectation of the system.

So, at the time, we had closed our license due to a lack of bedroom space, and so we were being investigated as just run of the mill citizens.  What about when you're a foster family?  Can you still be investigated?  As it happens, not only can you be investigated, but it's probably even more likely to happen than if you're just hanging out minding your own parenting business.  Case in point: We had CPS called on us because we had someone else's kids in our house, and someone got concerned about the welfare of those children, not ours.  When you take responsibility for someone else's kids, the chances of having a report made on you goes up considerably, and it's usually because it's the only control that that someone else can exert over the situation; sometimes it's an effort to have you discounted as a foster parent so that the child will return to the bio parent's care.  It's a major reason, in addition to maintaining good records that can follow the child when they leave your home, that foster parents are told to keep a daily journal and to report any incidents of injury to the social worker - it's a CYA measure (and, also, you can be investigated for failing to report injuries and those sorts of things to the worker, even if the biological parent doesn't opt to make a report).  But, since you're already in the system, it's not a state CPS investigation anymore.  Now it's a state MIC investigation - maltreatment in care - AND a special evaluation by your agency.  Joy!  A two-for-one deal!

When we decided to pursue Stargazer's adoption, I wasn't concerned in the least about MIC and special evaluations.  We'd never had cause before to worry about them, because we've followed such a unique path in the world of foster care.  We've never dealt with biological parents at all, let alone retaliatory ones.  Stargazer wasn't going to be any different, as far as that went.  There are biological relatives in the picture, but we'd hashed out nearly from the beginning that the relatives were interested in us adopting and maintaining contact with them, rather than adopting themselves (and, yes, I know I open myself and them up to all kinds of judgment by just leaving this part of the story there, but there it is).  We have an amicable relationship with them and there hasn't been any reason to be truly concerned that they might suddenly start accusing us of anything or contesting the adoption.  I anticipated fairly smooth sailing between placement and finalization.

Our agency has been nothing but incredible to work with.  This is our third agency, and unless something catastrophic happens, I can't imagine working with any other agency in the future.  Our licensing worker was supportive and helped us out by writing to petition the state for a bedroom waiver for us so that Stargazer could have her own bedroom in our three-bedroom house for a couple of months before having to share it with Froggy.  Licensing rules state that opposite-sex children, whether they're biological siblings or not, can no longer share a room once one child is over age 5, and Froggy turned 6 not long after Stargazer moved in with us, meaning that she had to move out of Bean's room and into the room with Stargazer.  I felt that it would be unfair and challenging to ask a 14-year-old to move from an institutional placement directly into a shared bedroom with a nearly-6-year-old, hence the waiver.  Our foster/adoption worker - let's call her Bella - has been incredible to work with and is on top of all the policies and procedures.  I've been able to reach out to other foster parents with information about things like getting funding for tutoring because Bella has shared that information with me and their workers were oblivious.  When she came to our house for the first visit after Stargazer was placed with us and officially transferred to our agency, Bella had a flowchart to share with us that she had created herself to show the steps of the adoption process just because she had had so many families who wanted to know where they were at.  I brag about her constantly to people because she's so organized and on top of things, and when she recently had her work evaluation and her supervisor called me to ask about our experience with her, I am not ashamed to say that I gushed about her.  In return, Bella has told me about times when she's heard our name around the office - after reaching out to our recruitment specialist about support for pre-adoptive parents of teens, I sort of became an unofficial peer mentor to another woman, and I'm also hosting the pilot of a foster care recruitment home party because I asked our recruitment specialist if she'd ever heard of doing something like that after reading about other agencies doing such a thing when I attended a foster parent conference - and proudly been able to say that that's one of her families, and she's always expressed how impressed she is with how on top of things I am.  It's a great relationship filled with mutual admiration, and last Monday I spontaneously wrote a 5-star review of the agency on Google.  On Tuesday afternoon, I got a call from the licensing supervisor.  We had been tapped for a special evaluation.  Another licensing worker would be at our house that evening to conduct interviews.

The circumstances were understandable.  Stargazer has an ongoing health issue that lead to us taking her to see a pediatric specialist because it was making her miserable, and because she was also missing extensive stretches of school due to it.  Foster care tends to already put kids in a vulnerable position regarding academics, and she couldn't afford to miss as many days as she was out.  The specialist put her on a medication that helped tremendously.  But when it ran out, I decided to hold off on getting it refilled to see if the underlying issue had resolved or if it was still a problem.  (NOTE: Though this wasn't what we got dinged on, learn from my mistake and do not allow a foster child's medication to lapse without consulting with the doctor and having their permission to reduce or stop the medication - this easily could have become a major thing.)  Unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, the symptoms were back, and she missed another three days of school while we got the prescription refilled and it started working again.  On the fourth day, she accidentally fell back asleep and missed the first half of school.  On the fifth day, she made it for the whole day, and that afternoon, one of her teachers emailed me to inquire about her eye.  Now, I had woken Stargazer that morning, as I typically did, and I even remember seeing her face under the hall light when we passed each other on her way to the bathroom, and there had been nothing wrong with her eye.  But the teacher shared with me that it looked like she had a healing black eye, and that Stargazer had told her that it had come from someone she didn't know while she was at the park earlier in the week.  That story did not add up, and I told her I would be sure to take a look when I got home from work.  I did; there was still no black eye, but when I mentioned it, Stargazer shrugged it off and said she didn't want to talk about it.  I didn't think about it again until that call on Tuesday when I learned we were under a special evaluation for an alleged black eye.  Naturally, the teacher had gotten concerned with events playing out as they did - kid misses three and a half days of school and shows up to class with what, to her, looks like a healing black eye - and she is obligated to report any suspicion of abuse to CPS as a mandated reporter (I'm a mandated reporter twice, since I'm both a teacher and a foster parent, so I understand her position).  Which meant we were certainly being investigated by our agency, and we were potentially being investigated by the state MIC team for an infraction of the rule against corporal punishment, not to mention the potential for ending up on the Central Registry as child abusers.  No big deal.  And as part of the investigation, Bella had to come out with the licensing worker to participate in the interviews.  So much for being her model family!

