To make a long story short, the foster-to-adopt placement with the three children I've written about previously in this blog series did not work out the way we'd hoped it would.
The children came to our home for a weekend visit August 9 and were taken back to their previous foster home the morning of August 11. This was part of the plan as we wanted to get a sense of what having them around our house would be like prior to them moving in for what we assumed at that time would be a permanent arrangement. The visit went well, as we had a cookout that weekend and spent a majority of it trying to acclimate to one another while also working towards establishing rules, boundaries, expectations, and something of a routine. They came back to us on August 13 and got fully moved in over the course of the next few days. My wife took that time off from work to spend with them, to get them better acquainted with their new surroundings, and to handle a variety of errands.
If I've never told you how strong of a woman my wife is allow me to do so right now. During those three days, she took the children for eye exams and hair cuts. She did every bit of the leg work involved with getting them enrolled in school. She made Lord only knows how many phone calls in an attempt to get them seen by a local pediatrician as we wound up in something of an emergency situation seeing as how by the time they got to us they were each in need of refills on their ADHD medication. (This was one of the first bits of evidence we would uncover that their previous foster home was inconceivably inept at providing adequate care.) She wound up having to take them to a facility at which they'd been seen previously (in a town 90 minutes away from where we live, mind you) to make sure they wouldn't run out. All this on top of making sure we were fed a hot meal at supper time every day - yes, I include myself in that category because while I do cook she's always been the primary preparer of sustenance around our house, and a damn good one at that.
We began to face challenges with the children almost immediately in terms of their behavior. This wasn't unexpected obviously as they're children after all; as a parent, they're going to test you to see how far they can get with whatever it is they're up to in the moment. Our friends and family who are parents kept reminding us of this and I can't say they steered us wrong as these three were certainly excited and lively. In hindsight (I'm going to use that phrase repeatedly in this entry), I think those were labels my wife & I used as blinders early on to make it seem as though things were going to get better.
The first few days we had the children in our home were full of revelations. We didn't have a lot to offer them in the way of toys as we were expecting them to have had some items of that sort. We were surprised as we unpacked their belongings to find out they were sent to us with not much more than a few stuffed animals. Some friends of our family had been kind enough to give us a basketball goal and we had gotten a few outside toys as we thought they'd enjoy being able to play together. That idea went out the window when they realized this new house they were in was stocked with things like an Xbox, tablets, cable TV, and the Internet.
My wife & I had gone through the paces of trying to shore up our multimedia devices to do the best we could at making sure the kids wouldn't have access to questionable content. (I've had my share of fits with Time Warner but I will say that their parental controls are quite good.) We let them use our tablets as it seemed like they were pacified when they were each individually engaged in a singular activity. They would watch programs on TV or Netflix, and I believe they managed to download more games than I knew existed from the Android marketplace. We allowed them to use YouTube (which, in hindsight, wasn't a good idea) but this became an issue as we noticed they weren't watching what either of us would consider kid-appropriate content. (YouTube's content ratings are looser than a Zeta Tau Alpha pledge during rush.) They wanted to watch videos by Rhianna, Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, and other artists whose material isn't exactly PG.
This would turn out to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of our learning what kinds of material to which they'd been exposed in their previous foster home. We found out through casual conversation one evening at dinner that they'd seen Django Unchained. It came up as a result of our talking about the buildings that are near our home and how they're used by a cotton ginning operation; the topic of cotton brought up a question about slavery and that lead to them saying they'd seen a movie about a slave. I thought they might have seen something historically relevant like Roots or Glory - nope, Django Unchained. Quinton Tarantino. Blood, guts, violence, nudity, harsh language, and more. They also had some knowledge of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween films as they knew who Freddy Kruger and Michael Meyers are.
Keep in mind these kids are 10, 8, and 7 years old. And yet the people who were caring for them before they got to us couldn't figure out why they were afraid of the dark and had nightmares?
