nausea.

The last couple of days I’ve really been feeling pretty buried by all the hurt.

The hurt of Jae in all of this, the hurt of Zee causing his physical aggression, the hurt of them being temporarily separated, the hurt of not having Zee here, the hurt of the boys’ fear of the future, the hurt of knowing Jae will be leaving, the hurt of the unknown.

The hurt of feeling so helpless.  I just want to make it better.  There is a clawing at my heart that makes me feel physically ill.

I was wracking my brain all day yesterday trying to come up with some service to implement, some intervention that would help Zee’s physical aggression.  Something that would make it possible for him to stay here.  That would ensure that his physical aggression would not get even worse.

And I just keep coming back to the same thing -

It’s just not safe.  It is not safe for him to be here while he is struggling with the physical aggression that has brought us to this hard place.  I don’t feel that it would be safe for me to be home alone with him and Sylvia when he was really angry.  And I think it is going to escalate.

 

They’ve found a home that is only 30 minutes away from their hometown, where their siblings are placed.  I don’t think that they will try to put them all four together for the time being – it’s just asking for disruption.  The boys will go for a pre-placement visit Friday through Saturday, and if it goes well, will probably move next week.

We’ve always said that we wouldn’t ask a child to leave our home unless it wasn’t safe for them to be there.  We know the effects that disruption has on kids – so we decided that we wouldn’t do it unless there were really no choice.  I just never really thought we’d get there  - where there was no choice, where it wasn’t safe.

 

Please pray for the boys.  Pray for their angry hearts.  Pray for their healing.  Pray for their caseworker (whew, that’s almost hard for me to type.  terrible of me.). 

Pray for their parents.  Maybe a miraculous turnaround – cause goodness knows that if it is safe – we pray that they go home.

Not really sure…

 what in the world I was thinking yesterday when I said things were back to normal around here.

 

But they are not.

 

Every minute is a struggle.

 

Really, really hoping the boys don’t make decisions that make it unsafe for them to be here.

What to do.

  Well, ever since Sunday the boys have been back to the normal routine – I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly good week, but no sign of what went on Saturday.

  Right now my theory is that visits in general bring them anxiety – visits with mom, visits with dad, visits with siblings – this is evident in their behavior prior to visits.  I think that maybe having two visits with their siblings on back to back weekends was too much, causing our little rendezvous with the men in uniform.

 

  I feel so sorry that this is the direction things have taken.  It will make it much more difficult for them to find a home that can take all four of the kids.  However, it only serves as confirmation for us that it is not a good idea for us to do just that.

  It also lends itself to lots of head scratching by all those involved in the case.  What triggered it?  What services are appropriate to help alleviate the behaviors?  What do the boys need to get through this without being violent?  How can we as foster parents best be supported in order to avoid any kind of disruption?  On and on…

  Of course, when anything of this nature happens with kids in foster care, there is always the question of medication.  It has been brought up.

  I strongly feel that the boys are not in need of medication to alleviate behaviors.  Medication doesn’t fix what is going on in their hearts.  I often bristle at the thought of medicating children in any instance – children in foster care are so over medicated.  But I sincerely believe that it is not needed here.

  The boys are mad.  I mean severely pissed off.

And….I would be to.  I think that their anger is fully justified given their circumstance.  I think it is a fair reaction.  In fact, I’d be a little worried if they weren’t just a little peeved.  I’d be really worried if they were going through all of this with a Pollyanna attitude.  I’d say that anger is a pretty normal reaction here.  I don’t want to medicate them because they are feeling the way they should.

  What they need is to learn how to express their anger.  It is ok to be angry.  It is not ok to push Brian down the stairs.  I imagine if I were in their shoes.  I’ve just had my life ripped out from under me.  I’ve lost everything.  It is not my fault, but I have no control over it.  I’d be ticked off.  And if I had never had anyone show me what it looks like to appropriately display my anger?  I’d probably throw things.  I’d probably hit and kick.  I’d probably threaten people I love.  I’d probably run away.  I’d be mad in a way I couldn’t express.

 

  Medication would probably stop the behaviors, but it wouldn’t heal their hearts.  The behaviors are not the core of this problem.  In fact it would probably hinder any progress – it would be like putting a bandaid over a wound that needs stitches.  It doesn’t heal – and in the end may make the scar all that much worse.

