I Can Haz Baby

We’ve been living it up for the time without a baby – we knew it would be short.  I worked (boring) played (fun) and got my hands dirty working for two days at the Great Minnesota Get Together!I love the Spin Art booth and spending the weekend there was the best of all worlds – I got to help out the local artist owners when their weekend manager had an unexpected conflict, I got to be a part of the fair (I don’t go any more because I can’t eat any food and it’s real expensive! If it was just one of those two things, I’d still be all in!!), and I was making the most of my baby-free time! Meanwhile, my partner had a table at two comic conventions (MN Fanfest and Wizard World Chicago) selling his amazing art and hustling for that elusive work-from-home and make money doing art paycheck.

But…we got the call again!  Word is, there’s a very small baby in a hospital ready for discharge to a loving foster home.  It’s pretty terrifying and exciting – getting to do ALL THE STEPS from the very beginning! But…TINY, helpless, sleepless, baby.  Unsurprisingly, I used the time between the phone call (about 4:30 p.m. yesterday) and the call that yep, it’s a go, pick that baby up (about 12:30 today) to FREAK OUT at everything, change over everything from big baby to tiny baby (clothes, toys, sleeping areas), and do the grown-up things: shower, shave, clean up the house, do the laundry and grocery shop – basically, lay in supplies to make this next transition as easy as possible!  Unlike pupper, who can tell her life is about to get stressful again, Kitty is ALL IN on new baby plan!

The worst part of fostering is the uncertainty of everything…when will I have a baby? When will I not?  The next worst is the lack of permanency…need to say goodbye over and over.  But the benefit is the breaks that you get from parenting that no one else gets.  Saying goodbye to our first was both sad and… a little great!

I took this time to reevaluate and refresh . . . there is a release and relief.  We are still doing everything in our power to move forward with our family and parenting goals and we are fully available to children in need in our state.  But we have no responsibility to them this second and we get a little mini-vacation!  My partner gets to focus on his art and I get to actually do something other than work/baby/work/baby.   Instead of focusing on the “what comes next” I focused on letting go and “what can I do now?!”

It turns out, if you actually just freaking let go for a minute, it’s possible to still have fun as an adult even with all the stupid adult responsibilities and stressors! I went to the farmer’s market, to brunch with friends, I painted my toenails, I played stick with the dogger, and I went to a Star Trek pub crawl at the very last minute, entirely unplanned.

I even rode my bike to the pub crawl instead of Lyfting.  I felt 25 again!

Fostering is full of stress and uncertainty.  Thinking of the time between placements as a time to refresh and recommit feels like a genius piece of self-care.

We have completed our first placement!  Baby was an amazing 13 month old who was basically magical for, like, a baby.  Baby slept through the night, baby ate well, baby was generally in a pretty good mood, baby was pretty charming and was ready to learn and explore and DO STUFF all the time (except when tired and hungry).

First baby was with us for about three weeks and we could not have asked for a better first experience.  Yes, we hope to someday have a permanent baby placement, but we knew it wouldn’t be this one right from the start and this helped us get going – to get used to the concept of loving and letting go.

The biggest lessons from experience #1 were about process – fostering just requires an endless amount of patience.  Not, my strong suit! In all the classes and forms and preparation you just don’t learn what the process IS.  How do the children get placed? How does scheduling work? What is the monitoring? Who does what, exactly?  Well, gulls, foster care is just as much of a mess as you have ever expected!  As just one example, with this baby we often did not know if visitations were going to happen THE NEXT DAY until sometime the night before.  We didn’t know who/what/where.  We didn’t know if we had to provide transportation or if they would.  We are a one-car household and literally all sort of decisions stem from which of us need the car on a given day.   Basically, nothing goes as planned or stated in foster care, which is SO FRUSTRATING to me – I am a super-good planner! And then I do the things as planned! And then everything is easier for everyone! I know all the reasons foster care does not and will not ever work that way…it just happens to be the greatest challenge for our household.  Hilariously, writing the application for eventual adoption if it happens, one of the questions is “explain how you are flexible and able to be flexible in parenting”… I was just honest and said I’m not…but I’m working on it.  And here’s fostering, to really help me undertake that challenge!