Seeing as how the weekend of August 16 presented the kids' last real opportunity at having a good time while still out of school, we decided it would be nice to take them to Chuck E. Cheese's for an afternoon of fun and games. For about $100, the three of them got 3 and a half hours of all the games they could play - Jill & I got a chance to sit around, eat horrible pizza (in hindsight, the salad bar would've been a much better option), and drink soda. I had never been to Chuck E. Cheese's before so the whole experience was new to me. It's about the same as the midway games at any given state or county fair in terms of its gimmick; huge prizes get dangled out in front of the kids as they walk in the door and they spend every ounce of energy they have trying to get the giant panda (that being a metaphor in this instance for a Nerf gun that the 10 year old had his sights on) only to be disappointed when they find out they have earned enough tickets to get a plastic slinky and some glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth. Toys that will last about as long as the drive home, in other words. But hey, they enjoyed themselves and got to interact with other children, and that made it worthwhile in our minds.
Bed time wasn't the most difficult thing with these three as it seemed like they enjoyed sleeping, particularly the 8 year old. We put them to bed around 8:30 PM the Sunday evening before their first day of school and story time followed. My wife would read Diary of a Wimpy Kid to the boys meanwhile I read a Junie B. Jones book to the girl.
The boys would usually stay up for 30 minutes to an hour after their story, just talking to one another about gosh knows what. The girl was a real talker as well - always asking questions and chiming in with her two cents, never with any sense of a filter or consideration for how what she was saying might affect others. Of course it's not unusual for a child (especially a little girl) to be chatty, so I don't want that comment to come off as me complaining. It's just that the kind of things she would say often caught me off guard. It dawned on me in the days to come that what we had been told about the boys being in a sibling rivalry was exacerbated by their sister as she would say things to them that would send them into a fit of rage. I don't know that she understood what she was doing but the fact of the matter was that she was most certainly a trigger to their minor behavioral issues becoming a much more profound problem. The anger they exhibited during those moments was startling to me, and there were many of them over the course of time that we had them in our home. This is why I began to feel as though I wasn't being a parent to them so much as I was a referee in a mixed martial arts fight, only in this particular arena the fighters sometimes hit the ref simply because they feel like it.
Monday morning rolled around and my wife & I were forced to come to grips with the fact that our schedule would consist of getting up at 6 AM for the foreseeable future. That said, the school day routine never became an issue for us because I feel as though we knew what we had to do to get everyone ready for the day. Make sure everyone is up by 6:45 AM, teeth brushed and dressed by 7:15, and ready to go out the door by 7:40 as my wife would be dropping them off on her way to work (it was a perfect fit as she kicks off her work day at 8 AM). The first day was slightly different in that we had them there earlier than normal seeing as how we wanted to walk them to their classrooms and hopefully meet their teachers (we hadn't had a chance to do that yet seeing as how open house wasn't scheduled until some time in September). Once we had them at school we were sure that the pacing of the day would lead to breakthroughs for the group. They'd make friends, get into the swing of things, adapt to this new culture and surroundings, and we'd be off and running as a family, onwards and upwards.
In hindsight, that was wishful thinking.
My Mom was a blessing to us as she was willing to pick up the children from school, bring them back home, and then begin doing whatever was needed with them in the afternoons (homework or what have you) so that our work schedules wouldn't get disrupted. I knew this was going to be a tough assignment for my Mom but I also knew she could handle it - she taught children their age for 30+ years, for crying out loud. If anyone we knew was up to the task, it was her!
It seemed as though frustration set in for the kids the very first day of school. The oldest boy in particular had a tough time because I don't think he was quite ready - academically, socially, etc. - for the experience or the fact that he'd have homework. The after-school period became a trial each day as none of them wanted to do their homework, rather they just wanted to play with the tablets or video games. My Mom did what she could to keep some sense of structure for them, to no avail.
Before I go further, I want to make sure that I don't make our home life or the way we were trying to parent these children come off as though we were running a military operation. We were not expecting them to be perfect children. We were very keen to the idea of "picking our battles" in that we knew we didn't need to call them out for everything. We were trying our best to instill in them things like respect and consideration as these were qualities they'd been introduced to at church and we wanted to further re-enforce them at home. Simple concepts, but clearly ones that they had never been asked to take on before now.
The challenge we faced with these three in terms of trying to correct their behavior was that there wasn't much we could do realistically. We tried to establish a points system whereby they could earn points for positive behavior. These points could then be cashed in for things like bonus electronics time (we set them all at a limit of 1 hour per day), a movie night, or even money. The points could also be taken away for bad behavior. I hate to say this but none of them had a chance to cash in their points because they couldn't maintain any long enough to have earned anything of "value" in our system. When the taking away of points didn't work, it became a matter of having to take away privileges like toys, electronics or TV time. All this did was to make them more defiant.
