Seasons change

When we moved to New England, it was never meant to be long-term. The truth was that we intended to leave again. When one of the medical schools that had accepted II offered him a deferral, we thought there was a good chance we would leave to go back to where we were before the world fell apart on us.

II walked away from medical school in part because he refused to allow me to pay the price I would have to pay for him to be a doctor. The second reason was that the children love New England and have thrived here. They have loved this place so much that II and I made peace that we would stay--forever. I mourned deeply and he set about to repair what his grieving had done to his career for the six months after Micah died. We were going to buy the farm we brought the children to and allow them to finally have roots.

Despite months of working 18-20 hours per day, despite nearly giving himself a heart attack to change his boss' opinion of him going downhill, he could see this fall that his boss was not happy and none of his efforts were making things better. Even then, he resided himself that he would simply not advance in his career but would stay, in order to allow the children the stability they craved. II's company expected him to be back to normal the day after Micah died. He had been brought up more than once since that point, and several times this fall. Finally, unsure how to navigate making the relationship with his boss better anymore, II sought assistance from HR.

For reasons we still cannot grasp, and two lawyers have been stunned to hear, the HR liaison did not assist II in his dilemma. She stated she thought that all II and his boss required was to sit down with a mediator and work on the issues. Perhaps that is true, but that should have been done in a different manner than how she choose to do things. II's HR liaison forwarded his email directly to his boss, in it's entirety.

II and I both knew the moment he got the copy telling him what she had done that his job was gone. In the blink of an eye, one thoughtless decision by an HR employee turned our entire family on our heads. II wrote the VP of HR not because either of us thought there was a chance to stop what was going to happen, but as a Hail Mary for something that would take care of our family. Six weeks ago, II was given a choice by his boss. He could sign a legal liability waiver that would bar him from suing his company, resign from his position and take an extremely generous severance package. Or, he could stay, he could fight for his job, but his boss laid out the path he was going to take to build a case to fire II. Even the HR liaison who sat in the meeting agreed it was an impossible task when his boss said there was a slim chance he could actually succeed in the tasks laid in front of him. Rather, as soon as he sufficiently failed to accomplish the goals listed (and several of those goals were not II doing anything but other employees doing things, which was out of II's control) then he would be fired, and there would be no severance package.

As sick as both of us were about this situation, there was really only one choice to make. The reality is that II never took longer than six weeks to find a job before, and he never looked full-time for a job before either. His severance package would not cover health insurance, but my job had health insurance. Assuming the worst case scenario, we had enough funds to make it to the end of the school year without having to cut back on our living, thanks to the severance package. We had health insurance through my work. If by some chance he secured a job quickly, then what his company gave him would set us ahead years financially. It was best to not think of that possibility but we both knew that we could be far better off as a family by the end of this hard experience than when we started. We simply didn't KNOW what the future was going to hold.

One month to the day from when he gave his resignation, II was given a job offer. He wasn't given just one job offer. He was actually given two, both huge promotions (the level of the boss who fired him in fact), both were significant pay raises. Neither job offer was where we are living. We have decided to look towards this move as an adventure, since there was no choice but to take it. Rather than merely looking at the bigger paycheck, II evaluated which location was a job and a company that he believes it would be possible to have the rest of his career with, rather than having to move for his career after this point. We looked at the locations and what opportunities were available for the children. We even considered accessibility to family.

In the end, II took the position with a Japanese company in the south. It's not exactly where we lived before. However, it's actually positioned so that it is more centrally located to more of my family. This time, we are intentionally looking towards permanency. Provided the increased income for II is sufficient for our expenses, as we believe it should be, I will be going full-time to finish this second Bachelor's degree this spring and to graduate studies this fall. The only way to safeguard this family from the vulnerability that disrupted our lives this fall is if I have income potential that is not dependent upon II's career and does not require I move. As a nurse practitioner, my career will allow that. While I believe that under normal circumstances my intention is to work part-time, should anything happen to this family, the roles will be reversible and I could work full-time and II could change career paths or even work part-time.

There is some joy at moving nearly home. There is also a lot of sadness. II has already gone and started his job. Having children with significant special needs means every timeline must consider insurance coverage. We have timed my notice at my job to his starting his so that we will transition between health insurance policies without any gap, just as we transitioned when he resigned from his job. While we'll look a bit like what our past was for a few years, in reality we will never go back to that life. I will be home, but the children (safe C) will be public school and I will be a full-time grad student, not a stay at home mother. I'll be available for the children, but when they go to school I will go to work.

