The Reunion

The caseworker, who had been with us for five years already after our first adoption, sidled up to me as  we prepared to take our weekend respite charge home with us and said, “I wouldn’t mind if you fell in love with this one. We don’t have anywhere to place him.”

It was supposed to be just one weekend of care. At home I had my birth son who was ten, my daughter, adopted at the age of five, now ten also, as she is just four days younger than my birth son, --who didn’t want to be adopted, only wanted to be with her birth mom and let me know how much she didn’t like me every single day, --and an almost one year old, defy all odds, boomerang bonus birth baby girl, plus a husband who suffered from chronic depression trying to get through grad school. My hands and heart were full.

But I knew Joe. Before we moved to the Island in 1992 where no one knew anything about attachment disorder, we had wrap around care as a pioneering family in a program called Permanency Planning. The kids each had their own caseworker, we had our own caseworker, we had monthly family potlucks, therapists, respite care exchange with another family just two blocks away, and a newsletter that kept us all in touch with each other. I had taught classes in the home study groups which were actually eight week classes with your cohort group. For ten years, neither I nor the kids nor my husband could sneeze without it having to be reported. It was primo support.

And I had watched Joe. A bright and bubbly towhead, he delighted me everytime I saw him. I knew his first placement family as well. It came down to the fact that Joe was obviously gay, and did a lot of violent acting out behavior, and well....it disrupted.

He came into the system early in his life. His drug addicted mother had given him to her parents while she went into rehab. They were mad at her and didn’t realize the consequences of their actions, called CPS and that was it for Joe. Fortunately when he went into the system he landed a connection with Lutheran Social Services. I say ‘fortunately’ because at the time they had a lawyer, Brian Linn, who could get a kid out of the system in 18 months.

So that’s how it started. I DID fall in love that weekend. Sent him home with a brand new dinosaur blanket, bright white with primary coloured dinosaurs of all kinds on it. Five year old boys and dinosaurs are just a thing. Go figure.
So charming, wonderful, creative Joe came to live with us the next weekend. Did I mention, violent, tormented, angry Joe as well? We  use to call him our little Ted Bundy.  Gallows humour.

There are two kinds of acting out behavior kids ( and anyone) can do. One is passive aggressive. That’s the person who, if they don’t like you, just grabs a thread from your sweater where you can’t see it , so to speak, and unravels it slowly. Of the sixteen clinical levels of anger, that’s actually the angriest. We’d already experienced that for the previous five years with the first placement.

Joe had the other kind. Aggressive. I’ve watched him, more than once, punch his fist through a plate glass window, call 911 because I asked him to clean his room, tear and rip his brother’s Ken Griffey junior poster to shreds, stand outside an open door screaming “Let me in! I’m going to call CPS if you don’t let me in”. The list was very long.

And yet I loved him. As I did all my kids, I was looking at the long haul, parenting for the long haul, enduring for the long haul, in it for the long haul.

Flash forward many years. He’d returned to his birth mom at age 12 and then when he found out maybe she wasn’t all that clean and sober chose to go to his adopted dad’s – now my ex-- in Eastern Washington. I’d only let him go back to his birthmom’s with the agreement she stay in touch. That lasted about a month. Then I couldn’t find him.
Looooooooooooooooong story short. Found him at sixteen. More looooooooooooooong story. Now in his mid twenties. Facebook had been invented. I posted on his birthday a simple message. Up pops. “Can I have your phone number? Can we talk?”

Joy is immeasurable when it is deep in the heart. We talked for about an hour that night. He had learned so much. Done his therapy, gotten greatly healed, had made a good life for himself despite many trying circumstances that happened after the decade he spent with me.

Guess what he told me? He’d been reading my column for years. Yup! This paper reunited us. This column. He quoted a phrase I’d used once. “I hate what I’ve been through. I love what I’ve learned.” It had become a guiding principle for him.

We met several times over the next few weeks. Those papers and art projects and records I’d saved for all those years finally had a deep meaning to both of us. I filled in the gaps of his memory. In response to his statement, “I had this horrible childhood and yet I have all these great memories”, I explained how I rose above the acting out behaviour of both him and his adoptive sister to purposefully and intentionally foster friendships, playdates, sports activities, trips and vacations and summer camp, theatre experiences and learning to be a sibling.

Then we got to the tough questions that took courage on both our parts to ask. “Why”, he asked, “did you put me in the basement that night. It was really scary down there”

“Do you remember what happened right before that?” I asked. He didn’t. “I had just found a twelve inch butcher knife under your pillow. You were so violent we didn’t know if any of us would wake up alive the next morning.  The case worker wouldn’t come. Respite help wouldn’t take you. It was the only thing we could do to get through the night as safely as possible.”

Then I asked my tough question. During a court battle with his dad later, Joe had put down horribly untrue things in a document. “Why did you say you never had any birthday parties and I made you watch pornography?” I asked with equal courage. Older adoptive kids frequently portray adoptive parents as abusive, we’d been warned of that, but this was so opposite of what really happened.

He put his head down sheepishly and said, “Oh... I was just listening to Dad”.

And that was that. We were through the past and into the present.

Today, I send him frequent atta boy texts with unbounded joy and delight in his every success. Both he and my birth daughter have done the hard work of therapy, getting to the core of issues that came from their childhood that I could not control, things other people had done to them. They are both poster people for the reward of digging deep and facing unpleasant truths about one’s story, a path I had valiantly tried to model to them and thought it had brought no good fruit. Never say never.

This month is National Adoption Awareness month. Adopting babies is great. Adopting kids from other nations is great. But there are millions of older American children, domestic adoptive opportunities who need parents strong enough to pour into them the seeds of goodness and love and ‘normal’. Think about it. Here’s one last reason. Research shows that what you experienced between the ages of six and ten is how you believe the world is. Both my adoptive kids are living lives that directly reflect how they experienced life between the ages of six and ten. Pouring goodness and a different vision of life than that which they experienced in the first five years of their life, made all the difference.

He is my forever son. All of us in the family made sacrifices so Joe could make it. We all endured what most families aren’t willing to endure. But --- it CAN make a difference. It IS worth the risk.

And he is happy for me to tell you his story, our story, now. And yes, I have heard the words,”Thank you for all you did.”
Consider the older kids. Be the difference some child needs.

Love,
Deborah, who is delighted
 to be known as Joe’s mom.