The whole thing ended up being as much a nonevent as the CPS call.  We learned that MIC had screened out the call, meaning that they didn't find anything in the report that led them to believe that it needed to be investigated by the state, and kicked it over to our agency for the special evaluation.  So, while we could potentially still be put on a CAP, or corrective action plan, if the agency found that we had broken a rule, and we could still wind up on Central Registry if we didn't comply with the CAP, we didn't have to worry about a state investigation on top of it.  First, the workers spoke privately with T-Rox and me about the charge, and we shared our perspective on it, and then they privately interviewed each child in turn.  We had spoken again with Stargazer about it earlier in the evening to make her aware that an investigation was happening and the workers would want to talk to her about what had happened, and she shared that a friend of hers had been flailing around and accidentally hit her in the eye, but she didn't want the friend to get in trouble, so she had made up a story about the park, so we recounted this conversation to the workers.  The teacher had alleged in her report that I had brushed off the concerns about the eye and changed the subject to homework, which was the most aggravating part of the entire experience - she had asked about the eye and then added some information about makeup work that Stargazer could do over the weekend, and I had responded with curiosity as I hadn't seen a black eye that morning, explained the prolonged absence (we have previously had good lines of communication and this teacher is aware of this particular bit of medical history), and thanked her for the information about the makeup work.  Never did I brush off the concern or change the subject.  I shared this whole email chain with the workers so that they would have it for their records.  I strongly encourage all foster families to be sure that as much communication happens in writing as possible for this exact reason (and because it's easier to find an email or text than to try to remember what was said in a verbal conversation).  

So, while I agree professionally with this teacher's decision to report something she saw as a potential concern, it's now put us in a place personally where I have to make some decisions about trust and quantity of communication.  I saw us all - teachers, parents, social workers, etc - as being on the same team together working for the benefit of this child we all cared about.  I put in a lot of effort at the beginning of the year to loop the teachers and other relevant staff in to the situation of Stargazer being in foster care and pre-adoptive placement and to push for an IEP evaluation for a kid who had never had one before; I wanted to make it clear from the outset that I was in the ring for this kid.  We spoke in person at parent-teacher conferences about the health issue, for which she'd been out that entire week, and she encouraged us to keep her home for an extra day and try again on Monday.  She was on the IEP team and we spoke at the initial meeting after the evaluation was complete.  And when it came down to this incident, she opted to have us investigated.  And it's not personal, and, as I say, I understand as a professional why she did it, but that doesn't make it any easier to swallow or to navigate.  Emotionally, it may be a bit of a rocky road with this teacher for at least a little while.

When our interviews had concluded and we were back to talking about where we were in the adoption process, Bella tentatively asked, "Was that you who wrote that really nice review of us on Google yesterday?"

"Yes," I replied, laughing.

"I thought it might be, and it was, like, really bad timing, because our director sent out an email this morning to share this really nice review, and I was pretty sure it was your name, and then a couple of hours later I got the notice that you were on a special evaluation, and I was like, 'Oh, no, she's going to take it back now.'"

"Yes, and I was like, 'Oh, no, I just wrote this really nice review and now Bella is going to be so disappointed in her model family!'"

She and the licensing worker shook their heads.  "Nope," they said.  "Because when you're a foster family, it's not IF you have a special evaluation, it's WHEN."

What's In A Name?

When I was a kid and thought about my life as a grown-up, basically my entire dream for the future consisted of having kids.  Which was, hopefully, pretty obvious in my origin story.  I did have more or less vague thoughts about my future career, as well, but becoming a parent was priority #1.  I imagined blissful, joyous days of arts and crafts and games, traveling together, and homeschooling.  In fact, I put them all together in this dream of buying an RV and taking a year-long trip around the United States, studying science and history and math and geography and writing and reading and communicating our adventures together through blogs and vlogs and whatever other technology had cropped up by that point.  (If it still wasn't clear yet, I have wanderlust and stability issues.)  So...I anticipated some things that did happen, a lot of things that haven't (yet) come to pass, and I also expected things that will likely never become reality.  Because what I didn't expect so much - or, you know, at all - was that I might speak an entirely different language from my future kids - both figuratively and literally.

I was a huge fan of The Crow when I was in high school.  (Don't worry, the subject change will make sense in a minute, I promise.) Like, obsessed.  My bedroom had kind of an interesting shape because I had a dormer window that kind of jutted out, and then there was one wall that had this sloped section before it met the ceiling, and that sloped area was covered in posters from the various movies.  My favorite was the straight-to-video The Crow: Salvation with Eric Mabius and Kirsten Dunst.  I wrote to Eric Mabius to get an autograph, and he sent back an autographed headshot, which was up there, as well.  We had stray cats that wandered onto our 12-acre property and when one of them gave birth to kittens, I named one of the kittens Mabius and another one Cro (it was edgier without the 'w', obviously).  When I was about 14, I came across a book series based on the Crow storyline, where various authors had basically written their own versions, and I think I ended up owning pretty much all of them.  There was also a TV series that came out around the same time, and, yes, I was on top of that schedule.  There were just so many great, angsty things for a teen to love about The Crow, but hands down my favorite part was the line in the original where Eric Draven is confronting Darla about her heroin addiction and failure to be a decent mom to Sarah, and he says, "Mother is the name for god on the lips and hearts of all children."  That was such a profound line to me, because...what a responsibility, and what a calling.  My own mom perfectly embodied that sentiment to me as a child, as well, and it really felt like she had this endless reserve of patience and kindness with us, which I just assumed must have been natural to motherhood - at least, in my genetic line. So I also might have had some high expectations of myself and the type of (patient, kind, loving, caring, creative, nurturing, organized, prepared, involved) parent I would be when the time came.