First baby was a known short-term placement and was a super-good amazing intro into this world… we don’t have children of our own, are not oldest children who took care of younger siblings growing up, nor are either of us those people who just love EVERY kid and babysit for everyone all the time (I like children when they belong to me in some way. My partner likes children who can talk and DO stuff). Fostering is our LEAP into parenting…and it’s a big leap, both the physical reality of caring for another human 24/7 and emotionally.  I was totally freaked out about the drop-off, we spent the whole day cleaning (what if they got here and were like…hell no, we aren’t leaving a baby HERE?! This was anxiety, not reality!).  Instead, they walked in, plopped down baby, were like, “here’s baby” and that was that.  We were plunged all in!!  The household providing care to this baby before us gave us all sorts of info (baby cries all the time, baby hates baths, baby loves broccoli, baby doesn’t go to sleep well, baby loves strawberries, baby has blow-outs all the time) of which the only thing that proved to be true was baby’s love of strawberries and broccoli.  Yum!  So even the info we DID get was next to useless in figuring out what/how we are doing this “foster parenting thing”.

My partner is independently employed and is at home as the primary care-giver for our fostering.  He was unsurprisingly challenged when his entire life was suddenly occupied every second with the needs of a small demanding very sweet tyrant (i.e. toddler).  In contrast, I had to keep my all-encompassing, high-stress, reasonably demanding, day job…meaning entire days go by where I don’t even get to see the baby – hard on baby (presumably accustomed to a female care-giver, the baby definitely had a slight-me-preference), hard on me, hard on spouse.  We thought that I might be able to work from home part-time giving us more time together, less feeling of missing out for me, less felling overwhelming 100% responsibility for him…HA! Maybe with a new-born, but absolutely NOT with a toddler.  And there sure as heck isn’t time to write this blog between working and babying!  Quite honestly, even the pets were stressed out about where and how everyone was supposed to interact…my poor dog is all “is this my toy? Does EVERYTHING belong to this tiny thing? Will I ever go to the dog park again?”

Like all new parenting, fostering is apparently hard on the relationship. WHO KNEW?!  All of a sudden, there is just not that time together – and both parties are exhausted and, in our set-up, somewhat mildly resentful of each other when those breaks away from baby do come.  I would have liked more involvement in the parenting and felt sad and stressed about missing out, he would have liked some time away to work and exist without constant unending baby needs, and felt stressed out and alone in this process. I seriously cannot imagine how new single parents do it, or people without support systems.  We had so much support and it was still exhausting!!  Also, I see some solid benefits to day care…you come home and get to be EXCITED about your kids, instead of it “yep, still our kid all the time every second.”  If we have a long-term placement we will definitely be doing some ECFE classes, and some swimming, and just SOME THINGS!

This baby was so easy to love and care for.  And it was also clear to us that the baby would and should be heading home very shortly; we were thrilled to learn the reconciliation was happening.  And also, obviously a little sad (I would have been FINE if we could just say goodby and hand-off without the hour of waiting in a hallway to learn what was happening next  – will we? won’t we? but instead got weepy and shed just the right amount of small tears). It’s super-important to fall in love with each and every one of these children. That is the job we are signing up for…to love and to let go, over and over.  And to remember, no matter how happy and well-cared for adjusted, every child in foster care is in trauma.  If you saw this baby with us, you would assume it was ours.  It ran to us for hugs and cuddles, looked for us when we were gone, cried if I left for work, enjoyed new activities with us (learned to LOVE bath time for the first time!), pushed boundaries, challenged the rules, and wanted to do everything all the time.  If the worst happened, and baby lived with us, from outside you would think baby was perfectly bonded and just fine…but seeing baby greet its parents, after almost two months living in care, at 14 months old…that baby knew EXACTLY who its parents were and wanted more than anything to be with them, not us. And that’s the challenge of substitute care-giving, especially with a permanent placement as the ultimate goal.  No matter how happy and healthy and supportive a home we give a child, it needs to have space and freedom to be hurt and lonely and confused about its family of origin and to be conflicted about us as “parents”. That is OUR challenge to live with, and support, not a child’s to hide from us.

Things are finally (sort of) happening!  Baby room exists! 