If anything, the security that having both my income and my health insurance availability when II was blindsided with his job is something I never want to lose again. I don't believe this new position will come to that. When II took his last job, we both saw some major concerns. We had to have A job and it was never meant to be anything but temporary so we ignored those red flags. None of those exist with this position. However, if it were to happen again, we need me to not dally with my training so we have my work to fall back on for family stability. Even if nothing happens, to get us to a point where the choice to have this large family doesn't start impacting our future finances negatively we need for me to finish my training and get into a career where I am working, even if I remain part-time so I can continue to balance the needs of this family with it.

So, we're going home. II is already there. I am nearly done serving my notice at my employer, and despite the ups and downs going back did answer the question of where I was meant to go in the future. Once I am done with my job, I still have to finish my semester for school. In the midst of that, I'm back to solo parenting and I have to declutter and pack my house. II went with the Japanese company and they don't typically pay for cool relocation packages where people pack your stuff for you. They are paying for all of the actual costs of the move, but we have to put in the labor to get this one accomplished. He could have gone with the other job offer which had a better relocation package (and a bit more money) but he truly felt this position was the better job for him, and the better option for his career. So, in my 30th move of my life, I'll do the labor around the other things that need to be done.

When we get there, I'm hoping we can settle in. My children are asking to be done moving and I have ever intention of giving them that wish. Thanks to his former employment we're in a position where we can even buy a house again, though we would prefer to rent someplace for a year that we could then buy in a year just to get us in an even better financial situation. The kids are terribly sad to leave here. II did look for local jobs. They didn't move fast enough and there aren't nearly as many of them as those which would necessitate a move. No one is sad to leave the New England winter that is already starting to settle into the crevices of life up here.

The one thing I am most sure of in all of this is that I MUST finish my training and get into working. Just having a part-time job and access to healthcare was lifesaving for this family this fall. If I had not been able to provide that, II would have been forced to stay at his old job while looking for a new job and hope and pray that he secured a new position before his boss built a sufficient case to finally fire him. We have children that are totally dependent upon health insurance. At any other point of our lives, we would have had to pass on the severance package just to keep those children safe and secure. Instead, he could take the cash settlement and work full-time searching for a new position. Today, I am thankful for throwing away a paradigm that said I could never contribute anything beyond my womb and my breasts to my family and my partner. I am thankful for the job I must now leave, for the patients who have taught me so much, and the co-workers who have stretched me to be a better person, but also for the ability to provide for my family in a crisis in a tangible way I never imagined before.

Onward to the next season of our lives now.

Tired

I am an inconsistent blogger now, and I am okay with that. The reason I started blogging was to journal a season that was so painful and so heartbreaking that I often wondered if I would lose my will to fight to move forward. There was a lot of painful growth I went through, a lot of re-examining and rebuilding a new marriage that II and I went through. I had to re-learn who I was and nearly everything I thought I was, wanted, or was focused on for my life and future. My thought in putting my journal online was that I was not the only wife who ever endured this nightmare. I had never seen a raw, honest blog about someone who survived, no matter what the outcome was, and truly focused on themselves and not the circumstances. I wanted to put my journey out there so there was something for that void, in case any other person ever needed to read those words to figure out how to pick themselves up and walk forward again.

Then, this became my journal of lose and grief. It seemed to fit, because it was still part of who I am and in so many ways my devastation and reconstruction was enmeshed with Micah and his life and death. I kept it here because I still needed to journal and I wanted Micah's life to be REAL, especially when I knew all too well that it was fleeting.

I don't know what the purpose of this is anymore. I have always tried to view this as merely my journal, while not private still anonymous, and write for my own purposes and not to an audience. I have only ever veered from that course when the psycho ex-nanny and her boyfriend's mother came here to directly attack me. Even then, I did not air her dirty laundry, and there was far too much of it I could have aired, but I refrained and only directly put them in their place for acting like heartless monsters. Otherwise, I have never written this for others, and I write it as genuinely here as if someone were sitting with me in person. I don't understand embellishing and falsifying your life for a blog. II assures me most bloggers do (this after I discovered the next door neighbors blog and remain baffled at the inconsistencies of what I see daily in person and what she writes online as if it is true).

When I joined online communities years ago, I made a commitment to be genuine and myself no matter where I was or what I did. I decided that I would be the same person, no matter the medium and those who "knew" me would recognize me even if they met me at the grocery store. I have been very successful in that promise to be true to myself online. Thus, I am unsure where I am supposed to go with journaling at this point.