As I grew into adulthood and started reading up on and looking seriously into foster care and supervised independent living, I began to think about the type of relationship I might have with the youth who came into our home and became part of our family, even temporarily.  When you're only parenting biological kids, it's virtually a no-brainer: The kids are going to call you some form of "Mom" or "Dad", typically.  In same-sex families, perhaps there's a bit more thought put into it to differentiate between the two parents, and some families encourage everyone to call everyone else by first name, so it's not a universally simple situation, but it's been my experience in the wider world that most parents go by a form of these two titles, and certainly we didn't put an inordinate amount of thought into it.  T-Rox, if I recall correctly, was sort of like, "Eh, I'm gonna be 'Dad', I guess," when I asked him if he had a preference on what his kids called him.  Because I'm weird and overthink things, I did put some thought into what I wanted to be called, and I was really stuck on 'Mama'.  I liked - and still like, as you'll note from my handle - the feeling/image it conjures up for me of cuddling up all cozy with my little babies.  So, when Kiddo came into our lives at 2 weeks shy of 18, when I was about 7 or 8 weeks pregnant with Froggy, I had kind of a title dichotomy in my head: I was going to be 'Mama' to whoever this little being inside of me turned out to be, and to this teenager, I was going to be...what?  I'd done all of this reading and thinking and considering and planning - for teenagers, no less - and I hadn't actually been prepared at all to identify myself as anything in particular to these kids.  I'd kind of just expected to be...well, me.

About a week, maybe, into his eventually 13-month stay with us, Kiddo came up to me and sort of awkwardly/apologetically/goofily-in-that-way-that-people-are-when-they're-nervous-they're-asking-something-stupid-and-about-to-be-rejected asked me in his somewhat broken English if he could call me 'Mom'.

Now, picture this: He had come up to me as we were about to walk out the door somewhere.  This felt entirely out of the blue.  His mom was alive and well back in his home country.  His relationship with her had been strained and he had some hard feelings toward her, but he did have someone he already called 'Mom', and his status was such that we couldn't adopt him even if we had been prepared to offer that option to him.  I did feel that it would be inappropriate to have foster kids - who had parents and ideally would be returning to them eventually - call us 'Mom' and 'Dad', but refugee youths in supervised independent living was a little more of a gray area, and my assumption had been that anyone who came to live with us would just go with calling us by our names.  At a week in, we were still getting to know each other.  He was basically an adult, legally speaking, and I was only 8 years further into adulthood than he was.  I can't say that I hadn't imagined a foster kid/SIL youth possibly wanting to call me 'Mom', but in the actual moment, it became abruptly crystal clear that parenthood was not necessarily going to be any of the fantasies I had conjured up in my childhood and adolescent imaginings; it was actually going to be weird moments like this one, and now I had to navigate what was really in a name without inadvertently embarrassing/alienating this kid who was in a new home with new people and trying just as awkwardly as we were to figure out how all of our pieces fit together.  And so, while my heart did a little flutter at being asked to be 'Mom', my mouth said, gently and apologetically, "No, I don't think so."  And he immediately kind of laughed it off in an 'of course not, that would be weird' sort of way, and we moved on, and I don't recall that it ever came up again.

And ever since, I've been thinking anew with every kid who joins our shifting, flowing family of what's in that name that I am called, that I call myself.

Is it 'god', on the lips of my children?  Almost certainly it is for Froggy.  For all of my deep and terrible flaws as a mother in reality, when it really sank in for her one night a couple of weeks ago that someday I will die and she will not have me in the world with her anymore, she cried that no other mom could take care of her and love her like I do.  Sometimes it feels like no matter how much time we spend together, it isn't enough for her.  And sometimes it feels like I could do or say just about anything to her and she would still love me and worship me, and that is the most frightening feeling I have ever experienced in my life.  Who am I, this mortal human being who loses her patience and yells too often and has had dark thoughts in hard moments of lashing out at her own children (though I never, never have), to have such enormous power over this child (or any others)?  When it comes down to it, very little except excellent circumstances (financial, emotional, physical) and a supportive, trauma-free childhood, both of which provide strong protective factors, separates me as a parent from the parents whose children might eventually come to me through state intervention.  I have resources and supports and education behind me - an entire network, always growing, of people in similarly healthy circumstances whom I can reach out to when things feel hard or overwhelming or hopeless.  I have had standing mom dates, and T-Rox and I trade two nights per week - one for me and one for him - as our parenting nights "off", when the evening routine is handled by the other parent while the "off-duty" parent gets time to themselves.  Our parents, though they don't live close, are good for babysitting, particularly overnights, and as we had stable childhoods, we trust them to take good care of their grandbabies, as well.  We have good, stable jobs that provide the means for stable housing, reliable transportation, and consistently-stocked pantry and fridge shelves, as well as excellent health insurance that provides the means to take care of both our physical and mental health as needed.  We can provide, as our parents did, an excellent model of how a healthy family functions.  And even with all of this positive goodness in my life, and for all of the good that I egotistically think I might be able to do for traumatized kids who share my path for any amount of time, I know that for countless numbers of children who wind up in the child welfare system due to unsafe parenting of some form or another, 'mother' is still the name for 'god', and that mother/god is not me.  It is the god who can, whatever her flaws and failings, only take care of them and love them like their own mother can.

