Broken Dreams

and New Glories

Welcome, once again, into the asylum. This week will be a bit different as it isn’t about politics, but something that has been on my mind and heart for almost a year. It is my asylum, so we put out what I want to put out. My wife and I got married young; I was 20, and she was 18, having known each other for only a short time. We met on November 9, 1996, and were married on February 27, 1997. We moved back north briefly after I got out of the Navy, but returned south after 18 months. Anyway, the first few years were normal, good, bad, indifferent, but through all the struggles we had made it. By 2001, I was secure in my Information Technology career, and we had purchased our first home. Then, in 2006, we had our fourth child, and we were done. Our family was complete and took surgical measures to ensure our family was complete.

Shortly after that, we laid plans for the rest of our lives through retirement. We planned to have our house paid off by 2021 and all the kids of age by 2024, so we would be “free” of day-to-day parenting responsibilities by 48 and 46, respectively. My wife and I both changed schools frequently as children; she more so than I. From K-12, I attended 8 different schools, always being the new kid and the outsider. Just when we started to fit in, it would change again. We didn’t want that for our kids, so we planned to be in that house until they all got out of school. We had visions of travel, doing things together, and not having to worry about a babysitter. Not having a house payment and having all of our children over 18 would afford us those capabilities. Then, sometime south of 70, I would retire, and we would be completely free of our significant obligations. It is the life we fully expected to live. You know, they say men plan and God laughs. That is true, at least for us.

To back track a little bit. I was raised Catholic, and if you don’t know, that tends to produce zealots or atheists, and I went down the atheist path around 14. Then, sometime in my late teens, I started looking everywhere I could into Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, the occult, and various other pagan belief systems. My dog tags from the Navy list Pagan as my religion. Anyway, around the age of 24, I came back to the truth that Jesus is the one true and living King; He lived a perfect life and died a perfect sacrifice to take on all my failures and sins, setting me free of the weight and making me worthy of eternal life.

Fast forward a bit to 2011, and one of my wife’s cousins has a baby. We hear that the baby has been exposed to meth in utero and as a result, the baby was taken into state custody. We further hear that during their investigation, the Department of Human Services (DHS) found extensive evidence of domestic violence and unsafe conditions, so they also took her cousin's older child (6) into custody. I have told this story before (here). At this point, we had been both church going Christians and unchurched Christians for more than a decade, and we had on different occasions discussed the possibility of being foster parents, but we always got in the way. We did have a plan after all, and additional children weren’t a part of that plan.

If I am being honest, we were not fully surrendered to Christ. This was our Matthew 19:16-24 moment, and we were failing. Before it was all said and done, we went full Jonah and ran from this calling. No whales, but we were still resistant. I am ashamed of that now, but it is the truth. We eventually repented and ended up with two new-to-us little girls, one six years old and the other eight weeks old, around 19:00 on December 21^st, and they came with almost nothing. We had finished our Christmas shopping, or so we thought. Anyway, by God’s grace and Amazon Prime, it all worked out.

We still had our plan and believed at this point that the bio parents were going to get it together and get their kids back. We were going to take up this cross and follow (at least until we could pass it off. We had a plan.) Eight months go by, and the bio parents haven’t accomplished anything except having a second meth exposed baby, a boy this time. In the run-up to his birth, we get a call from our social worker (in the foster care system, everybody gets a social worker: the kids, the bio parents, and the foster parents) asking, since we had the boys' two older siblings, would we accept placement if he were taken into care. We agreed. The baby was born meth exposed, and we brought him home from the hospital. At this point, we have seven children in our home, but are still beyond reason hopeful that the biological parents will get it together and be reunited. We supervise visits much more frequently than would occur with just DHS and do everything we can think of to build a relationship with and facilitate reunification, from rides to grocery shopping, until it becomes unsafe to do so, with the mother at least. The dad was in and out of jail or prison most of the time.

The parents didn’t do anything; they didn’t go to rehab, didn’t go to anger management, domestic violence, or childcare classes. However, since the biological father had his tribal card, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was in effect, and the court couldn’t move to terminate parental rights (TPR) until the tribe agreed (they could, but then it could be contested and would be a mess, so they won’t). Their tribal social worker was incredibly racist and hated the fact that the kids were not in a tribal foster home, but ICWA rules placement by hierarchy, and we were a family placement (they had tried 15 different households between the bioparents, closer kin to find placement, and none of them qualified due to criminal or drug histories before we were even considered) so there wasn’t anything she could do about it. We also found it odd that she acted shocked every single time we had a court date to review progress, and the state worker essentially reported no progress or worse. This goes on until the tribal social worker gets replaced in June of 2014. So, for more than 2 years. It then comes to light that there are more than 100 pieces of correspondence from the state case worker, unopened in the tribal file for these children, all outlining missed drug tests, missed classes, missed visits, and other malfeasance. In contrast, the written tribal records indicate total compliance with the reunification plan. The new worker is great, and we moved to TPR in September.

During this period, caring for very broken children, the eldest was almost feral. She was 6 years old, 30 inches tall, and 173 pounds when she came to live with us. She was violent and incapable of speaking standard English; it was all curse words and ghetto slang. The only solution to any conflict with other children was violence. Then the meth exposed babies' sensitive skin won’t let them sleep (way worse than normal babies), whole body muscle cramps, and more like having a baby on hard mode. It got so bad that they set up a cot in the storage room at work, surprised me with it, and the boss made me take naps so I could function. It was hard, but worth it.

