Archives for posts with tag: marriage

What heartbreak looks like in Mid-Ohio

07/18/2018 //
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J and I knew soon after we were engaged that we wanted to be foster parents. It was an idea I’d had since my mid-20s, but  I encountered enough variations of, “are you crazy, why would you want to do THAT?” in my conversations with family, friends and the occasional stranger about my maybe-some-day-motherhood that, within a few years, I stopped talking about this facet of my life plan.

I introduced J to the idea when we attended a conference on adoption and fostering in Washington D.C., the fall before we were married. He was hesitant, until he sat in on a session with a serial foster mother (meaning, foster mother over the years to multiple children, with some of those ending up in adoptions) who clarified how the process worked: it was, she stressed, about fostering the entire family. He could get on board with that. So could I.

It was a six-month process between attending the initial information session and gaining approval, and as of this writing, the time it must have taken to go through the the 72 hours of training, readying the house to pass health and fire inspections, multiple sit-down interviews and a whole host of gathering and submitting forms and questionnaires has receded into a distant memory. Somewhere in there we talked about what our foster parents name would be. Ms. and Mr., the standard fare for older kids, seemed too distant, too informal – though if that’s what they wanted, fine enough. But what if we ended up with younger kids who didn’t yet want to give up the informality that childhood could give you with adults who were virtually strangers, but took care of your needs nonetheless? We settled on Lama for me — short, essentially, for Laura Mom — and Joppa for Jay, a derivative of J and Papa.

It took almost a year after we were approved for us to actually BECOME foster parents, mostly because we were busy gallivanting across the world in our last minutes of full freedom.

We’d signed up for older kids. On purpose. We knew the department often had a harder time placing older kids. And, truth be told, we kind of liked older kids better anyhow. Or at least we liked the idea of them better.

We got a call one September afternoon in 2016 about two siblings, ages 4 and 6, a so-called “emergency placement” — department speak for kids that have just come into “care” that day and needed a place immediately. We were led to believe, in our initial sit-down talk that night with the social worker, that it would probably be temporary: most likely the kids would end up with family at some not-too-far-distant moment in time.

A year and a half later, they were still with us.

We were told we were good foster parents, by the department and by the kids’ family. It was sometimes hard to believe, since in the midst of a temper tantrum (yours OR theirs), you do not always FEEL like a good foster parent.

Joppa with kidsWhile the kids never told us we were good foster parents- though they told us often that they loved us – I realized that perhaps we had done exactly as instructed in that original conference in D.C. after one bedtime conversation with the now-7-year-old. She was telling me a story about some earlier memory of another family member. “You remember,” she stressed, “So-and-so. She watched us sometimes.”

“No, honey, I don’t remember: Lama and Joppa weren’t around then.”

She full-on stopped and tilted her head to the side, surprised by this information. “You weren’t?”

“Nope,” I answered, shaking my head from side to side while I placed my hand on her leg underneath the comforter.

“Hmmmm,” she said. “It just feels like you and Joppa have ALWAYS been our family.”

A year-a-half after they arrived on our doorstep suddenly, they almost as suddenly left our house.

I originally wrote the below in a very long but very heartfelt post on Facebook.

Its truth still stands, still sums up the wonder, beauty and heartbreak of what it means to foster a family. I wrote it in some nondescript hotel room in Ohio. Today as I sit in my living room, it’s just as true. Heartbreak and healing looks the same no matter where you confront it.

*

We said goodbye to our foster kiddos yesterday (Friday, March 16), just 10 days shy of a year and a half. Long enough to start weaving ourselves into a family. Long enough to understand that blood will always knit you strongly, whether you can see and talk to your family or not. Long enough to learn about a new kind of love, the kind that smarts when it’s time to say goodbye. Short enough to know it was bound to come sometime.

It was hard to be too sad: they are in a good place, and so much good has come out of this transition. We had three weeks to prepare, to say goodbye. We had time to have all good days and good times together. I don’t know, in this line of love, if you can ask for much more.

There’s so much I made sure to say, and so much I left unsaid. On purpose. To say it all would be to say, to acknowledge, that this was goodbye. And none of us wanted to do that.

On the way to drop them off at their new home, I started crying, the kind that leaks out slow but steady. “What’s wrong Lama? Why are you crying?”