So what's in a name?  The world, the universe...and then the reality of a fantasy turned a little sideways.  My biological kids stopped calling me 'Mama' when they were each about 2 years old, opting to shorten it to just 'Mom', so for all of my intentions to name myself, they have been the ones to name me.  Butterfly, Kiddo, and Blue all called me by my name (and so did Froggy for a time, which was actually okay with me).  Some of my students sometimes refer to me as 'Mom' as well as my teacher name; in that context, it's endearment rather than anything deep, reminding me that sometimes, what's in a name is as simple as affection and even respect.  Stargazer calls me by my name, but she's flexible under her own conditions.  She sometimes calls me 'Mom' when referring to me to Froggy and Bean.  She has called me 'Mom' to my face once when she was trying to get my attention by yelling for me from upstairs while I was in the middle of something else downstairs.  In her planner under the "if found please return to" sections are her name and then my name with 'mom' in parentheses.  When she's on the phone with her friends (and, as she's reported to me when I asked her how she would want to refer to me when she's at school, when she's talking to friends or teachers there), she refers to me as 'my mom'.  Because her biological mom isn't in the picture and wasn't involved in her childhood even before she ended up as a state ward, and because we are in the process of adopting her and legally making her our child, and because she has expressed so much joy about that, this feels like a benediction at the same time that it also feels like a title of convenience for the sake of not having to clarify the situation to everyone.  And, I'll admit, it then kind of makes me want to clarify the situation to everyone!  "Well, her adoptive mom, because she had a mom before me, and her mom did the best she thought she could at the time, and I'm just kind of stepping in now because our paths came together and we bonded and adoption was on the table and I've always wanted to adopt a kid, and..."  To apologize for the joy I feel at being called 'mom' by someone else's child, because that feels like the height of parental hubris, and because I am just a regular old person after all, not the god of kindness and generosity and warmth and patience that I imagined when I imagined myself as a mother.  And because there was another woman who came before me who had a child and was, maybe, for a little while, her god.

Origin Story

When I was in first grade, I had an assignment to write and draw about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote that I was going to be a teacher, and that I had some new method to teach students with special needs (I think it was specifically blind/deaf students, presumably because I'd read or heard a story about Helen Keller).  Being the egotistical and close-vested child that I was...and continued to be into early adulthood, honestly...I refused to write down my idea in fear that some adult would come along and think it was brilliant and steal it for themselves before I could grow up.  As a result, I have no clue what this proprietary teaching method was, so good job to 6-year-old me for that.  But I suppose the broader point is that I continued to want to be a teacher, and particularly of students with special needs, until 9th grade, when I took an intro to law course and immediately decided that I wanted to be a public defender and work in juvenile justice.  That idea was nixed by my dad in my junior year when I was applying to colleges, so I entered my university back to thinking I would be a teacher, but a combination of an uninspiring intro to education course at 8 am three days per week plus a whole college catalog filled with new and interesting topics to study conspired to push me off that track, and you already heard about changing majors 11 times, so, there was that.  I graduated college still not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, career-wise, and hung in that limbo for a solid four years.

But when I was in fourth grade, my teacher showed us the Disney movie The Girl Who Spelled Freedom, and from that day on I knew I was going to get involved somehow with refugees/foster care/adoption.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the plot, it's based on the true story of an American family who sponsored/hosted a Cambodian refugee family in the late 1970s; one of the girls in the Cambodian family went on to learn English so well that she won the countywide spelling bee and went on to compete in the national spelling bee (though she did not win).  As a spelling bee champ, myself, I particularly connected with the story.  I begged my parents to adopt an older brother for me; I dreamed of growing up and adopting a girl (I never dreamed of getting married or even having a partner; I envisioned myself as a SPBC before I'd ever heard the phrase "single parent by choice"); I wrote stories about my future self as an adoptive parent and about large families whose kids were adopted and a story about an only child who ended up with a younger adopted "brother" after stumbling across an abandoned alien child (incidentally, Stargazer frequently calls herself an alien, and a speaker I recently saw at a foster/adoptive parent conference talked about how all children with developmental trauma are "aliens" observing and learning human behavior, so apparently I was metaphorically onto something in the fifth grade).  Without knowing anything about the rest of my future, I anticipated turning 21 because then I would be legally old enough to start fostering at any point where I was financially stable.

I met T-Rox in middle school - we had mutual friends and participated in some extracurricular activities together.  In 9th grade, I started to notice him, notice him.  We sat together with other friends at lunch all that year, and he talked about nerdy and interesting things, and he wasn't a butthead about the unrequited crush I had on another one of our friends.  In 10th grade, I suggested he ask me to Homecoming.  He didn't act on the hint fast enough and I called him over the weekend and asked him to go with me, and he was bummed out because he had been planning to ask me at school on Monday.  By senior year, I had let him know that fostering and adopting were definitely in my future, so if we stayed together, they would be in his future, too.  I...don't think he understood how serious I was until we were in our second apartment and our fourth year of marriage and I started filling out the paperwork to become refugee foster parents with Lutheran Social Services (now Samaritas).  Hopefully by that point he had at least figured out that I liked to get us into interesting adventures - recall that specific travel blog I mentioned in my first post?  At least he got to stay home for this one.

