Seth and I have been struggling mightily with our household lately. Sunny knows there are only a few weeks before she goes home, and she’s ramped up her behaviors significantly. Intellectually I get that she’s pushing us and her sister away so that leaving is easier. I get that she’s only 10, and is struggling. She wants to be home right now, dammit. She doesn’t understand why she has to complete the school year here. She doesn’t understand her feelings, doesn’t have good coping mechanisms despite a lot of therapy trying to help her with that, and is basically just full of resentment.
It comes out as defiance, lying, and meanness to the extreme. She tells her sweet little 6-year-old sister Sprout not to say she’s her sister and that she doesn’t love her, and that she, in fact, hates her. She tells her sister terribly mean things, and bosses her around relentlessly. She tells Seth and me terribly mean things, like that I look pregnant on any given day, and I shouldn’t wear that outfit if I don’t want people to say that. She tells me her friends all say I look like a boy because I have short hair. She tells me I smell, or that I have too many chins to be pretty, and so on. It’s relentless.
I can cope with her meanness toward me ok but I hate it when she’s mean to Sprout. And her lying drives me right up the wall. She’s taken to urinating in all sorts of strange places too, which we think is her trying to be so “bad” that we will send her home early. She’s actually admitted she’s trying to be as bad as possible so we’ll give up on her and send her home.
She’s just Not OK.
We have a countdown chart on the refrigerator that she is using to track how long before she can go home, but man, it’s not helping. Sunny is a flat out mess.
Our house does not feel like a home with this level of dysregulation dominating everything. I don’t want to be in those four walls except when she’s at school, and I just start to relax when it’s time for her to come home each day. In short, this end of her stay with us feels like torture.
Consequently, just imagine my delight at having a “girls weekend” scheduled with a friend from law school this weekend! Three days away from Sunny and her emotional chaos and acting out! (Also, poor Seth at home with Sunny solo…)
My friend and I are staying at a VRBO in the middle of a field surrounded by woods. I’ve listened with joy to wood thrush and veery, spotted a flicker and a cat bird, and got to watch a tiny fawn wobble all knock-kneed into the woods. It’s sunshine and rain, fresh breeze and cool air, good fresh food, and good company. I can feel the stress flowing off me.
Yet even despite all the joys this escape has to offer, I found myself a little homesick. I’m not homesick for the place I call home, but the people.
My friend and I were at the local farmer’s market this morning when I got a call from Sprout’s Girl Scout leader. Sprout happened to be Girl Scout camping for the first time ever near where my VRBO is, and she’d come down with a fever and wanted me to come get her. So I did, of course. My friend graciously dropped her plans and we went to fetch Sprout at Girl Scout camp.
As I forced Sprout to lie down to rest, I crawled into bed with her for my own nap. I gazed on her lovely little almond shaped face, still a little flushed from fever, and realized how content I suddenly was. Sprout is home. How a fellow human can feel like home is a mystery to me, but it’s true.
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt that way about another human. My best friend in high school – who is still my beloved BFF – was the first time another human felt like home. I’ve felt that way about my husband. But it’s the first time I’ve recognized that my own child feels like home to me now.
Now that she’s here in this little cabin, I’m not homesick anymore. I am, in a word, content.
I think home will start to feel homey again in a few weeks when Sunny leaves. Her distress is palpable in the air right now. It’s almost something you can smell when you walk in. When she has left with all her things, I will tear out the urine soaked carpet from her room and reclaim the space as our office. I shall get all new agey, and burn some cleansing incense and do some reiki and anything else I can think of to restore my house’s equilibrium.
Seth and I have our own work to do. As we’ve wound down our fostering, we’ve recognized that we have neglected our marriage for the 8 1/2 years we have fostered, and it’s in need of some TLC. We have focused our energy on kids’ extensive needs and putting out the eternal fires of chaos rather than on each other. Dates? What are those? We have a marriage therapist, and summer vacation plans in France, and hopes that when Sunny is gone, we can settle into a kind of peaceful family life with Sprout that we’ve never experienced before. We hope that our house and the other person will start to feel like home again, too.
But man, foster care is hard on marriage, family, sanity, house, and self. I admire people who have done it for 25 years or more like hell, but I haven’t got what it takes for that. 8 1/2 years of it was everything I had.
Today, though, I’m just going to delight in my feisty, funny, sweet daughter and how homey her little self feels to me.
sprinklesonachaoscupcake.com 