During this period, we gained a lot of knowledge about the foster care system. Some of the bigger things are that children under 5 are almost always adopted out of foster care unless they have some serious medical issues (like will need care the rest of their lives), or they are part of a sibling group. All children in foster care are broken in some way, from drug exposure before they are born to various traumas witnessed or experienced; they are all broken. No matter what horrible things happened, children love their biological parents by default. Lastly, bouncing from placement to placement in the system is as damaging, if not more, to a child than whatever happened to land them in foster care in the first place. With all this new knowledge, we had decided that any child accepted for placement into our home would stay there until either they were reunited with their families or launched into the world. It is also hard not to become attached to a child, especially a baby, when you have cared for them for several years and fought through their challenges and witnessed them overcome and grow. As a result, when the time came, we elected to adopt these three children God saw fit to place in our lives in October of 2014. After that, we closed our home and thought we were done.

I often get asked how we know that it was God’s will for us to do this. The truth is faith, because I can’t say the actual will of God, his ways are not our ways. That being said, how many coincidences need to pile up before they are no longer coincidences? Seriously, I wish I could count the times something happened, sometimes even things we did not know about, and an acquaintance, or more than once, a stranger just showed up with a solution out of the blue when they had no way of knowing, and sometimes before we even knew there was a need. Then, of course, there is the still, quiet voice inside your heart, a persistent pull toward something.

One of the better examples of this is after our adoption, with seven children now, and having been closed for almost a year and a half, the social worker we had is now a supervisor, and we get a call from her about another one of my wife’s cousins who has had a meth exposed baby that was taken into custody. This cousin is 23 and has already had six previous children go through TPR due to drugs and other issues. The social worker said that due to the history and the baby being born testing positive for meth, they are going straight to TPR, and this would be three to five months, and done. Do we want to foster and probably adopt the baby? My wife tells her she will talk to me and call her back. There is barely time for my wife to tell me, and for both of us to decide no, we don’t want to do this because we have enough kids, and then start in with the excuses, the biggest one being we just got rid of all the baby stuff and don’t have anything for a baby. When the wife gets another phone call, I don’t think even five minutes have gone by. My wife has a good friend who lives over an hour away, and they don’t talk more than 2-3 times a year, but when they do, it is measured in hours, and she is on the phone. My wife's friend tells her this will sound crazy, but she was praying, and she got the distinct feeling she needed to call my wife right now and offer her all the baby stuff she had just packaged up to get rid of, since her youngest was a toddler and they didn’t need it anymore. There was a playpen, a crib, a swing, a bassinet, girl clothes from birth to 18 months, all seasons, and a lot more. If that isn’t God indicating what he desires, I don’t know what is. There was no other possible way for my wife’s friend to know that, and no reason for her to have that sudden feeling during prayer, not even five minutes after the need was revealed to us.

We took that as confirmation and accepted the little girl. Unlike the last time, however, her cousin hired a real lawyer, not an appointed one, and successfully entered drug court, fulfilling all the required conditions. A little over a year later, she was reunited with her daughter. During this period, we did everything we could to help and encourage her. After reunification, we became the primary babysitters while her mom pursued her GED, tried to get and hold a job, and dealt with other challenges. This ultimately led to us caring for the girl for weeks and months at a time, with mom only turning up for a weekend here or there. During this period, we were still an open foster home and had a few placements for various lengths of time, typically ending with finding a placement with blood kin family.

This resulted in us taking the placement of two boys and their middle sibling (another boy) being placed elsewhere. While drugs were most certainly involved at some level, their case was all serious abuse and neglect. Ultimately, the third boy was placed with us, and we adopted all three. Children of trauma, even when you would think they are too young to know or remember, are significantly more difficult than drug-exposed babies. All the while, the little girl from before was still with us more than she was not. Then, in early 2022, her biological mom got into some trouble with DHS again. To protect our daughter (because at that point she was as much our daughter as if she were born to us), we engaged a lawyer and, with the help of the biological mom, we got a full binding guardianship of her. This removed her from the DHS case because she wasn’t a member of the biological mother's household (previously, regardless of her location, she was considered a member of her household for DHS purposes).

After our first adoption, our little 1400 sq ft house was too small, and after the second, it was no longer an option. So, we sold it, and rather than having a paid-off house, we have a mortgage with a 4% lower[ interest rate and a 300% larger payment until 2051. We won’t have the freedom of kids old enough that we are free to do as we please until we are 58 and 56, respectively. While that isn’t ancient, it is much older with more limitations than the original plan.

Now that you are 2400 words in, you might be wondering what the point is. My Youngest biological daughter graduated from high school last year, and while our original plan died a long time ago when we first said yes to adoption, that event made it real. That was the milestone marker for when the wife and I were supposed to be free to be just us. It became real because we still have six kids, aged 13-8 years old, in the house, and due to their past trauma experiences, we can’t leave them with a babysitter, and certainly not alone. I am not writing to tell you how good my wife and I are, because we are not particularly good people; we are only forgiven people. I write this because we are mourning the loss of our dream, and the pain that comes from