Because I like complexity in my life, we accepted our first placement, a 16-year-old pregnant Honduran girl, within days of finding out that I was pregnant with Froggy.  Though I'd like to say we bonded over our shared predicament, Butterfly, our teenager, spent most of her two weeks with us holed up in her bedroom, either dealing with morning sickness or talking with her boyfriend.  Butterfly had been in the refugee program when she arrived in the United States, but had run away from her host family to live with her boyfriend's family.  When she became pregnant, they encouraged her to go back into the program so that she would have more support.  We agreed to host her either until her former family decided to take her back or another family was found - we were really not great with the idea of becoming her new permanent host family and having two babies, a teenager, and two adults in one two-bedroom apartment in less than a year.  Fortunately, her former family did agree to take her back in, so two awkward weeks later, we were saying our farewells, and we never heard from her or about her again.

I decided I still wanted to take another teen, because just being pregnant and working part-time was boring, and we requested to be matched with a boy.  We had two other potential placements fall through.  One boy was supposed to be coming directly from Sudan, but there was an issue with the UN approving people to go to the United States, and he remained stuck in a refugee camp in Africa.  Another decided that he wanted to stay with his current placement.  Then we got a call about a boy in a residential center in Chicago who was ready to leave his program.  He had fled Mexico three years before and spent time kicking around a detention center at the border and then the residential facility in Chicago - not quite the newly-minted asylee we had been anticipating, but it did mean that his English was pretty good and we weren't doing as much of the cultural acclimatization as we might have otherwise.  It also gave me a first-hand introduction to the immigration experience at the southern border, which I'd only previously studied as a Spanish minor in one 3-credit class.  We did a phone interview with Kiddo and then met him at the airport maybe a week later.  Kiddo turned 18 within a week or so of moving in with us, and stayed until just past his 19th birthday, when he decided that he wanted to move to Texas to live with a relative.  It was a wild year: Two introverted adults in their mid-20s trying to navigate a not-quite-parental relationship with an extroverted 18-year-old who often acted much younger while also experiencing a first pregnancy, birth, and first six months of infant parenting.  Oh, and then we bought a house.  Space was a necessity.

Kiddo's path took a diversion not long after moving in with his relative in Texas, and he is back in Mexico by his own choice, but we are friends on Facebook and occasionally talk over the phone.  He just turned 25 and he works as a firefighter, which was his dream when he was here, while raising three little girls with his girlfriend.  I teared up when he sent me a photo of himself holding his newborn first daughter a few years back.  Things were sometimes rough when he was living with us, but I am so grateful to still get to be part of his life even from a distance.  I think the distance and time have also helped us all appreciate each other more.

In the meantime, I was working part-time as a private tutor, which allowed me the flexibility of being home during the day and out for only a handful of hours each evening, long enough that, as a breastfeeding mom, I could get away with not needing to pump while I was out as long as I pumped at least once during the day so that Froggy could get a bottle while I was gone.  It gave me a break from being home and helped me maintain an identity outside of my postpartum fog of motherhood.  When Froggy was about 8 months old, I started looking at the local private Montessori school for potential childcare, because I was thinking about going back to school for my full teaching certification.  We had the opportunity to sit down with the owner/director, and when she found out that I was a tutor and was looking to go into teaching, she suggested that I connect with some of the middle school families to tutor their kids and that there would potentially be a middle school teaching position open in the fall if I was a good fit.  So I started tutoring after school four days per week while Froggy went to the infant room, and in the fall I did indeed start working as a co-teacher in the middle school room.  We also transitioned our refugee foster license to a full domestic foster license, and after two potential placements fell through that winter (one was a surprise sibling pair, after we had specifically requested one child at a time, and we declined; the other was a newborn and we said yes, but a family member stepped up to take her instead), we decided to transfer to our local DHHS (Department of Health and Human Services) so that we wouldn't be stuck potentially having to do family visits up to an hour away from home three days per week.  Things were fairly quiet for a little while, and then in May we got a call from a social worker friend of mine from my volunteer work as a CASA (more about that in another post) about another emergency placement.  There was a child who was going to be adopted, but the adoptive family wasn't licensed yet and the current foster family was closing their license.  The child was 10, much older than we had requested on our license, but the social worker knew we were also open to taking LGBTQIA+ kids - not very common in licensed families in our county, unfortunately - and this child presented as genderqueer.  Would we be willing to take the child until the adoptive family was licensed?  I was registered to go to Cincinnati for five weeks over the summer for Montessori teacher training, but it seemed the kid could be gone before then, and if not, it was just a handful of weeks for T-Rox to single-parent.  We said yes, and Blue moved in.

And, because this is my life, a few weeks later, we found out we were expecting Bean.  (To be clear, both of my bio children were planned; we just didn't expect to end up pregnant the second time on the first try, because it took a little while with Froggy.)  Blue's adoptive family wasn't licensed until near the end of August, so T-Rox did end up single-parenting a newly 2-year-old and a 10-year-old for four weeks, while I suffered through morning sickness for four weeks and came home in the middle because I couldn't imagine doing the fieldwork week when I was already spending half of every day laying down and trying not to move.  So, even when I was home for that week, T-Rox was still doing the bulk of the parenting when he was home, and when he was at work, we all learned all the lyrics to the Dinosaur Train theme song.  Thank goodness for the TV babysitter.

Things were quiet again for a little while after Blue left.  I started my second year of teaching at the Montessori, and while my training had been amazing, I loved working with the kids and the tutoring I did for upper elementary students, things were becoming more and more tense with the owner/director.  After Bean was born that winter, the owner/director wasn't in a hurry to have me return from maternity leave, and I had to get a little insistent - we needed the income.  Bean spent a few weeks in the classroom with us, as another teacher had done with her newborn several years back, but I got a lot of pushback from my co-teacher about it and eventually I moved him to the infant room for the rest of the year.  Over Memorial weekend, we took in a friend and her two children who were in a bad situation, and by the end of the school year I had decided that I would not return to the school again in the fall.  We closed our foster license due to a lack of beds and the need to do a few repairs around the house, and for a year it was three adults and four kids under four in the house.  We had an encounter with CPS that spring when the friend's kids turned out to have high lead levels in their bloodstream and someone - presumably someone from one of the agencies that was providing home visits to the kids - reported a lead concern.  It was quickly shown that the lead hadn't come from our home, and even if it had, we were taking steps to remedy it: Our kids did not have elevated lead levels, and we had been in the process of getting quotes for new windows upstairs (our house is over 100 years old and some of the windows were still wooden rope-and-pulley style), so that just escalated our timeline. 

