What to do?

Our timeline had been to be making an offer on a house by... right about now.

But, it's looking more and more like it's going to take longer (our biggest hint: we aren't making an offer right now. That's how we know it's going to be sometime in the future.) For one thing, our credit report has some old stuff on it that should have come off because it was paid in full or aged off a long time ago, but even some of the things that were paid in full, the companies/agencies who reported them never reported that they'd been paid. Instead, they changed their names slightly every month to keep the now inaccurate entries constantly current. A credit card that I paid off and closed in 1993 is still on my report. And, because we're going for an FHA loan and credit is tight right now, it all has to come off - all of it - before we can get approved. We're working as fast as we can on getting this done.

Which is just as well, because we've discovered that getting out of our lease is going to be harder than we'd thought. We sent in our letter of intent not to renew our year-to-year lease three months in advance of the anniversary date, as required. Our landlord sent us back a letter informing us that because only B signed the letter, it didn't meet the conditions for not renewing and our lease is now automatically extended to July 31, 2010. If we want to get out of it before then, we have to pay the landlord a $1k non-refundable extra-special-permission bonus and then find someone else to rent the apartment at our own expense.

I've started tracking down other people who are in the same boat with this Fan Apartments as we are - there are at least a dozen I've found already - and one of them told me that Fan Apartments has turned down three applicants for his place already, and he's still on the hook for rent and responsible for finding a new tenant, even though he's already done a walk-through and turned in the keys.

So, long story short, we figure at this point our best bet is to take a breather, be happy that the time pressure is off, work more on getting all the crud off our credit reports and becoming perfect little mortgage-seekers, and then, when we're all ready to go, call the Fire Marshall. Fan Apartments is a repeat offender for chaining and padlocking shut the fire escape on this building. Any port in a storm, right?

Ye gods, I really do loathe this kind of purposeless difficulty. And I still have to call the agency to let them know that our timeline has changed.

Grumpykins

I've been in pain every time I walk (and quite often when I'm not walking) for weeks now, thanks to this wart on my heel that went ballistic and had to be removed, which meant cutting out a big chunk o' heel. It's the limping that's getting to me, throwing everything else out of whack, straining tendons and joints. I'm miserable and stressed to the breaking point, crying a lot over nothing, insomnia, etc. So, if I'm sounding extra-bitchy... that's why.

The good news is: it's healing. This is not the way things are always going to be, this is temporary, and recovery is on its way. We're focusing on that. The other good news is that the husband that drives me up the wall is also the same husband who has been taking care of me, bringing me things, changing the dvd, getting me food, and just being within earshot whenever I take a shower, just in case I slip and fall... everyone should be so lucky as to have a B like my B.

Mile 1

Yondalla has a post up that is wonderful (as usual):

As I read the blogs of foster parents in different places it occurs to me that though our journeys take different paths, we mostly seem to hit some of the same points. I think they tend to go something like this:

1. Pre-placement: "I know it will be hard but we are ready."
During this stage we are often frustrated at people who don't know a thing about foster care telling us that we are naive, that we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into. Right, like they do? We've been reading and thinking about this very carefully for quite a while. We've read the blogs, the books, gone to the training. We know it is going to be hard. We even know that we probably can't imagine exactly how hard it is going to be, but we are ready to get to work. We will face the challenges as they come.

And then there are another seven steps, but I'm nowhere near them yet (and nothing matters but meeeee). And I gotta say, I'm there, she's absolutely right, but she left some things out. Let's add:

