foster-kids

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My wife can make me cry at work

September 21, 2004 in Kids, Personal by Ben

Closing line from an e-mail:

ly
congrats, future adoptive dad

Looks like we’re on the fast track, with super luck it’ll be done by thanksgiving, marginal luck Christmas, my luck? Sometime in January.

Lookee here

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…and it makes me wonder

September 21, 2004 in Personal by Ben

I was in church a few weeks ago, and at the end of mass a young lady came to the podium and wanted to talk to everyone about a group that helped her. She told her story of being a wild kid, and said that she was pregnant at 17, then again at 19. Now, however, thanks to the group, at 22 she was married to the father of her children and couldn’t be happier. What angels they were! They really helped me overcome lots of obstacles. Please help if you can.

I looked into the eyes of the baby I was holding. Her mom went to prison for fraud, and left her at the age of two months with her girlfriend, an alcoholic crack addict who was also a prostitute. Luckily a local businessman realized what happened and called the authorities. They found the baby living in a trashed apartment, and her “guardian” replied to queries about her drinking with “only when I can.” There was no formula in the house, and she had no job.

Would this group of angels had helped? Or does the church have such a problem with promiscuity, drug use, prostitution, and homosexuality that they would have just turned their back on her?

I wonder.

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Life, Unscripted.

September 9, 2004 in Kids, Personal by Ben


The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books (Guest Author: Mark Falanga)

Update: I won 3rd Place! I am shocked as at least 53 other entries were better than mine. But I’ll take it! Thanks everyone for the kind thoughts and e-mails and comments. And thanks to Jay and Mark for making this possible. I’ve found writing about things to be a very interesting way to unlock feelings I thought were lost.

This is my story:

The answering machine said “4.” Four messages. Nobody ever calls, how did that happen? Must have been a wrong number. Fearing a family member was sick, or worse, I was about to press ‘play’ when the phone rang.

“Hi, this is Dee. We have a placement and wanted to talk with you about it. It’s a little boy, three months old, and he needs somewhere to go tonite.”


- Read the rest ->

I suppose I’d better back up a little. The year before, my wife and I went through the certification process to become foster parents. We went to class, we were interviewed, fingerprinted, inspected, detected. All was in order, but up to now we had never been called on. Up to now.

“I tried to call you at work, but you had already left, and I left some messages on your machine at home.”

As part of our preparation, in our many interviews, we had to specify what kind of children we thought we could care for best. Since we both work, we thought school age children would do best in our home. We had no kids of our own, but felt we made damn fine babysitters. We had set up a room for them already, two twin beds (my wife sewed matching quilts along with a friend). We had a few kid toys - legos, lincoln logs.

“How old did you say he was?”

“He’s three months. He was removed from his home, and he needs a place tonite. It’s getting late. He seems to be happy and healthy.”

I looked at my watch, it was almost 6:30. My wife would be home from work soon. What would she think?

“Umm…,” I tried to think on my feet. “Do you know anything about the case?”

“Well, they have a family member, the fathers sister, I think, and they want to take him but we have to do a background check first. He’d probably be with you for a week.”

Well, that changed everything. It was almost Spring Break, my wife was a graduate student and would have the week off. We could do this. And just as I was thinking that, my wife walked in the front door.

“Can I call you right back? We need to talk for a minute.”

Dee said fine and gave me a number to reach her. It only took a moment for us to agree - sure! It’d be fun. We could get our first taste of fostering and it would be conveniently at a time where she didn’t have to work.

We called, said we’d be happy to do it. “Okay, we’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

I hung up the phone. Shit! What had I just said? We had to think fast.

My wife called some friends. They were expecting, but not for about four months. They cheerfully offered their crib for the week and said they could bring it over right away. Turns out they also brought some baby clothes and toys, too.

By 9:00 the doorbell rang, and moments later I was holding a tiny baby in my arms. He looked me in the eye, drew a breath, and screamed.

“Look, he likes you! Sign here…” said the worker. They had stopped at Wal-Mart on their way to the house, so the little guy had a change of clothes, some diapers, a pacifier, and some formula. They loaned us a car seat (”we’ll need this back, but you can keep it for now.”) We had just finished building the crib, after moving our computer desk and some boxes (still packed from our move two years before) around in our office.

A few minutes later, we were alone with the baby. He calmed down as soon as my wife held him, and after all the adventures he had during the day, was soon asleep. We laid him in the crib. (”Is it ‘back to sleep’?”) and started planning our next few days. At that moment, we had no idea how flexible we had to be.

The next day, my bride brought him to my work. As soon as he spotted me he laughed and smiled - which was, of course, much better than the night before. Perhaps it’s because I was up three times overnight feeding or changing him. I’ll never know. That weekend we drove to my parents house, and to see friends. Showing him off, like a new car or an engagement ring.