“Oh, I’m just sad. We’re going to miss you, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with myself without you guys around. Who is going to wake me up with a little rap on the door in the morning a few minutes earlier than the 7:30 am it’s supposed to be? Without (the 9-year-old) to be tired and grumpy and not-a-morning person with me? Without you guys around to leave tiny little pieces of paper all over the floor that somehow you can’t see to pick up even though it’s all over?” I said this last part with a smile: we’d had this conversation before when I’d exclaimed in my fake-mad voice that I didn’t understand this phenomena and especially not when those same eyes could pick out a pack of gum buried under three layers of purse contents.

They both leaned forward in their seats in the back and let me have my tears, let us have our moment, their hands stretched forward to touch the front seats, close enough so I could squeeze their hands, another way to let them know I’d be OK, but I was still gonna cry about it.

We dropped them off. I gave them kisses on their forehead and cheeks, put my hands on their shoulders, told them I loved them so, so, so much, forever and forever. “See you later,” I said. They hugged Joppa, hard.

We walked out, like it was easy. “I love you,” I said, the same way I had said it every night as I walked out of their room at tuck-in time.

Maybe in some ways it was easy. When I felt lonely today I called their Mom. “How are you doing?” she asked ME. “OK,” I answered. “A little grey around the edges. Right now it feels like maybe they’re just away for a few nights,” I answered, as honest as I come. “I know I’ll have to FEEL it entirely, but I guess I’m still trying to avoid it.”

I told her I had just a glimmer, a 5 percent, maybe only 1 percent glimmer, of what that pain must have been like for her, when they left her.

It doesn’t matter WHY they leave, it only matters that they aren’t there anymore.

Later, I talked to their Nana, the same way we did when the kids were with us, covering present-day and family history in one fell swoop, me pulling out glimmers of where the kids might have gotten this trait or that. I always loved that part. I still did this evening.

Last night I was looking back at pictures. They’ve grown so much, and I’d lost sight of that, the way you do when kids and life are happening every day. They were 4 and 7 when they first showed up, the tops of their heads peering in the screen door as I waved a hearty hello to them and gave a big smile after what I knew would have been a big, scary day. They are 6 and 9 now. I’d already forgotten how much they’d grown. How much her face had changed, picked up glimmers of the teen you can see she will be. Forgot how he’d gone from toddler to joking, farting kindergartner. They grew a lot: but so did I. With them, I found the patience I always worried I didn’t have. I could still use some more, but at least I got a little more.

And then this afternoon I jumped in the car and streaked away, up north to start reporting on a story I’ve already put off for two weeks. I started to listen to an audio book, but my mind started drifting after an hour and I realized I needed to breathe. I listened to the music we played on our road trips, the ones we sang together. I listened to songs that pulled out my longing, songs that pulled out my heartache. And I listened to songs of hope, catching glimmers of the future I’d wish for if you could actually plan life out that way. And I cried, just enough to remind me of what I’m driving away from right now.

The tears were as much about the inevitable goodbyes that come with living as they were about the kids. They were about joy, however fleeting. And they were about the duality of luck, how it makes you a winner even when it means a loss has to be involved, somehow.

Somewhere between the Ohio border and Cleveland, Dave Matthews sang about love:
“Father up above
Why in all this anger do you fill me up with love, love, love?
Love, love, love
Love, love was all around.”

And I thought, “Yes. This. This is why.”

I mean, think about it: it takes an awful lot of grace to let somebody else parent your child in what is otherwise a process that fosters anything but.

It takes an awful lot of trust to open up to a new family.

And that’s exactly what they did: the kids AND their parents and grandparents.

So right now, tonight, sitting in a hotel room in Toledo, Ohio; in this moment; I feel goddamn lucky.

Because I was lucky enough to figure out how to be happy and frustrated and angry at the kids, and still love them fiercely no matter what. And for a woman who never birthed her own kids and wasn’t sure it was entirely possible — even as I professed to others it WAS — right now that seems like everything.

Through this process, we have gained new family, people I can honestly say I love the way you do when someone is blood.

I feel lucky because Joppa and I signed up for this fostering thing because we LIKED- we WANTED- to do what they pitch in recruiting foster homes: fostering the entire family. And we got that this past year and a half. And even though the kids aren’t living with us, we still ARE. And we have seen enough, heard enough, talked to others enough and had our own experiences enough to know that it’s actually NOT that common, these cases when it all opens up and it truly is fostering and becoming one family. They were ours and they ARE theirs.

I’m leaving out a lot of the pain that came before the drop-off: the horror of breaking little hearts when it’s the one thing you professed, felt sure, you would not do. The Tuesday before last, my first real one alone in a week when I wasn’t on the phone or engaged in some action all day long, when the reality settled down on me for the day, the one where the tears slipped out and the sobs poured loud enough to make the dogs worry.