1. Really scared that the nay-sayers may be right. Not about teens being the wrong way to go (I'm weird in this way, I know, but teens are now and always have been easier for me to pseudo-parent than younger kids are) but about the sibling groups, yeah, possibly. Most of all, I'm scared that this is going to be harder than I can actually cope with.
2. Because honestly, I still have trouble coping with the behaviors my husband still has left over from his fucked up childhood and the havoc they continue to wreak in his, and through the magic of physical proximity and a shared bank account, my life.
3. FOR INSTANCE, B, although in many ways a delightful person, actually finds it stressful to be in a place that's clean and tidy. He is only comfortable in what most mother-in-laws would refer to as a "sty" (fortunately, my mother-in-law is pretty understanding about this - she is, after all, the only other woman on earth who has had to try to maintain a house in which B was living).
4. And that's just the start. B is getting a lot better, and he's doing it pretty fast, but events lately have made it very clear that our relationship dynamic is that he throws his emotional weight around willy nilly all the time and I keep an even keel. When I start having a tough time - like I was doing last summer, when I was hating my job and not finding another one very quickly, or this past week when several weeks of constant pain and immobility found their way to my last nerve - things become unbalanced very quickly. The good news is that now, if I explain this to B properly, he can get over himself (mostly) enough to not take my bad moods personally. Last summer, not so much. So progress!
5. All the same, B's self-absorbtion, his inability to learn from his mistakes, his inability to cope with rectifying his mistakes, and his innate attraction to Bad Ideas (ooh! shiny!) are a source of stress in good times, and are absolutely intolerable when other stresses are around.
6. You may think I'm kidding, but B announced this weekend that one of the things he's looking very much forward to taking back up again when/if we get our house in the country is knife and axe throwing. Seriously. I asked if he really thought that was a good idea, seeing as how we're planning on also having troubled kids join our family. B's response: "I honestly don't see what's wrong with it." Dude, if you don't see what's wrong with combining troubled kids in a new and strange environment with throwing sharp objects around as a hobby, I don't think it can be explained to you by anything other than experience. And unfortunately, that's the sort of experience that, when you get it, you get to think about where things went wrong from the comfort of at least an emergency room, and at worst, jail (actually, at worst, the afterlife). Sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm the one with the risk-aversion that's out of whack, but then I remember that, while he doesn't see any danger in bringing a teenager with emotional problems into the home of a knife-juggler who doesn't pick up after himself, B does perceive very high levels of risk in things like telling me that the car needs repairs, or in trying a new restaurant.
   
7. Seriously, what am I doing and why am I even considering this? I'm already shepherding an emotionally crippled 40-year old with the wisdom of goat cheese through life. Sure, not having any kids makes me look around at life every once in a while and ask "what's the point, really?" but just because I want them, or even need them to fulfill some biologically-hard-wired life list, that doesn't mean that I'm actually capable of doing right by them. And the big important question in this isn't "is this something I want?" it's "can I offer them something better than they've got now?" I wish I could be sure that the answer to that was "yes."
   
8. But the thing that scares me most about is that nobody can tell me anything about what these kids do that really scares me.
   
   They may smear shit on the walls (literally). Well la-de-fucking-da, so what? It cleans off (and really, just thank your lucky stars it isn't urine, because that can soak into the drywall and molding and then you have to replace the whole thing to get the stink out. Please don't ask me how I know.)
   
   The kids will tell you that they hate you - look, bio kids will scream that they hate you, sometimes in highly entertaining ways, why should an adopted parent expect anything else? Screaming "I hate you!" is kidspeak for "Curse you, Parent-o, my arch-nemisis! Once again, you have thwarted my idiotic and self-destructive plans! I shall now retire to my room/lair to sulk and plan my next childish scheme, which will surely succee-- hey, toys!" I'm not getting kids here so that I can at last have validation that I'm loved/lovable, etc...
   
   And the kids will try to ruin everything they figure out is important to you, well boo-hoo. Ladies and gentlemen, have you met my husband? You know, the one I call "the Destructor," the one who asked me on my birthday about the reservations I'd made several weeks in advance for myself for my birthday because nobody else is going to do it, if I was really looking forward to going out on my birthday, because he didn't want to just say that he wanted to stay home (he wouldn't do something like that, that would be awful!) but if this wasn't something that was really, really important to me, he'd just as soon stay home. But if I really wanted to do it, he'd be willing to go along and make the best of it. Any other time, he'd just refuse, but because it was my birthday, and he had verified by asking if I would be ok with cancelling at the last minute that it was something that was pretty important to me, he wanted me to know that he was willing to suck it up and endure a romantic dinner for two. Because he's like that, you know, he's giving.
   
