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!