They repeatedly called my wife "mean Mama" and said that they wanted to go back to where they'd been previously. We tried to press on in spite of this because we still wanted this to work. In my mind, they were like wild horses; I felt like it might take them being "broken" before they would realize that there's a right way and a wrong way to conduct yourself (because clearly wherever it was they had been before never tried to put over such things to them). The difference being wild horses don't scream, yell, kick walls, slam doors, and tell you how much they hate you.
I feel like the moment when my wife began to have doubts about our relationship with these three working out came one evening during supper. My wife has a recipe for shepherd's pie that is from her mother and it's a favorite of ours because it's a hearty meal that's easy to put together. If you don't know what shepherd's pie is, it's a dish that consists of layers of mashed potatoes, seasoned ground beef, and cheese that's baked to a warm and bubbly consistency. We thought it was something the kids would enjoy seeing as how it is what it is - potatoes, meat, and cheese. My wife served us all up a helping and I began to dig in. The kids took one bite and they all began to make noises and faces as if they were going to vomit on the table. (This is an example of how none of them had a sense of gratitude about anything we tried to do for them.) You would have to know my wife to know why that action in particular was so troubling but I think that was when the dam began to crack, for lack of a better phrase.
So long as they were on an individual task the boys weren't that difficult to deal with. The moment you inserted them into a situation where they were in any form of competition was when their attitudes shifted. (This dynamic of how they were fine on their own but problematic when put together verified what we had been told in regard to reasons why their previous adoptive placements didn't work out as those families tried to adopt one or two of the group but not all three.) It didn't matter if it was us throwing around a football in the back yard or playing video games, if they could have a disagreement over what was going on they were going to wind up in an argument. And since I know you're probably wondering, the games we had for them were intended for children. No Call of Duty, Gears of War, or anything of the sort - just titles like the Lego games, a few old Super Mario selections, and Just Dance. They did have a WWE game but it quickly "went missing" after they repeatedly got into shouting matches, usually over the fact that one wouldn't let the other win, no less. The Lego games are fun and actually quite challenging, even for an old gamer like me. To them, they became frustrating. One would blame the other for their not being able to complete a task and it was all down hill from there. The shouting would ensue, then one would draw back as if he was going to hit the other in an apparent act of intimidation (the girl would argue with her brothers and she, too, would draw back her arm as if she was going to strike them).
The girl's behavior became progressively worse throughout the week. She would not listen to us, refused to take direction, and acted in a way that was so blatantly defiant that it boggled my mind. (A learned behavior, in her case; all kids act out but what she was doing had to have gotten in her mind from another source, likely from watching people she had been around previously.) When we would attempt to correct her she would turn it around on us as if she were in charge. Concepts like restriction or being grounded prompted an "I don't care" sort of response, as if to say I'm going to do whatever I want in spite of you. At one point when we were trying to play outside she became upset and tried to lock us out of the house. On another evening she walked out of the house saying that she was running away (she got about as far as the stop sign at the corner of our property before coming back). Again, this wasn't a response to any kind of difficult request from us, rather it seemed to be because she felt as though she wasn't getting her way 100% of the time. All the while we were trying to plan a birthday party for her as she turned 7 while she was in our care. We threatened to cancel the birthday party if her behavior didn't improve and in hindsight we probably should have gone ahead and canceled it because she was a true terror to deal with.
I mentioned how our hands were mostly tied when it came to discipline. It goes without saying that spanking wasn't an option, so we did what we could in trying to show them that if their behavior was unacceptable they would lose privileges. First off the list was access to things like tablets, TV, video games, etc. The boys seemed to get the idea as they would become apologetic and try to get back on our good sides, whereas the girl just plain went into a massive fit. She continued to be disrespectful so we began taking away her toys. The same attitude persisted and we were to a point where there was nothing left in her room but her bed. She wailed as if she were crying but she wasn't genuinely upset as my wife saw her smirk at her at one point, as if to say "I know if I do this long enough you're going to cave." We never did and she kept at it until she finally went to sleep. To their credit, her brothers tried to calm her down, telling her that all she had to do was "act right" and she'd get her things back.
