Other People's Kids

Home Alone

Home alone tonight, as The Wife has "Tammy" with her at the cabin helping Mom clean. There's nothing quite like a completely empty house...to make you remember why full houses are a good thing. Still, the quiet isn't weighing too heavily on me tonight and I have friends with me, if not human ones. There's something to be said for sitting on the deck in the night and appreciating the crickets' and frogs' hard musical work in the swamp out back. Plus, the fireflies are going to be expending all that light anyway, and in the interest of saving energy somebody should really be out there looking at it. Might as well be me, right?

Basically just sitting and wondering about our new prospects tonight. One is supposed to be coming Wednesday and the other Friday. We've been fooled before in this game so I'm not counting on it, but they've stuck to the same story for an unusually long time this time (maybe 4-5 days) so maybe they'll actually come through this time. Broken clock, twice a day, and all that.

This feels like I felt when we were going to be getting "Josie". The good part this time around is that we're a little wiser, a little more settled, and we know much better by now what we're letting ourselves in for. We didn't exactly fail with her (she shows up to church on her own, in part to see us) but we didn't get much of a chance to work on her real issues. She was too smart and threw up smoke screens that we weren't able to get through in a few months.

The bad part is that we've been burned a time or two now, and the hard part is to keep letting yourself open up and loving each kid equally when they walk in the door, knowing that so many things can go wrong. They can throw it back in your face, social services can pull the rug out from under you just when you think you're getting their trust (and they blame you, natch), or you can screw up and yell at them at the wrong time and irretrievably change the relationship for the worse.

But whattaya gonna do? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Also nothing thrown at you, nothing broken in your house and nobody gone in the middle of the night when they're supposed to be in bed...but we'll just focus on the gained part and deal with the rest as it comes up.

In fostering, if you think too much about what it is exactly that you're doing, you might just quit, so it's better to just sit on the deck and listen to the frogs and watch the fireflies. Maybe listen to a little Air Supply, or maybe Breathe.

Yeah.

posted by Dan @ 8:10 PM