   
9. Actually, he is a generous, sentimental, funny, scary smart guy and we ended up having a very nice time, it just took him about 15 minutes after we sat down in the restaurant to calm down and let himself have a good time because it was a new place for him and it was fondue and he wasn't sure he'd like it but he let himself take this major chance (with a whole evening and meal at stake!) and it worked out! He's a great guy. He's just a great guy who comes as part of a package deal with a big heaping helping of stupid destructive crazy. As will these kids.
10. Who are going to be coming to me right at the same moment that my career is really starting to take off (I didn't list that first, but it's worth mentioning, especially since everybody involved will be depending on my career for, you know, money to live).
    

Yondalla again:

We knew that kids sometimes say hateful things to the adults who try to help them. We even understood why. We probably judged other foster parents for responding in insensitive ways. Okay, so he threw his food at you and said he hates you, but he is four and traumatized.

Then it happens to us and it hurts. Having someone look you in the face and tell you that they hate you and hope you die, hurts. Imagine if your spouse/partner said that to you, if you mother said it, if your best friend said it. Imagine the feelings you have then. You are going to have those feelings.

You know what scares me? It's that that thought "what if your spouse or mother said that?" - geez, my spouse and mother both are adults who have never let go of childhood traumas. They lash out with worse stuff than that all the time and I'm long past the time when I thought it had anything to do with me. Honestly, "I hate you!" is strictly little league, and Mom and B are more bus league (maybe AA). What scares me is that I want to take on another relationship just like that, and I can't figure out why. Except, maybe this kid, maybe I can help him face his demons while he's still young and still has a chance to make something out of his life.

What am I getting myself into?

Numbers

Days until Sims 3 is released: 40
Days until every single thing in the history of time is cleared off of my credit report so that I can get a mortgage: 15 to 45
Days until I have to give my landlord notice or else renew my lease for another year: 7
Total dollar amount of all items keeping me from making an offer today: $2,087.43
Days left to prepare a level 1 D&D adventure: 10-20
NPCs created for adventure so far: 116
Days left to prepare for seminar on programming for EAV table structures: 2
Slides ready for seminar: 1. Well, almost 1.
Max size of sibling group we'll consider adopting: 3
Min age of oldest child in group: 12
Approximate times I've been told that teens are hard and sibling groups might "gang up on me": 15,000,012

If anybody who has adopted teens or sib groups happens to read this post, did you experience the same reaction coming from family and friends? My friends and co-workers almost universally report that teens drive them crazy. My otherwise supportive family practically turns into concern trolls when I mention the possibility of a sib group. I see it as a kid with an intact relationship and support network; they get very wide eyed, exhale audibly and say "three is a lot of kids."

And for the record, I like teens. They're just like adults but thinner, with less money and more drama. Being around teens is like being a fan of a low-budget soap opera.

UPDATE: so, I opened up the EAV presentation file to work on it, but instead of doing that, um, I did this.

Adoption Meeting

The blog is going slowly, I know. I'm trying to stick to adoption issues and, occasionally, work stuff for filler. Otherwise, I'd be putting up lots of posts about politics, links to things like this video of a robot which solves Rubik's Cubes in which the newscaster asserts that a cube has five sides and that the robot's best solve time (26 seconds) is "almost double" the fastest human time (10 seconds). I weep for humanity.

Or, I would be linking other videos like this one, which I've watched a dozen times today and it makes me cry and smile and I love it. I'm still weeping for humanity, but in a completely different way.

We had a meeting at the adoption agency yesterday. We went back over our opening checklist. The difficult part is that the goal is to be "open" with the agents, but it felt like everything we said just opened us up to misunderstanding. It went like this:

Agent: You've signed the agreement not to use corporal punishment, and you've been to the classes that have talked about discipline methods. Could you talk about how you were disciplined growing up and what your philosophy is with regards to discipline?