At the same time, I had found an alternative route to teacher certification program and had started my core classes in January, with the expectation that I would be elementary certified in June.  I was also working full time that semester as a paraprofessional at a charter K-8 school, where I pushed into 2nd and 4th grade classrooms and also was frequently requested to sub in the middle school because the teachers thought I did a great job.  In May, the friend and her children moved into their own housing; by August, I had accepted my first certified teaching job as a middle school social studies teacher.  By November, I had become entirely disillusioned about my ability to manage a classroom in a school with no support, and found a job teaching middle school math at another school.  In February, I was completely burned out, and I tried one more time with a different school, this one a charter school on the secure campus of a residential treatment center (RTC). 

I knew from my tutoring experience that I was good at building relationships one-on-one with students, which I wasn't able to do at either of my previous schools.  I also was still interested in working with students with special needs, and by this point I had narrowed it down to emotional/behavioral needs, but I also was pretty confident that I didn't want to go into special education.  I thought I wanted to be an alternatively certified teacher who taught in an alternative education setting.  I wanted to work with kids who were not just at-risk, but potentially last-chance.  And I still wanted some tie to kids in foster care, even though our license had been closed for nearly two years at that point.  The girls in my middle school room at the RTC were exactly the population I had been seeking.  They put up walls, sniped, fought, hurdled tables, tore things up, and threw chairs.  They joked, laughed, shared their stories and their fears, made art, hugged us when they were prohibited from human contact with one another.  They were like injured, caged animals, desperate to both get closer and to run away, as likely to seek affection and reassurance as to snap at anyone who tried to get close.  They were my babies, and it was as much my job to love them and care for them as it was to teach them. 

I started at the beginning of March.  Girls were expected to be coming in and out without much preparation, as they were only supposed to stay for the duration of their individual programs and then go elsewhere - home, a foster placement, an adoptive placement, supervised independent living - but there was a dearth of available placements for all of them and they were tending to stay longer and longer.  Still, new girls did come in, and we got one a couple of weeks after I started the new job.  She wore bandannas or headbands around her forehead every day, kept to herself, stayed in corners of the room, but not in an anxious way, more like a mischievous or even somewhat defiant way.  She wouldn't sit in lessons, and she didn't seem interested in getting to know anyone except one or two of the other girls who also tended to find corners of the room.  She drew a lot, and ripped things up a lot, and one day she went AWOL not just from the classroom, but all the way across the campus and over the fence, laughing all the way.  That was the second day I cried on the job, because I was so bewildered by her behavior.  We had had a runner before, but it made sense to me: The girl had been angry and wanted to get away.  Fight, flight, freeze.  This girl was just running because she thought it was funny.  I didn't understand.  I knew she would be held in her room for a day or so once she was recovered, but I also knew that I wanted to double down on getting in with this kid when she got back.  I couldn't imagine feeling so untethered from everything and everyone that running felt like a fun choice, when the consequences were heavy for going AWOL.  When she came back, I made it a point to go to her at the back of the room whenever possible, to ask about her art, to find out her interests. 

She was surprisingly open for a kid who sought the corners and ran away for kicks.  She told me she liked space and wanted to study astronomy.  I brought in a used book on space that I bought a few weeks later and gave it to her to look at.  She opened up more and more.  She eventually started sitting at the tables during lessons, though she didn't necessarily do the work.  Summer came and went and she was still there when I returned in the fall.  She participated in class.  She still didn't always (or even most of the time) do the work, though she was more likely to do it when I sat at her table and encouraged her.  She was constantly losing materials, and several times became very angry with classmates whom she assumed had stolen her personal things.  She had gotten friendlier with some of the other girls on her unit.  She was more likely to tell other girls to knock off the fighting or to calm down, and sometimes they listened to her.  She started talking about her home passes to visit her grandparents, who had recently learned where she was.  She was photolisted on the state adoption page as a waiting child. Eventually she stopped wearing the bandannas.  We talked about shared interests, and interests she shared with T-Rox.  In November, I started thinking what-if.  In December, I started obsessing what-if.  In January, I asked T-Rox about re-opening our license and fostering, maybe adopting, one of my girls. 

I had talked before about re-opening it, and he wasn't ready, and I was worried it would be the same now.  I told him I had a girl in mind.  He considered it, and told me I could look into what it would take to re-open the license and we would go from there.  The next day, I called DHHS and told them I was interested in a waiting child, but didn't know how to contact her worker.  I gave them the girl's information.  The social worker told me she would reach out to the worker for me and it would be up to the worker if she wanted to contact me.  I got a call from the worker just hours later, ecstatic to hear that I wanted to adopt this kiddo.  After that, things flew.  We found a new agency to license us and I pushed us through all the fingerprinting, training, and paperwork to try to set a record for how fast we could get licensed.  The girl's grandparents had expressed interest in adopting her to get her out of the RTC, but quickly supported us adopting as long as they could still have visits; I still wanted to get things moving as quickly as possible so nobody could change their mind (not that that's how things really work, but a sort of anxious adrenaline pushed me for those months).  The girl learned that another family was interested in adopting her, but didn't talk about it much at school; I learned about some of her concerns from her adoption worker, who was in regular contact with me while doing her best to keep our identity secret while I was still working at the school.  It was a conflict of interest for me to foster or adopt one of my students while working with a population that was heavily skewed toward being involved in the child welfare system, and we didn't want anyone spilling the beans. 