We had her birthday party on Saturday, August 23. We invited a number of our friends and family over for the occasion, all with children roughly the same age as the three for whom we were caring. The goal was for each of them to see that they were surrounded by loving, kind folks who are concerned about their well being and who want to be involved in their lives. The events of the day wound up being the final straw in our decision to officially disassociate ourselves from the children.
The party went off well, for the most part. Jill's Mom was staying with us and she had organized a painting activity for the children to do. The youngest boy had slept most of the day and his demeanor reflected this as he was grumpy, especially when the other boys at the party went outside and began playing with some of the balls and sports equipment. I tried to encourage him to share and be friendly, he acted like they'd disrespected his territory. The oldest boy was the opposite, seemingly overjoyed at the fact he suddenly had a whole bunch of new playmates. He could be the most docile, innocent kid - he really was the most agreeable of the three as he would often try to take the role of parent in trying to get the other two to settle down when they would fight. The girl was a whirlwind of activity and emotions, excited one minute, disappointed another, outgoing then suddenly shy. Through it all the underlying attitude she exhibited was one of ungratefulness. Nothing seemed to be good enough for her, which was in stark contrast to the theme of the event as she was dressed in a Cinderella costume.
A couple who are close friends with my wife's family had graciously given us money to use to purchase a new bicycle for each of the children. They enjoyed riding their bikes and we, of course, tried to keep an eye on them at all times while they were riding them. They went out for a ride that evening after the party was over and all our guests were gone. My mother-in-law was outside watching them play and my wife had gone into Orangeburg to pick up a pizza for supper as we were going to eat then watch Frozen together. I didn't see the incident but something happened that lead to an argument between the girl and the youngest boy. My mother-in-law tried to get them to settle down and come inside; before she could, they began tossing around each others bikes. This lead the youngest boy to say to his sister "I wish you were 16 so you could die in a car accident."
At that moment, this family we had tried so hard to keep together fell apart. We called one of the adoption workers we'd been assigned and made arrangements for them to be picked up the next morning. I had it in mind before then that there were two reasons why I would pull the plug on this effort: 1) If they hurt our dog Roddy (he was "on vacation" during this as he was in recovery from being neutered), and 2) if they did damage to property. I didn't think that the third option would wind up being us just plain having had enough. My wife and I decided we couldn't do this any longer as we had had 10 days of almost non-stop fighting and unruly behavior with no sign of things changing.
I know some people will say we didn't do enough or that we didn't give it enough time. The fact of the matter is that until you've lived with children like this you have no idea how difficult our lives became. I was to a point where I did not want to come home from work because I knew that they were there waiting for me. My nerves were shot because I felt powerless to try and remedy the situation. (Truth be told, I left most of the attitude adjusting to my wife, opting instead to keep up with the logistics of keeping the house in order. Why? Because I'm good at that sort of thing and I'm also the type who would just as soon drop a proverbial nuclear warhead on a situation and walk away as opposed to trying to handle the matter constructively.) Our bedroom became the only sanctuary we had as we'd retreat to it each night in the hope that things would get better the next day. I'm sad to say that they never did. We could not allow them to ruin our home, our relationships, and certainly not our marriage.
They were picked up the morning after the birthday party. Not wanting to out and out make it known they wouldn't be coming back, we told them that we had some things we needed to work on before going forward and that they'd be going away for a few days.
I know that I've levied some harsh criticism at these children in this blog entry but the truth of the matter is that I do not blame them for being who they are. These children have been in the foster system for better than 4 years now. They are a product of that system's failure to cultivate a network of supportive, nurturing homes throughout the state of South Carolina. They are the unfortunate victims of predatory adults who see foster children as a means of earning a paycheck instead of an opportunity to help raise a well-adjusted, productive member of society.
To all the people who donated time, effort, clothing, prayers, or whatever else to the children, you have my most sincere gratitude and thanks. You are each examples of the fact that agape love exists and that goodness will always outshine the darkness of the world. Anything that was given to the children while they were with us will be staying with them. Hopefully they will someday be able to appreciate those gifts and the people who cared enough to give.
So where are we now? We're hurt, deeply, and we all need time to heal from this. But we will use this as a lesson learned and try again someday because our goal is still the same - to build a family of our own.