By the middle of the following week it was clear he was not going to live with his aunt. “Well, that didn’t work out, but there are other relatives that might be interested. But it looks like he’ll be with you for a while, maybe another couple weeks.”

Panic, again. E had to be back at school the following Monday, so we needed to find a sitter. The very first person she interviewed was perfect for the job. “We don’t know how long he’ll be with us” “That’s okay, he’s welcome here. You don’t need a long term contract or anything.” A relative mailed us a care package, boys clothes their son had outgrown. We found another car seat, so we’d have one in each car.

Over the coming weeks, and months, relative after relative didn’t work out. His mom left town - left the state. His dad had remarried and his new wife didn’t want anything to do with the baby.

Two months before his second birthday, we adopted him. And two weeks ago he began 1st Grade. We finally had our “school age” child.


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Dirty Deeds. Done dirt cheap.

September 1, 2004 in Kids, Personal by Ben

So my weekend was something like this:

Saturday: clean out the garage. Throw out a ton of stuff that we should have thrown out the week before. I mean, we should have sold in the garage sale the week before. Yeah, that’s it.

Sunday: Go to church, twice. Go out to eat with the kids (always an adventure). Go to the park. Go get the tire fixed since I ran over a screw. Quoting my son: “You’re in trouble, I’m gonna tell mom you broke her car.”

Monday: drive several hours to testify in court that I will love my little girl and accept her into my family. It took twenty seconds after the defense rested to terminate parental rights on her (non) mom. It was well worth the drive.

And that brings us to today, and I’ve just spent three hours working on a volunteer project and I’m dog tired but can’t sleep. That just sucks. It’s 1 AM.

Update: THANK YOU for all the well wishes!

I’m sorry if I was too vague; what happened monday is they terminated rights on the biological parents. The adoption process is now ready to begin, and if we are lucky it will be finished by Christmas. It’s a complicated yet simple thing; the agency and we need to jump through several hoops to finalize things (for example, everyone needs a physical exam to make sure we’re healthy enough, she has to go to the dentist, she has to visit a child psychologist, etc.). After all the forms are filed and all the various agencies are satisfied, then we finally will go to court and a judge will sign the order making her officially part of the family, with a new last name and everything. There will be a party, oh yes, there will be a party.

I could write a very lengthy narrative about Monday, and will, but I don’t think I’ll post it here until everything is said and done - for privacy reasons. Drop me a line by e-mail if you want to know more; you know I love to talk! I may try and post a few tidbits if I can do it in a way that doesn’t seem not right.

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If you love someone, set them free

June 30, 2004 in Kids, Personal by Ben | 1 comment

    Blogging for Books entry

In March of 2000, a scared little boy came to live at our house. I’ll call him Boo after the scared little girl in Monsters and Ink (as my kids like to call it).

Boo was about seven months younger than my son. They instantly fell in step, like brothers. It mattered not in the least that one was black and the other white, one had fine blonde hair the other black curly hair, one blue eyed the other brown. Everywhere we went together people would do a double take. “Are they brothers?” “Sure!” They certainly acted like it.

Boo had a brother, who was in another foster home. Yeah, we’re foster parents, and Boo came here when his mom left him at a friends house so she could run to the store. She never came back. His brother had been in care for a number of years; they let her keep Boo since she was trying hard to mend her ways. Ooops.

Time went by. We had lots of adventures - vacations, trips to the zoo and the park. In 2001 it became clear that Boo’s mom was losing custody of both kids. Boo and his brother would go to live in the same home, together, brothers at last. But they hardly knew each other. His brother had “issues,” he knew his mom and how badly she screwed their family over. He was in trouble at school, at home. But still a good kid.

We knew we could fight, we could go to a judge and insist that Boo belonged to us now. My son’s brother! Surely they had a stronger bond than this other kid who he hardly knew. But in the eyes of the law, blood is everything. It doesn’t matter who you love or who you spend your time with, the blood relation wins out. It would be a difficult fight, and one we were sure to ultimately lose. We had to try and do right for Boo.

We looked inside and decided that the best thing to do would be to let him go. As the time drew closer, other things happened. Planes flew into towers, relatives got sick and either died or got well. The people adopting the boys were acquaintances, they lived a hundred miles away. We went to their house. She ran her own day care and could be with Boo all day every day. His brother would be in school a half a mile away. They came in their truck and got his stuff - in a year and a half, a little boy can accumulate quite a few things.

We made sure to pack his sword, he and my son used to love to do swordfights; it was like a wild west show where they worked out a script and took turns dying. They did this at the Rennaisance festival and drew a crowd, I swear they needed a tip jar. “Are they brothers?” “Hell, yes.”

His new mom, his forever mom, didn’t like weapons. We sent the sword anyway. Heh.

His last morning with us, Halloween 2001, I tucked him into a car seat for the last time. He looked at me and wouldn’t say a word. I tried to be profound, and about all I could come up with was “I love you, Boo. Take care.”

And then he was gone.

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