I'm not leaving. I'm not taking down what I've journaled for the last six years. I'm just realizing that my journal entries are sparse right now because I have entered a season of my life that demands SO much of me elsewhere. After kicking and screaming and mourning that I had to leave full time stay at home parenting, I have embraced having goals towards a future. Yet, when I'm not working, not homeschooling C, and not working on my own fast paced schoolwork, my time is limited and I spend it with my children and husband. I'm amazed at how fast my babies are growing up. I'm also amazed at how tiring this second Bachelor's degree has been for me. I've started the process for graduate studies and my goal is really to get scholarships and funding so that I can move to PRN work during my grad studies and not have to continue to work 24 hours per week. I feel like balancing work and school leaves far too few moments with my babies and too much that II picks up around here. Daily, I remind myself that this season is finite and when I reach this goal, I can slow down.

Maybe it's really bad of me, but I often tell my children to not settle down and get married and have children until they have the educational part of their career goals completed. I hate to say that, especially since I was deliberate in holding off on this education to have the large family first. Yet, I am so much more tired in my mid 30s than I ever was in my early 20s. I have had no more than a three day break in my studies since January and I am simply tired right now. I have done two classes at a time, to try to push this last degree, eight week sessions so 12 hours per semester including through the summer. Right now, I am only doing one class because I agreed to cover the clinic while my co-workers all went on vacation. Yet, we had record census and thus I am even more tired than I was before right now.

These are the things that consume my life now. They aren't life altering. They aren't conflict ridden. I don't feel like I am in the point of turmoil I was in for so long, nor am I in that idyllic dream that I lived in for the years I homeschooled but lost my own identity. I journal at points in my life when I need to process and to contemplate. Right now, it feels like I am too busy living to process and contemplate things. I expect my journaling will simply be slow through this season, and honestly I realize I am okay with this reality. Parenting six teens and pre-teens is EXHAUSTING (don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise). Add two caboose babies who need to still be cuddled and cherished and not forced to grow up too soon, work, school and a marriage that I actually put solid effort into these days. My life is too busy for me to live it right now. It's certainly too busy for me to contemplate it much, which maybe that's good. I've discovered the hard way that I can hit exactly 5 hours of not being so hectic and busy living with this zoo crew before grief will wash over me and it all comes back. I'm not ignoring that whisper. Hell, I've finally found a place where I can SPEAK at work about Micah and not fall apart, because I dearly want him recognized for being my son forever. I just know that grief is there, it will always be there. I face it in snippets, in those moments when I can and do step out of this life. To parent day to day, the numbness is safe for me. I talk a lot to other parents when I encounter them, and they all assure me this is the reality of the rest of my life--always there, always lurking, always part of who I will forever be. Life is what has happened while I wasn't making plans but just focused on living. This is my reality now. I expect it will remain like this until I finish my doctorate and can enter nurse practitioner work without additional schoolwork always lurking.

Bad Mommy

My children have not seen an eye doctor in three years. I know children are supposed to see the eye doctor annually but we have not taken them in three years. When II left his job and we went back to school, we had everyone in the family's eyes checked before we lost insurance. That was actually the first eye exam I had personally had in nearly 20 years. II swore I had to have eye issues and my vision was still 20/20 so I basically told II to bite me on that one. Granted, when I hit 40, I am aware that I must start seeing an eye doctor because normal aging causes the eyes to deteriorate. When I get stressed or tired, my eyes go blurry, but they said that is a muscular issue and glasses won't help it.

Anyway, the kids all saw the eye doctor at that point. To that point, they saw the eye doctor annually. If I let myself, I feel like a horrible mother for then skipping three years. However, I think I have reached a threshold of acceptance and forgiveness for myself these days. I'm truly not that bothered that it's been three years.

Here's the thing. My kids do not have horrible eye sight. If had a child with really bad eyesight, I would never have allowed it to go three years. My oldest always had a slight nearsighted issue, but not enough to justify glasses for him. However, he did have an astigmatism that did require glasses, and we have always bought the glasses and it's been explained to this child that the glasses will help correct the astigmatism. Then, two to three weeks after the glasses show up, every.single.time., the glasses either get "lost" or they get broken. Seriously, this child is so talented at eliminating his glasses that they were once dropped right underneath the wheel of the big van and run over before anyone realized it. After years and years of buying the glasses and replacing them multiple times before giving up for another year when the eye doctor finally said forget it, they won't work if he won't wear them.