Me: I remember when my father announced that he'd decided that spanking was just teaching children that it's acceptable to hit when you're angry, and he wasn't going to do it anymore, and my first thought then was: "why did he wait until now, when I'm eight and too old to spank anyway, to figure that out?" I can see the rationale for a corrective light swat on a pre-reasoning bottom, but I think that, even if there weren't all the other reasons for not using corporal punishment on a fost/adopt, spanking a child over the age of reason is correction through humiliation, and that's a bad idea under any circumstances.

When we talk about discipline, the thing that I keep in mind is that it isn't possible to really "control" a child. A teenager, especially, is going to hit a moment when it occurs to him that there's not really a lot their parents can do to them, and what they can do might be a small price to pay for whatever it is the teen wants to do (I remember clearly when I had that delicious revelation). Children are autonomous beings, and it's up to parents to guide them by building a relationship in which parents' guidance and opinions are valued (or at least complied with because it's such a hassle otherwise...) And that works and it lasts - I still can't stand the idea of disappointing my dad. The important thing is to avoid overreaching the bounds of parental authority, because the inevitable result of that is that the parent either becomes a tyrant or a figure of ridicule or both.

And we have theories, not children, and we'll probably laugh our asses off a year from now at these theories, but for right now, that's where we're coming from. Use a light touch, build the relationship, horse whisperer stuff.

Agent: OK, but you understand that these kids might be 15 years old but emotionally aged 4, so they can't really make good decisions for themselves?

And everything was like that. Except for the part when we told them that what we really wanted was a kid with ropy muscles, good for "working the farm." They asked about what experience we had with kids and one of the things we told them about was the open houses we did in 2003-2006. I was going back to school at VCU and we made dinner for whoever showed up one night a week. Told a few kids at school about it the first time, and they came, and then they told two people, and they told two people, and it went on like that. There was somebody every week who we'd never met before, and we still keep in touch with some of the regulars. Met their parents when the 'rents were in town. Good kids, for the most part. We enjoyed having them around.

Still no firm news on the house situation. The house we'd like to buy has been re-listed at the same excessive price. We're getting close to the point where we're ready to make an offer, but we're not quite there yet.

Code Camp

If you're going to be in Richmond, VA on April 25th, and you want to hear a highly technical (which is the nice way of saying mind meltingly boring) talk about designing Entity-Attribute-Value table structures and programming techniques to compensate for their performance shortcomings, I will be conducting exactly such a seminar at Richmond's Code Camp (too lazy to link) two weeks from this Saturday. Should be fun, and by fun, I mean woohoo! I can check off one of this year's work "stretch goals!"

Context

This is a fost/adopt blog. Really. In spite of the fact that the fost/adopt process is still in its nascence, and also in spite of the fact that I rarely blog. I thought I'd take a moment to give you an update on the whole shebang.

We have turned in a great big pile of paperwork, but still have another great big pile, including our autobiographies, to go. We have a meeting with the agents on April 15, by which time we hope we can have the rest done. We're also hoping by then to have some more definite information about the house we want to buy. We aren't worried about anybody else grabbing it before we can get there - it's way out in the sticks, almost an hour from the edge of Richmond, the asking price is ludicrous (10% over assessment, no we're not going to pay anything remotely like that) and nobody but us has even come out to look at it since last May. It's new construction on 9.5 acres, still owned by the developers, and none of the other four much larger lots in the tract are so much as cleared.

We're very excited about the house and we expect that sometime within the next six weeks we'll be ready to make an offer on it. We'd love to move sooner, but... see the problem is that we aren't people who like to live on credit - I haven't had a credit card since the first $500 limit teaser card I got my first week at college, and I cut that up before I graduated. In the nearly fifteen years B and I have been together, we have had... wait for it... zero credit cards and exactly one car loan and one student loan. That's it. Until the little Versa I'm driving now, we've bought used cars for cash. Except for the student loan and me putting my foot down when the '81 Toyota MR2 gave up the ghost on I-195 (in all fairness, we paid $2000 for that car and put 100,000 miles on it at over 30 mpg highway - it was a deal), if we don't have the money on hand, we don't spend it. Which means that our credit sucks because there's not much positive to report on it.

