Ironically the first holiday we celebrated together was Mother's Day. It had only been about a week since we met but I already felt like the kids were looking healthier and happier. I always thought bonding between me and an older child would be hard, but it had happened so early on and so easily with Penny. I thought she must be in the honeymoon phase of foster care. She followed all the rules, was easy to please, was kind, loving, helpful...she seemed too good to be true. The more I learned about her past the more I understood why she was so unlike the typical foster kids I had learned about in my classes. She had spent a large portion of her life away from her birth parents. Most of the time she had been with aunts and her grandmother. Although they had their own struggles, they provided a loving and somewhat stable home life for Penny. Millie and Max were not as lucky. They were kept away from their maternal extended family by their birth mom's current boyfriend and Millie's birth father. I wouldn't know until later, but all the kids, especially Millie and Max, had witnessed a horrific amount of domestic abuse. It was also safe to assume major neglect had been a part of most of their young life.
I was ill-equipped to deal with so much trauma. Foster care licensing classes were tailored to fit a wide variety of possible situations and so any extensive training on a specific situation was impossible within those training classes. If I had known how much help was available among fellow foster parents at that time, I would have reached out. But as it was, I was left guessing, and reading whatever I could find that I thought might help me. After 1 week of listening to constant crying and screaming from baby Max both Kyle and I were exhausted. I was determined to solve his unhappiness and figure out why he was so sad all of the time. Despite his constant fussiness, I had a pretty easy time bonding to him in the beginning, and I think that was because he was a baby. We had so much attachment therapy together even though I didn't know that was what it was called at the time. Every night when I would feed him a bottle and sing to him he stroked my hair with his fingers. I rocked him and rocked him as much as I could. Putting him to sleep was an easy escape from the usual bedtime mayhem. Kyle and would take turns fighting for bedtime with Max because it was relaxing and calm. Unfortunately Kyle and I gave Millie the secret nick name "devil child"--referring to her sudden outbursts and tantrums that were completely foreign to us. She was absolutely adorable and absolutely the most active, mischievous, defiant toddler either of us had ever seen. But we were trying and for the most part, she was a happy little girl, who we had to watch like a hawk.
It wasn't all mayhem and madness. There were smiles and lots of cuddles during that first week together. All of these new relationships were exhausting but we also had moments of happiness. Mothers day was definitely one of those moments. It seemed to be the first time all week that we could breath, relax, AND take pictures!
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