  Of course, medication would be much faster than teaching.  Much faster than healing.  I am hoping this doesn’t lead to its use.

 

  I know there are situations that require medication.  And in those situations, I am so thankful that it is available.  But I really think our boys are trying to express what they don’t understand.  They are showing us their hurt in the only way they know how.  It is going to be a long road for them.  We are just praying that it doesn’t get worse – that it doesn’t get bad enough that we cannot safely keep them here.  Until then, we will tough it out – we will try our best to teach them what the hurt is, and to slowly, gently help them to heal.

The Po Po.

  I guess you could say we had quite the weekend…

We had a visit scheduled for the boys’ siblings to come and spend the night on Saturday night.  They all already knew about it, so we went forward with it even though we have decided that we cannot take them.

Saturday started out at a normal pace.  Jae was having a little bit of trouble, but Zee was helping Brian paint an old dresser and seemed to be doing really well.  Around 10:00 we had the boys go to clean their room – which seems to be equivalent to us asking them to catch fish with their bare hands for dinner – the most impossible task we could assign.  It is all very dramatic.  So at this point they get upset about how we are the most terrible, slave driving people on the planet because I’m making them pick up their dirty underwear.

This escalates a little for Jae.  He ends up shoving Brian, so he has to spend time in the other bedroom to cool down.  He does not cool down, earning him subsequent time in the bedroom.  This continues until I am sure he’s not going to be coming out anytime soon – and at this point Zee has firmly stated that ‘He is not cleaning his room.’  So, I tell the boys that they can choose not to clean their room, but that if I have to clean it for them, they will have to pay me from their allowance for my time.  Zee ended up helping me – Jae coughed up the cash.

Things weren’t getting any better, but we did not feel like the boys were completely out of control – definitely not enough to cancel the visit.  But, if there is one thing our boys are good at, it’s showing us up right when we think things are ok.

Starting around 2:00 their behaviors began to escalate, and continued to do so until dinner time.  (Their brother and sister joined us around 3:00.)  They progressed to throwing their toys at us as hard as they could, hitting and kicking Brian in obvious attempts to hurt him, trying to throw the vacuum cleaner at Brian, trying to push him down the stairs, screaming threats and obscenities at us, and running throughout the house.

I stayed downstairs with their siblings and Sylvia in an effort to keep them out of harms way, although Zee did come down twice and hit his brother with toys.  He also discovered a bottle of yellow craft paint that he attempted to squirt across our dining room, and they scratched the paint off of their bedroom door.

We tried several times to de-escalate them through talking an listening to no avail.  We are legally not able to lock them in any rooms or restrain them unless it is self defense. 

At around 6:00 we called the on-call worker at our agency to ask her what we should do.  They were completely out of control and were being more physically aggressive then they ever have been in the past.  Her suggestions were that we separate them, get them to calm down, and try to de-escalate their behaviors.  If I didn’t have a filter, my response would have been, “No kidding?  Really?  Because I would have never though of those things.  Thanks SO much for your assistance.”  But I didn’t.  Eventually she suggested that we call the police and have them come out to the house to show the boys how serious their behavior was.

 

So that’s what we did.  I called the police and they came out.  Jae was even disrespectful to the police officer until he required him to respect him.  They discussed how serious their behavior was, let them know that next time this happens that the boys will be escorted to the juvenile detention center, and made them pick up all of the toys they had thrown all over the house.

After the police left, the boys attitudes returned to exactly how they had been prior to the officers coming out, but they were no longer physically aggressive.  They threatened several times to run away, so Brian went up to their room and sat down with them to make a plan of how much it would cost and how they would earn their money.  (In an effort to show them how unrealistic it is for them to run away.)

 

After their siblings left on Sunday, the boys’ behavior began to de-escalate and by dinner time they were back to their normal selves.  We can only figure that their behavior was triggered by the visit.  Generally when the boys lose control it is for a shorter period of time (an hour or so) and it ends with them breaking down in tears and being able to discuss, at some level, what it is that is fueling the anger.  That didn’t happen this time, which makes me nervous that it was never resolved in their hearts and that there may be more to come.

I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with caseworkers trying to deal with all this – putting in my two cents and seeing how far it goes.  We’ll see where we go from here…