We were, us four, and then yesterday we were not.

So probably this is all just hopeful staunching of the inevitable pain that I’ll have to go through as part of grieving.

But for today, I’ll take it.

 

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Categories foster kids, fostering, Uncategorized

Abandoned

10/13/2013 //
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On Oct. 15,  2011, my husband left me.

I don’t mean left me as in, we talked about separation, we divided up our things and he departed the  house one day at an arranged time — you know, with agreement. With finality. With closure. With conversation. I mean, he left me as in I returned home one evening to find he had packed up all he could fit into the car, cleared out the bank accounts, and left the keys behind, with nary a word or a note –and never to communicate again via phone, text or email (at least, not until seven months later when he wanted to get the rest of his things).

To be fair, we HAD talked separation. After nearly a year of marriage counseling, and another few previous years of strife and struggle, I had finally come to the realization that the marriage was never going to be truly that  — a marriage, a joint union, each spouse standing for the other, making decisions for the marriage in lieu of the self. It had been my decision to separate to move towards divorce. And the morning he left, we had talked a bit more about the logistics of a separation, what the process might be.

But his actions that day had me feeling just one thing: ABANDONED.

Abandonment was my worst fear, realized.

It was the stuff of all my nightmares as a child, a teen, and even an adult. It’s what I had fought to avoid — in all my relationships, in my jobs, in my every day.  By 4 am the next morning I was exhausted, anxious, unable to sleep and devoid of any feeling except a deep pit in my stomach that was unquenchable with the very blackness of its depth. So much so that I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think.

I was an empty vessel lying in bed that night and morning: As though until I had to quit fighting, hard, every second of every day and even in my sleep for the shell of a marriage I had found myself in, I didn’t even know how hard I’d been fighting. I didn’t know then how much of my soul had gone into keeping the very thing I feared the most — abandonment — at bay.

When I called my Mom the morning after that sleepless night, all the feelings I’d been holding back, the ones locked behind the empty vessel I had become over the past three years, came flooding out in one single clarified moment. For the first time in many, many years, I sobbed, and I did it from the depths of my fear. All the loneliness, pointless wishing and hiding from myself I’d been doing came crashing in at once and came out of me in a  low empty, nearly voiceless cry turning into a deep racking sob that lasted for wordless, endless moments.

It’s amazing what can happen when there’s nothing left to lose. For the first time in my life, I asked her to come and rescue me: to come and stay with me the next week as I navigated not just sudden aloneness, but with the sudden grappling of the knowledge I’d been trying to avoid for so long, maybe since just after I’d gotten married. Not only was I abandoned NOW, I’d been abandoned, really, from the very beginning. Maybe before I’d even fathomed the idea of marriage at all.

She came to rescue me, to stay with me, just to BE with me. And my restart started, again.

*******************

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Each year, hundreds of ships are abandoned at docks and on sea. Depending on how you define abandonment, the actual number could be MUCH higher. After all, while we often talk about ships as though they embody a human — usually a she, as in, “She sails straight,” or “She is a great, beautiful boat,” or “She has her quirks but she never lets me down in weather,” — sailors and shipmen alike tend to refer to how much “soul” a boat has. Some storied ships carry their own spirit, regardless of owner, but these are few and far between. And, I would argue that most ships only have as much soul as its captain and crew are willing to put into it.

Amazingly, despite the ships that sit abandoned at docks, no one comes to claim them as their own. There is an unwritten rule that, even if a ship’s owner has not taken care of a ship in years, has not visited her or paid for her dockage or done anything to upkeep the ship, She belongs to someone else. And plenty of laws exist on the books in each local, state and international jurisdiction that make it clear that even if it’s abandoned, it still belongs to someone. Marinas have to go through piles of paperwork to get an abandoned boat declared as such before they can legally be allowed to remove it. The US Coast Guard and state natural resource departments can’t even begin to clean up the waste of an unclaimed boat until they get a legal declaration — a process that again takes much time and paperwork. And even if they do, there remains the ultimate question of who will pay for the removal of not just the boat but the fuel and oil it leeches into the water  as it decays. Because ultimately, these abandoned ships eventually succumb to the water in which they languish. A boat without water flowing by its hulls will eventually begin to rot, from the outside in. Wooden boats’ planks begin to shrink, change shape and leak water until the boards open to let more water in while the batteries die and the pumps stop emptying the ship of the inevitable water that makes its way through (because, as any seasoned sailor will tell you, all wooden boats leak, all the time). Metal hulls start to rust and welded seams eventually fail. Fiberglass hulls, too, develop weaknesses when left to the wiles of winds, waves and rain. To prosper and survive, ships need sailed. As though there is a deep-seated recognition that an abandoned ship is soulless and without much merit, the REAL pirates of today — the ones that patrol Africa’s eastern coast’s and the China seas — will not touch an abandoned boat. They target vessels already under steam, with a crew, a commodity underway. These pirates know a boat abandoned is merely an empty vessel, and they want a vessel full of possibility they can steal.