The second child has always been slightly near sighted, but again same problem with the glasses. She gets them, claims she loves them, then loses them. Just like her brother after the second or third replacement in a row, the eye doctor says forget it, her eyesight is not bad enough for this battle. I have monitored her for any odd holding habits, complaints of headaches, etc. Plus, she has seen her primary doctor and their cursory exams don't indicate a significant progression. Probably not the best parenting tactic, but honestly I figured either her eyesight would progress where she had no choice, or she would reach a place of maturity where it was no longer a battle. I have nightmares of the battles of glasses that occurred in my own childhood, and I refuse to create those nightmares with my own children. None of the children have ever had vision significantly poor, despite some strong genetic risks that they could (II, my father and my sister are naturally legally blind but all three have had corrective surgery so none actually wear glasses now).

So, as I'm correcting all of the things that fell apart as Micah died, vision exams for the kids was near the bottom of the list--quite necessary but no one was presenting with significant concerns to bump the priority. This month, we accomplished this task. Come to think of it, I don't think there is anything lower on the task except we must get J back to his Pulmonologist now that fall is here and his asthma is flaring again, but he shares a Pulmonologist with Micah and it's emotionally difficult for me to do this task. II agreed last week that he will take over this one, since he has been back to that clinic and that doctor several times and has reached a point where he can at least do what I struggle with.

The tally of eye glasses is nearly what I anticipated this year. A has an astigmatism, which he has long had. He has a tiny bit of near sightedness in one eye. If he would wear glasses for awhile, the doctors continue to assure us the astigmatism would correct and he would no longer require them. They've been telling us and A that since he was eight and he continues to refuse. We did buy him glasses yet again. He did agree if we would buy the really ridiculously expensive pair he wanted, then he would wear them for school. If he does, he might not need them at all by the end of college. However, I won't hold my breath. I think Dad got suckered into really expensive glasses that will be lost or broken before Christmas....again.

E is slightly nearsighted. She has always been this, and it has not progressed. Once again, we bought her glasses. I do have to say she showed her maturity and this time instead of gaudy, pink, and sparkly she picked a pair that actually make her look stunning, even better than she looks without glasses. So, maybe she will see them as a fashion accessory and wear them finally.

The surprise was the not-twins. C shows no signs of needing glasses per se, but it's hard to gage with his dyslexia. Ch, on the other hand, insists that everything should be two inches from his nose in order for him to read it. I truly thought Ch needed glasses, it was part of what prompted me to get the eye exams done finally. Ch has perfect vision. He appears to have a bad habit where he thinks cross-eyed is better than normal. Guess that explains why he keeps telling me he CAN read when he holds things at arms length but then immediately returns it to rest upon his nose when I stop asking. C needs glasses. His eyesight is on par with E, again not the horrible vision that runs on both sides of their family tree, but glasses just the same. He was actually quite excited to get his own pair.

R, L, and J continue to have perfect vision, as I suspected. For the first time, R did her appointment and did not cry in disappointment when she was told yet again she did not need glasses. My strange tom boy girl, she wants her outer appearance to reflect what she feels inside and she definitely feels glasses are part of what she feels inside, along with boy pants and shirts with only a touch of girly colors/flare and NO DRESSES.

The last child in the tally was S. I really had no idea what we were going to find with S. However, we have a laundry list of medical conditions we have determined are a direct result of the horrific neglect he suffered for the four years he was in the US and received worse healthcare than his ten years in Africa. So, I knew I was going to need to brace myself. S showed up with reading glasses and a healthy fear that he was to NEVER read without them, a rather odd fear for any child especially one who can apparently actual read without the glasses. He has refused to wear these glasses except on very rare occasions. We were told he had new glasses issued last spring, just before his abandonment and since there were a million other things to address with this child, I left it alone until he felt safe to address it. We talked for several weeks that if he needs glasses and if he can wear contacts, we will absolutely allow him to move to contacts. Otherwise, we will allow him to choose his own glasses and will not interfere in any way with that process for him.

We cannot determine what S requires yet. One eye is perfect vision. The other eye has an accommodation spasm. He must return in several weeks for a special eye drop to allow them to examine the eye properly without the spams interfering. Basically, when he attempts to switch from near to far and back, one eye goes into spasms instead of changing focus. What truly pisses me off is that the worthless monsters who did nothing but blame this child for all that went wrong in their house did have some idea of his vision issues. He did have glasses when he lived there. When we confronted them about the educational neglect, we were informed that S had a low IQ combined with a visual processing learning disability and that was why he never learned in their home and NOT the reality that she used the exact same first grade curriculum to "teach" him for four years. This explains why the school psychologist was not able to find ANY learning disabilities when he was formally tested. He did not have a low IQ and a visual processing disorder. He has ESL struggles and a muscular condition. They are both things that are easily address in a homeschooling situation but they are NOT an excuse for educational neglect.