We started the licensing process on February 1, and had our license in hand on May 1 - nose on 3 months, for a process that takes an average of 3-6 months to complete and can sometimes run even longer.  In March, I accepted a new position teaching 6th grade science, grieved to be leaving my girls, but excited to reveal our identity to Stargazer, and relieved to be leaving an administration that felt like it spent more time Big Brothering our room than supporting the work being done or the teachers doing that work.  I had to wait a full week to "meet" Stargazer as her prospective adoptive parent, and it killed me that I couldn't say anything on my last day of work, when she was literally climbing shelves and tables in agitation and distress at my departure.  All I could tell her was that sometimes crummy things had to happen so better things could come, and that I thought it was going to be worth it.

Working back in a traditional school was not cutting it for me, however.  It was the crummy thing that had to happen, for me.  I was coming home irritable and impatient and burned out again, and I did not want that for my life or my family, especially when we were about to expand and put a whole lot of unknown on our plates.  I had been teaching middle school for four years, between the Montessori and my job hopping, and I knew that I didn't want to teach kids any younger than about 7th or 8th grade.  I also had sparked a passion for alternative education, and I knew it would be nearly impossible to find a job in alternative education on an elementary certificate.  I was pretty sure I could change my certification, but I didn't want to end up without a job lined up for the fall.  I inquired about getting my previous position back, but the administration declined.  Then a spot came open at an alternative high school in Detroit for a science teacher, and I decided that the worst thing that could happen was I could apply and be rejected, and I was no worse off than I already was.  So I submitted my resume and a cover letter explaining that I was elementary certified but could change to a secondary certification if they wanted to hire me. 

A couple of weeks went by and I assumed that they had filled the spot with another applicant...and then I received a phone call.  They asked for clarification on my certification.  I explained the situation.  They asked if I was still interested in the job.  I said yes.  They gave me more information about it and asked if I would like to come in for an interview with the superintendent.  I said yes again.  I went to the interview.  I explained how I came to be looking for a new job, and why I was drawn to alternative education.  The superintendent said it was unfortunate that my previous school didn't want to hire me back, but lucky for their school that it now made me available for this job, and that he suspected he would be calling to follow up with a job offer but had to figure out how high of a salary he could offer first.  I had had another interview a couple of days prior to that, and got an offer from that school, which was still traditional, but teaching 8th grade science.  I told them I would let them know.  Not long after, I got a call from the alternative school superintendent with a very generous salary offer compared to anything I had made or been offered in the past. I called up the dean of my alternative certification program and asked about withdrawing from the last year of my elementary program and re-enrolling in the secondary certification program.  He advised me on how to make it happen. In September, I started the program all over again.  In December, I completed all of my classes, and shortly I will go online and put in the request for my certification from the state.

Over the past 8 years, I have learned everything from how challenging it can be to foster young, to why it was so challenging to foster at first (partly age, mostly a lack of real understanding of trauma and development), to how to navigate the system, to ways the system fails different people at different points, to how to interact with youth in a trauma-informed way, to how to incorporate trauma-responsive practices into the classroom, to how to make horizontal moves until the fit is right, to how to advocate for children and youth.  Last spring I gave an impromptu presentation on trauma-responsive teaching to a decently-sized group of my colleagues at an EdCamp conference, which was both harrowing and empowering - it showed me how far I've come since the days of trying to somehow parent an 18-year-old at 26, but it also showed me how much more I have to learn in order to create something that will be practical for others and not just informative.  It also showed me that what I have to share with others is seen as valuable and important - I think I had about 22 attendees or so, which was something like 1/6th of the total conference attendance.

The learning will be ongoing, and now I'm in a new phase of figuring out how to reach and teach the students at my new school, which is exciting work.  Every new turn in the road has allowed me to refine my work and myself as a person, and it's been a good decade of growth and personal development. 

In future posts, I'll talk more about the process of Stargazer finally coming to live with us and the road to adoption, and I'll share information and things I've learned about being an effective trauma-informed educator and therapeutic parent (which will always be a work in progress as my own kids move through developmental stages).

Thanks for reading.  Until we meet again!

A Mom Who Blogs

I do not identify as a mommy blogger.

I mean, I am a mom.  And I'm trying to blog.  For, like, the third time (well, the fourth time, but my first blog was a specific travel blog pre-children, so it doesn't count as a mom blog).  And I'm trying to blog about my experiences as a mom, and also as a teacher, because those two roles both intersect a lot and make up nearly my entire personal identity/definition.  It's just that I don't consider those roles as the be-all, end-all.  They're more of a starting point, the spools around which I wrap the threads of experience and education.  I read mommy blogs sometimes to help me thread my MOM spool, but I don't really see this blog as a way to contribute back to that pool of information and advice.  Honestly, I don't really want to contribute to that pool of information and advice.  There are a lot of moms out there who are killing it in that arena, and I don't think I've got much to add that isn't already out there.

What I want to do is share my journey.  And my thoughts about it.  And be brave enough to be vulnerable in front of potential strangers on the internet.  My journey is just my journey, but I wouldn't share it if I didn't think other people couldn't get something out of it, too, and that's both a little scary and a lot egotistical - who am I to assume that I have something to say that will resonate with other people?  But I have real-life friends who have assured me that I do, and that I should, and it's been a long time since I've tried writing anything, and I made a New Year's resolution (which I never do, because I'm a flake), and so here we are.