A boat that sits too long, too often, that’s faced a checkered past, a bad reputation, often meets if not an abandoned, untimely end, then a sad fading into semi-obscurity. Look no further than the tale of the Schooner America, a replica of the boat for which the landmark sailboat match the world tunes into today was named (This year’s match was out of San Francisco August 21 to 26 and October 2 to 7). Built by a wealthy Virginian restaurateur to be both a money-making venture and a goodwill ambassador for the US,  Mr. Ray Giovanni’s dream never quite materialized. The boat has alternated in its 20-year history between being celebrated, reviled, abandoned, recovered and re-celebrated before fading once again into the background at some dock in a port town (the full story of the Schooner America is coming soon, in a post entitled “Checkered Pasts and High Seas: The Life of the Schooner America”). Just three years after the Schooner America was built to great fanfare, celebration and media coverage, she languished at a Ft. Lauderdale marina, unwanted at the original asking price. In those short 36 months, the ship had developed enough of a reputation that few were willing to tackle a young boat with a checkered past. Its various owners in its life — three to date — have proclaimed in various ways that THIS time she was to prosper fully. Greg Muzzy,  owner of Liberty Fleet which bought the Schooner America in 1999 — only to have her run aground just a year later as she sailed on her maiden voyage out of Boston — told me in 2000: “The boat’s had a checkered life and created some bad reputations here and there. Our job is to try and fix some of those reputation problems and turn it into the best it can be.” And yet, just a few years later, Liberty Fleet put the Schooner America up on the auction block again.

A vessel facing criticism, abandonment, trials and innuendos, can hardly seem to escape that fate. The Schooner America is not the only ship to sail this tale.

And here lies the very real distinction between a vessel abandoned, and a person abandoned.

***********************

In the months after my spouse abandoned me, an amazing and unexpected thing happened: I found faith. In the vastness of love foundered on dreams unrealized, I developed a deep, abiding belief in love. I found a lasting sense of peace. And I discovered I had never been abandoned at all.  In this abandonment, I found freedom to take the abandoned vessel I thought I had become, shore it up with some new boards, a bit of pitch tar and faith in a right wind and TRUST it fully again. I learned to trust myself again, and I learned to trust the sense that came from deep within that there was something else driving this ship, something that I could trust.

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

We all have this opportunity, all the time, in the small and big losses of life.

Losing a job, an important relationship, a child, a dream: In our human attempts to overcome the inevitability of life, the ebb and flow of dreams developed, followed and derailed, we try to keep those events that cause those feelings at bay because, ultimately, we like to think that we can control what happens to us. Or, at the least, affect the outcome when they do happen- the fear, loneliness and hopelessness that can follow in the wake of our most shocking life changes.

We gather inspirational sayings to arm ourselves against that nagging voice that tells us in the quiet moments on dark nights that we are not good enough, not important enough or not doing enough. These work, for a time, until that next quiet moment returns. These losses force us to look directly at the one thing we fight against as humans:  that We Can Not, try as we might, BE God.

We do not consider, maybe we cannot consider, that in that wake, the clearing that loss creates, we are not DEVOID as much as we are an empty vessel ready to be filled. Perhaps then, the ultimate question is what will we fill our vessels with, what soul cry will we answer when we are finally empty enough to choose freely.

And so maybe boats – and people- ultimately become a product of their story and founding principles no matter where they sit or sail. The America might have been so embattled precisely because Mr. Ray founded her on two dual and competing purposes. You cannot produce a revenue to feed the company that runs you AND be a “goodwill” ambassador – which implies that it operates solely for the good of the people.

Left with nothing to lose, our vessels ask us what soul cry we will pick up. Our fate is not sealed: we are not an empty ship abandoned and now devoid of soul without its captain and crew to give it story and heart. Our vessel was never empty to begin with. And instead of fearing the space that these great losses can bring, we can instead remember that our soul infuses within us a continuing story.  Abandonment is a chance for us to ask, instead of what the world will bring to us, what WE will bring to the world.

I choose faith, love, hope and peace.

Hope

 

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Categories Emotional health, Personal Growth, Spirituality