So, I may be an imperfect mother. The truth is that I have reached a point that I won't swallow the pill of mother guilt of these vision issues. There have been significant issues happening in our family over the last several years, and none of the children showed signs of a major issue. Had they shown those signs, I was watching and I would have taken them in. Otherwise, we needed to take recovery one step at a time as a family. This is one of the final steps of getting back to a normal life. I'm thrilled to have finally accomplished it (but I'm now behind on well child checks due to the confusion of moving last year and must pick that up in the next two months to get everyone straightened out--long story but not terribly behind just more than a year). I have found grace and mercy for myself and my imperfections as a human. That's something I never truly thought I would find. I still stumble, but I don't automatically castigate myself for missing something, for being slow, or for just needing to work one step at a time instead of meeting all needs right away. I guess I am learning and growing afterall.

Finally--introducing S!

Oh happy day, my gag order is finally lifted!

For the record, the gag order came from the lawyer, the one we had to hire to protect this precious child after he was dumped on our doorstep 17 months ago. If you've read the Reuters investigation about underground re-homing of adoptees, primarily international adoptees, then you are familiar with the situation. S came from exactly one of those situations.

Fundamentalist Christian family (primarily homechurched because they felt even the most conservative churches were to liberal and not Christian), Patriarchal, Dominionist, Quiverful family adopted three children from Liberia the exact same month that Micah made his journey home to us. They had at that time, six biological children including one with a major medical condition and another who was later diagnosed with autism. Yet, they adopted three children, S completely unrelated to the two other children they adopted, from an orphanage in Liberia known for child trafficking issues through an adoption agency that has gone defunct in large part due to their unethical practices in Liberia. They have since had two more biological children. The family is uber modest, as in all females in the house, even infant females, are required to wear long dresses with long pants underneath and headcoverings. The boys were permitted to wear shorts, but nothing sleeveless and exposing the girls in the house to their bare chest was considered sinful.

So, just before Mother's Day last year, on one of my adoption support groups, this woman put out a plea for someone who had experience dealing with the trauma issues one would see in a teenager from W. Africa. Having A from Sierra Leone and having helped him resolve his PTSD issues over the years, I reached out to offer support. Ordinarily, I would have recognized an ad to dump a kid pretty quickly. As anyone might recall, Micah was dying. Last year was anything but ordinary. When I contacted this woman, I was told either we took him, or he was being sent back to Liberia. She literally wanted to bring him to my house within 24 hours and be done with him. I stepped back and offered her reliable, legal resources. She persisted. Over the course of two weeks, I required her to provide access to his medical and mental health records, to determine whether he was safe to enter my home, including authorizing me to communicate with his therapist (though the therapist failed to disclose that she had only seen him once because they refused to actually bring him to therapy with her). They had twice previously attempted to dump him by leaving him in mental health facilities until the authorities had informed them either they picked him up, or they would be charged with child abandonment.

Ultimately, we felt the continued threats to dump this child in significantly less safe situations was a credible threat. I had been long familiar with Kathryn Joyce's research and the reality that multiple Liberian adoptees have in fact been shipped back to Liberia, a reality that has failed to make our national news because Liberia is simply not Russia and has not brought it to our media attention. I knew this child was at risk. So, we felt we could provide a safe haven for the summer, get the child intensive therapy for his PTSD and then work to re-integrate him back into his family safely.

The bizarrity of this situation only got worse and worse. There was a third family involved that this couple was shopping this child like a used car around to others. They became involved when this woman knocked on their door late at night and upon answering it said, "You have black children, do you want mine?" Yes, they were also an adoptive family, but the insanity of this couple was just mind blowing. This child was the last of the three adoptees to be removed from this family's home. She had an extensive blog presence online at one point, thus she detailed the removal of the first child in disgusting and frightening religious justification. The disappearance of the second child cannot be traced. She simply disappears from family pictures approximately 2010. Yet, the insurance card which they presented us with S on it contained her name along with the last infant of the family who was born after the child's removal.

Ultimately, we and the third family they shopped my child to worked in coordination to assure that S was safe and cared for. We agreed that it did not matter which family he lived with, so long as we all conveyed he was wanted and loved and safe in both homes. Ultimately, we involved the state, both to protect S and to alert them to the disappearance of the other children. Under the supervision of the state, S was told it was up to him to choose his forever family, and when given his own choice, S made the decision to come back to us.