And we had our foster-care home study! I may be a little obsessive, but we were so over-prepared that our 2-3 hour meeting took less than 2, and we should be ready to go! Oh wait… as soon as we complete a bunch more paperwork (why didn’t you send that to me electronically sometime in the past few months as I repeatedly and endlessly followed up?) and ask our reference to re-complete our reference form (the one she already sent in was not received) and read a book and take a 150 question test! And send it all in and wait while they do their bureacracy stuff!

BUT! Other than that, we are totally ALL SET!

A big part of foster classes is about attachment.  Children form healthy attachment through having needs and having the responsible adults in their life meet those needs; the most basic for new babies being: touch, changing diapers, food when hungry, etc.  Healthy children who have their needs, both physical and emotional, met in a healthy manner grow are then able to begin exploring the world from a safe and secure base.  In a healthy parent-child relationship, the child’s needs are fulfilled by the parent – not the other way around.

Every parent fucks this up sometimes – good news, you do not need to be the perfect parent and meet every need (not want) perfectly to give your child the ability to grow and be healthy!  But as a matter of practical common sense – the more chaos, need, poverty, depression, and despair in a household, the less those needs will likely be met.  Add in addiction, neglect, and/or abuse and you have children without the ability to have healthy attachment or boundaries – which affects us in every way moving forward (jobs, education, relationships, parenting, mental health).

Every child in foster care has a huge attachment hole – because regardless of anything else that is happening (and obviously something else is happening or they would not be in foster care), those children have been torn away from their primary care-giver; no, they are NOT happy to be out of that home. We are taught, and then I of course obsess and study, about negative signs of attachment disorders and what they might mean and how to cope with them.  But foster class then reminded us to also pay extra attention to a child that is showing positive signs – the child that IS happy to be in your home, that doesn’t cry when they are taken away and just kind of goes with it and adapts and seems fine – that child is  showing danger signs that should be addressed if they are going to be able to form true health attachments in the future.

Luckily, I have an amazing therapist and I already KNOW all about my attachment issues, or this would have been a rude awakening. I was one of the only kids who didn’t cry on the first day of kindergarten.  I started going to camp alone when I was little.. 6 or 7? I never cried for home.  Generally, I don’t miss people when they are gone. And I never suffer from culture shock: Yep, in this country you can’t drink water from the tap, or speak the language, or know where you are, or have electricity, or flushing toilets.  Hey, in this one you can.  Cool.

When I was a kid, my mom read me the book The Runaway Bunny. It’s a story about a little bunny that is mad at his mom and he plans to run away.  The entire story is about how whatever he does and wherever he goes, mama-bunny will come after and find him. I THINK it is supposed to be reassuring to small children that even if they are mad and try to get away their parents will not abandon them.  Someone with a secure attachment experience will have to tell me if I’m right.  Because to me, it always read as a leash and a limitation.  You will never be able to get away.

“Away” can have a lot of meanings.  Here, I just mean boundaries.My bio-mom sent me two cards in the mail yesterday.

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It is one year to the day when she wrote me chastising me about my decision to break off contact with her again; and four years to the day that I saw her for the first time after nine years of separation in my attempt to try to reform a health bond with healthy boundaries.

She writes me emails or cards periodically; every time it is stressful, sad, comforting, guilt-inducing, reinforcing of my decisions, interesting; in short, it is fine.  I imagine it is a much more mature, healthier, adult, version of what children in foster care feel during their parenting time with their biological parents – or more accurately, the time leading up to that time. And then I read the inside and it’s the adult version of The Runaway Bunny:

What a wonderful sentiment from a friend!

And what a wholly inappropriate statement from my estranged mother – a specific reminder that she will refuse to accept the boundaries other people place!

I am guessing that it is INTENDED to be reassuring that she is not mad and/or forgives me and/or won’t abandon me – but that is not the concern in our relationship.  Our problems are in the listening, hearing, and respecting boundaries areas.  It’s a huge and meaningful reminder of how much pain parents can cause without intending anything except showing love.  And an even better example for teaching my white friends about microaggressions and a general refutation of “intent” as a defense.  Intention is not irrelevant, but it is at best of secondary importance. Communication is at least 50% about what the listener perceives and understands, not about what you intend.