So... six months ago when we decided that this is the year to buy a house, we not only went to work on that whole down payment thing, we also went to work on putting some positives in our credit history so that we could get a better rate on a mortgage. Since our lease isn't up until the end of July, it made sense to take our time. Sometime in April, early May at the latest, we should hit our goal number (we're 10 points away right now) and then we get the pre-approval, make an offer, seal the deal (refinance the car while we're at it) and get our move on. That's the plan. And I'm happy to report, it's on track.

I'll let you know as soon as there's anything else to tell.

Security and Personhood

Well this is just appalling.

SAFFORD, Ariz. — Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.

There's a lot of hyperbole from both mother and daughter in the article - the mom's lawyer calls this "the worst nightmare for any parent," Ms. Redding describes the incident as "ruin[ing] her life" but all the same, this is a clear case of a lack of respect for a kid's boundaries. And I find it worrisome.

First of all, I find it worrisome because these kids won't always be kids. They'll be adults in a very short time, more to the point, they'll be voters, and the people who grew up in this drug war zero-tolerance atmosphere in schools will someday outnumber those of us who grew up in the good old days when the Fourth Amendment applied to everybody.

Once we're out of school, most of us have limited contact with the same degree of intrusive authority that exists in the public school system, and for many people who do not have their dignity systematically threatened it is possible to believe that dignity is an earned state, not a contracted right. This is to say, unless we ourselves have had the misfortune to be the subjects of unjust intrusion into our personal effects, we tend to believe that such intrusions are generally justified and that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear from the State.

How much is this compounded when a person has learned to expect throughout their childhood not that an expectation of some privacy, a degree of respect by society for a boundary of the personal, is negotiable in certain specific circumstances where society has compelling reasons, but it does not exist at all. Because certainly, if society can argue that the lack of a record of prior wrongdoing by a 13 year old girl is only proof that the girl hasn't been caught doing anything wrong, then we have entered the condition of the Paranoid State. If that same society allows a 13 year old girl to be strip searched without her parent's permission or even knowledge, in the pursuit of a dose of Advil, then we must conclude either that children's persons are violable by the state, or else that the notion of a "compelling social reason" has been redefined out of meaning. Is it any surprise, when our children grow up in an environment in which they have no rights the State is bound to respect, that they themselves have no respect for the rights earlier generations considered inalienable?

I mention this here because when we talk about kids who have experienced trauma, we talk a lot about boundaries. Children whose boundaries have been violated - either emotional or physical - cease to understand where lines are properly drawn. And so they may flash their private parts because they no longer understand that there is any such thing as a "private" part of themselves. Much of the work of a fost/adopt parent is to help the child re-learn where her appropriate boundaries are. And this is a challenge - how, for instance, do you deal with a child who has experienced sexual abuse and who now refuses to submit to medical examinations? He needs to receive proper health care, but he also needs to feel secure in his own body, and these needs are, for the moment, in conflict with each other.

Medical attention is a case where the only way to administer it is to threaten a child's boundaries; schooling is not another such case. If we live in a country in which the we allow schools to neither recognize nor respect children's boundaries, perhaps our traumatized children are in the right after all. The world works the way they think it does, and we are hopelessly naive to think that a child can survive in it without taking off her clothes whenever and for whatever reason an adult tells her to.