In my next post, I'm going to give a little timeline to orient everybody to where we are right now, but for today I'll introduce my motley cast of characters:

• MAMA Z - That's me!  I'm currently 33, live in Michigan, have a decent commute to teach science at an alternative high school in Detroit, and have zero hobbies outside of reading; hence, this blog.  My kids are getting older, so this year I'm also trying to get back into hiking and walking regularly, with and without them.  I hate going to bed and I am also incredibly cranky when I don't get enough sleep, so that's a conundrum.  I have some ADHD tendencies but don't claim the label as I've never been formally diagnosed and I did great in school, so who knows (actually, I tried earlier this year to schedule an evaluation, and the office said somebody would call me back, and they never did, so maybe they need to evaluate themselves, just saying).  Some days I have the patience of a Zen master, and other days I'm ready to scream and run away from home.  I like the idea of cooking, but reality is kind of ridiculous (who has time for that??), so the only things I consistently make from scratch are pancakes and these scrambled eggs that we watched Gordon Ramsey make once on MasterChef.  I am addicted to Facebook and I read voraciously - the goal is 100 books per year, and in 2019 I read 106 (yes, audiobooks count, too!).  I'm hoping to pull some reviews into this blog, but we'll see, which brings me to the next things to know about me: I am a procrastination master, stubborn and contrary, and I like to create elaborate plans with no follow-through because it's less disheartening to never do something than to attempt it and fall on my face.  I am a recovering believer that the grass is greener on the other side; I think this has more to do with age and maturity than any deep life lessons, though you'd think it would be the life lessons since I've held 12 different jobs in the past 10 years.  I have a bachelor's degree, which I earned after changing majors 11 times; 13 credits towards an associate's degree in early childhood education; 0 credits toward a BSN since I dropped out of (very expensive) nursing school 2 months in; and a (second, after switching from elementary to secondary 2 years into a 3-year program and having to start over again) non-degree teaching certification as a sort-of career-changer.  I'd like to get a master's degree and eventually a doctorate, but, frankly, I clearly have a terrible track record for committing and I'd have to figure out what I actually want to study, first.  Graduate essays are my Achilles' heel, because mostly I just want to learn new things and then do them and then teach them to other people, and that doesn't seem to be a reasonable response to questions like, "How will earning this degree improve your life and advance your career goals?"  Dunno, dude.  Let me learn some stuff and I'll get back to you on that.

• T-ROX - That's my astonishingly steady life partner.  He's 34, has insisted on sticking with me for the past 18 years, only changed his major twice, and has been working at the same job for the past 8 years (there was a little difficulty finding a job in his field in the beginning, or I'm positive that number would be higher).  He's the eye to my hurricane.  We have nothing in common except our values, our politics, and our sense of humor, and sometimes he drives me crazy because he's the Voice of Too Much Reason, but then again, I'm also not living in a box on a beach somewhere (something I insisted years ago would happen), so I guess I'll keep him around.  He also spoils me, and did I mention that he insists on putting up with me in the first place?  Things definitely don't suck in the relationship department.

• FROGGY - The kid who made me a mom.  She's 6, and all of it, and she's also my mini-me, personality-wise, so it's good that we have a big house!  Truly, she's fascinating and entertaining, and she's also hugely challenging for me.  Her birth was hard and I am positive that I had postpartum depression/anxiety after she was born, but I didn't get help for it, and I think it really impacted my bond with her.  At the least, it didn't help.  If I'm reading parenting books and blogs and posts in groups on Facebook, it's because I'm trying to figure her out and do better by her, specifically.  She's also the reason I have learned so much about sensory processing disorders, which has helped her as well as some of my students (potentially a future blog post).  At least she has almost never struggled with sleep, so even when everything else in my life suddenly became a billion times harder, that has been one thing that has helped all of us.  She loves to do art projects and she is learning to read, and she loves science and is incredible at math, for which I'm grateful since math was my hardest subject throughout school.  Her imagination is brilliant and her empathy for others is a joy to witness.

• BEAN - The second and youngest kid.  He is nearly 4, and he is basically what would happen if you stuck Sonic the Hedgehog into a blender with a brilliant summer day and then poured that into a person mold.  We haven't figured out where the off switch is hiding yet, or else he would sleep much more easily and often, but at least he is generally vastly cheerful while he's busy never stopping.  Small consolation when you can't go to bed yourself until he's asleep or else he might set the house on fire (definitely a future blog post), but it's something.

• STARGAZER - The third and eldest kid.  She just turned 15, and I won't talk much about her background because her story isn't mine to share.  However, I will talk about the places where we intersect and the things that involve me as a parent/teacher.  We are in the process of adopting her, and in the time that I've been writing this post, I was contacted by her new lawyer to introduce herself, received an email from our licensing worker, and sent some check-in texts back and forth with her foster/adoption worker, so there's almost always something on my plate related to her placement with us.  She's a phenomenal kid and we generally get along well, and it's certain that I'll share more about how she came to be with us in a future post.  She's the fourth child we've fostered and the first one we'll adopt (T-Rox insists she's the only one we'll adopt...), and our experience with foster care and adoption has been so outside of the typical expectations that I feel compelled to talk about it.  I'm a bit of an evangelist when it comes to talking about foster care, as well, so it's probable that a lot of my posts about Stargazer will actually involve her only obliquely and sort of spotlight some tidbit or other about the system and our interaction with it.  I want to be clear that I'm not doing that because I'm using her as an object or a conversation piece, but rather because I respect her dignity and integrity and want to protect her story as much as possible while also sharing more specifically about our experience and the system itself, at least as it operates in Michigan.

That's all from me for now - I can hear children getting on each other's nerves upstairs.  In my next post, I'll outline the timeline of my journey with foster care and education, or something along those lines.  Till next time!