As we keep moving towards parenting, I think of the abominable examples our own parents set and I worry, incessantly, how can we ever be more than what we know and give these children of trauma a better emotional path than our own?  Isn’t the parenting dream? That our children have better lives than ours?  Not in material possessions…seriously, whatever.  But that we are able, somehow, through education and mindfulness, to stop the generational trauma.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my personality is “I am different” as a result of other people having told me “you are different” during the formative years of my life vs a different background of experience; I don’t walk around screaming “I AM NOT LIKE YOU”, but I have an inherent dismissive response to anything I think of as “mainstream” – I don’t care about or love fashion trends as trends, I don’t care about brands – in fact, I generally actively dislike them, I find displays of power/wealth in cars, homes, or possessions generally distasteful, I hate reality TV with a burning passion, I can’t deal with the suburbs, and I love the new, the queer, the rebellious, and the boundary-pushing, and I certainly self-define as something at least slightly “other” – in interests, in style, in goals.

I discussed this with a friend from high school once; if we could have afforded the right brand names, or were a little less obviously smart(ass), or went to church, or had a more normal family structure, and fit in to the popular groups when we were young, would we BE those people? Or would we have grown to love the different, the bright, the angry, and the dismissed, anyway? Have I always failed to fit in because I am actually different in some essential piece of my character or did I just miss class on the day they taught people to feel comfortable in beige khakis? Obviously, the nature/nurture debate can be played on many screens at many different parts of our lives.

I love reading historical fiction and historical romance (I know, I know) and these stories ALWAYS have a female protagonist that is “different”; she is a teacher, or an explorer, she wears pants, she is educated, she can fight, she is strong and sassy, and most importantly, she would almost always rather be an old maid than fit into society’s expectation of a wife. Tisha was one of my FAVORITE books growing up – I was SURE if I lived in the past I would have been a teacher in Alaska too – working for equality for women and native peoples and fighting off the societal expectations of the provincials.  Side note,  here’s my dog wearing my bandana from Chicken, Alaska:

Seriously, I LOVED the book Tisha enough that I WENT to Chicken, Alaska.  All four storefronts of it that remain.

One of the most frustrating parts of being so so so sad about not being physically able to have a baby is the fucking banality of it all.  I truly and honestly HATE people who are all “a baby completes me”; “having a baby is the ultimate in woman-hood”; “parenthood is the most and ultimate gift and purpose in this world” blah, blah, fucking blah.  Do you people not have any LIFE?? Heart and soul I believe that being a woman – being  a human generally – is everything and anything you choose and reproduction is absolutely, positively, not a defining feature of any kind of womanhood or personhood. Having a baby certainly does not giving meaning to a life that is without meaning. And I have no particular emotional attachment to the concept of my specific genetics moving forward in time. But also, I start crying every. single. time. I think about the people I love having the experience I can never have.

So, it’s not just failing at something I put all my energy towards, not just that I lack any control over the situation (lack of control = my nemesis), and not just that I am so sad I will miss out on the beginning of my future child’s life.  Nope, I also have to have a fucking personality crisis – does this obsession with a purely biological non-skill-or-intellect-based thing that is literally more luck than science for the majority of the population mean that I am NOT the forward-thinking bold and brave personality I always thought I would become?  I’m trying to think of a plot more trite than “infertile woman made miserable by failure to reproduce” and I’m pretty much failing.   Am I depressed because I cannot do the thing I want to do, or because I’m actually embarrassed in my own head that I am so upset that I cannot do the thing?!

I have been considering going to some sort of miscarriage/infertility support group because I cannot stop being sad – and I never, never, thought I would be that person.  But my close friends and partner have been carrying the burden of listening to this sadness for too long and it doesn’t seem to be GOING anywhere – despite my co-extensive excitement about building a family through non-traditional (slow. difficult. uncertain.) means.  I’m thinking I’ll just do my best to channel the fictional Sherlock Holmes from Elementary.  If he can fictionally live through and find value in support groups to retain his fictional sobriety from his fictional addiction despite his towering fictional intelligence and dismissal of the normal world, then fuck it, I guess I can do it live.