Sophomoricon

We have completed the eight hours of instruction required to become adoptive parents, which is eight hours more instruction than is required to become biological parents and approximately seven hundred ninety-two hours (give or take) less than is required to begin to have a clue about what we're getting ourselves into. I've tried to fill the gaps by reading everything I can find, both in print and in self-publication, i.e. blogs. And for the record, here's what I've learned:

• Child raising is like CPR, in that new information is always forthcoming and periodically the new information is revolutionary. There's a cycle of throwing out theories as new theories emerge. That doesn't mean that all theories are bunk and you can just ignore them, but do be ready to accept new ideas. Just because last year they taught you mouth to mouth and this year they say no mouth to mouth and hum the BeeGees while you do compressions doesn't mean that this year, if you see someone in cardiac arrest that you shouldn't do anything because next year they'll find another song that's even better.
  
• The behavior is what will present itself, but knocking out a behavior without getting at the underlying cause will only cause a new behavior to spring up in its place. If the underlying cause is unknown, fear is a safe first guess. In other words, Fear is the Kudzu of parenting traumatized children.
  
• Getting involved with fost/adopt is checking into the biggest morass of second guessing I've ever come into contact with. There is no end to criticism of the system and everyone who is a part of it, which in every case should either have let kids be with parents who were good or removed them much earlier from the bad ones, but in no cases ever acted exactly as soon as anybody ought to have noticed that something was wrong and not a day before. Somebody always ought to have known what Anybody else thought would have been best for Everybody, if only they all hadn't been so selfish/lazy/stupid/only in it for the money. The motives of all voluntary parents of suffering children are automatically either laudable, suspect, or both and they should all be considered guilty of not doing enough for their children until they prove themselves innocent by collapsing from nervous exhaustion.
  
• Sometimes kids wet the bed as a response to a specific, temporary anxiety. And sometimes they do it because their abusers didn't want to rape a kid who smelled bad. The fact that they continue to wet themselves when they're safe with you doesn't mean that they don't feel safe with you, necessarily. It's because that's the way the world works for them. Even if you're safe, that doesn't mean the world is. This cross applies to basically everything.
• There is a different right answer for every child, and the only people who don't know what that right answer is are the people providing day to day care for him. It is strange that this should be so, but as the world in general tends to be in agreement on this point in each individual case (although the pattern is generally denied) anyone taking the part of a parent in any particular accusation is taking what is popularly considered to be an indefensible position.
  
• When a child is neglected, a caustic chemical is released in her brain that has a calming effect on that child. If the neglect happens too frequently and the chemical is released too often, the brain resets its "rage thermostat" so that the chemical will now only be released under more extreme circumstances, leaving the kids with the most to cope with a harder time coping with everything. If one assumes the existence of an Omnipotent Diety, this single fact must be proof of Its satirical nature.

The agency has informed us that a case worker will contact us on Wednesday to begin our home study process. We still have a house to buy before the study can be completed.

My heartfelt good wishes for Torina. More than anything else, these poor waiting children need people like Torina's (and Yondalla's and the Grateful House and RADical Adventures) prominent presence in our society, because she provides visibility for their situation and encouragement and inspiration for people who are considering taking on the challenge of reforming their family to include a parentless special needs child. It is a shame that any dyspeptic troll can drive one of these bloggers underground by threatening to make false and baseless accusations of abuse against them. Taking her blog private was the only prudent thing Torina could do, but future adoptive parents will be poorer for not having her example to learn from, both in her successes and in her setbacks.

About that "i" in "Gullible"

Doop de doop de doo, what's up on Facebook today? (Answer: links to more information than I wanted to know about the sex life of a guy I knew in college, that's up.)

But what is this? There, across the top - it appears that 2 of my facebook friends have challenged me to an IQ test! And 1 of my friends - somebody in Glen Allen - thinks I'm dumb! Which is weird because I didn't know any of my friends lived in Glen Allen, although it would be cool if they did because that's where I work and it would be so close by and we should totally get a drink sometime or something. Just as soon as I take this IQ test and show them who's dumb!

Clicky clicky and this is a 10 question IQ test. WOW the questions are so easy! And there's my cell phone number and yes I accept the terms and conditions and...

It dawns on me that my IQ definitely has been tested here.

On the phone canceling my new subscription now...