The second time he came, we hired our attorney before we accepted custody of him again. Upon her advice, we attempted to amicably convince the first family to surrender parental rights and allow us to adopt him. When that failed, we filed for legal guardianship and adoption without their consent. Only after we were awarded temporary guardianship and within days of the hearing for us to go to court for permanent custody, they stipulated guardianship to us, and ultimately they finally signed voluntary consents to terminate their parental rights and allow us to adopt him.

So, in the middle of Micah dying, we were surprised with the arrival of a hurting, heartbroken teen boy from Liberia and who had NO citizenship, due to the first family's deliberate refusal to finalize his US adoption--a loophole for them to ward against child abandonment charges, but given that Liberia revokes citizenship to these adoptees under the belief they will be conferred with US citizenship, in that limbo place, it leaves these children without a country. For S, that nightmare is finally over. The Child Adoption Act of 2000 states that international adoptees are automatically awarded their US citizenship either upon finalization overseas IF the child met both parents prior to that finalization, or upon the US recognition or re-adoption if they did not. By finalizing his adoption in August, we also gave S citizenship again.

S is a beautiful child. He has tremendous hurt in his life. To this point, we have barely scratched the surface of the trauma he survived in Liberia because 17 months of therapy have been primarily utilized to address four years of horrific abuse he endured with the first adoptive family. Strangely, S felt safe with me from the state because the abuse he endured for those four years almost identically mirrors the abuse I endured growing up.

S has a protective spirit. He adores showing love to others, something he was unable to do for so very long. He is a dedicated athlete with a special skill for wrestling. He entered our home after receiving the same first grade school material for four years straight and yet somehow advancing on his own to a third grade level of education. He spent most of this time in the first home required to be isolated in his bedroom for fear he might hurt someone because he was a black boy. He came here starving, scared, homesick for both the home he knew there and Liberia and with a past this family tried to erase. They even tried to erase what tribe this child was. We have managed to identify his tribe. I knew enough about international adoptees that I knew a child who had remained in his birthome until he was six would recognize his mother tongue, even if he can no longer recall it. So deliberate was their attempts to erase everything that made him S that they scratched out his tribe name in a small statue they purchased in Liberia while picking him up.

S had so much to learn and address upon homecoming. He had never learned how to be a normal child. He had never stepped foot in a school building. He did not speak normal English. He had never used a microwave. He had been beaten down, degraded, shamed and abused. When he could take the abuse no longer he was thrown away like a piece of trash. All of that was not accounting for the trauma of surviving civil war, which is a tremendous struggle for any child without the added garbage this child faced.

Today, S has reached point where his struggles and pain are not the first thing anyone sees about him. He can present himself as normal, yet feels very safe at home that (as he says) we understand his issues. I often have to remind myself that this child's love language is gift giving. Sometimes even the smallest gift will light up his face. He was never allowed to have anything that belonged to HIM prior to here.

Integrating S has been a distraction in my grieving this last year. This child has a beautiful soul and a very bright young man, but he does not fully believe in himself yet. He has significant educational neglect issues, but not actual learning disabilities. Last year, we taught him how to go to school and act in a normal environment. This year, we are focused on repairing his education that was denied him his entire life. I cannot say this child will get through this unscathed. I don't believe he actually will. I do believe we are giving him every opportunity to have a healthy future, but he must learn and make his choices for that future. He must be safe to make mistakes and to learn he is safe and those mistakes will not cause him to be abandoned again. He has to learn that the aftermath of his abuse and trauma in the form of mental health struggles may never fully heal but that he can learn to manage them and to be proactive about them.

S arrived here with the maturity of a typical eight year old. He has grown and matured so dramatically in the last 17 months, but he is still not quite where a typical 16 year old would fall. Even so, at the rapid growth he continues to display, we do believe he will likely get there by early 20s. He's not one that I expect to be all grown and entered into adulthood by 18, but certainly in his early 20s he should get there. So long as he can overcome the Stockholm Syndrome of the four years of abuse, then he will understand the need to fight for his own health and healing.

So, this is my ninth child, my accidental adoption of a child who has endured so much more than anyone can imagine, yet continues to show the spirit of strength that helped him survive the hell he lived. He is very attached to myself and most of his siblings. He continues to hold II at arms length and act very attach disordered with II. We both understand that this is a result of no man ever being safe for this child. It is an interesting reversal of roles from Ch and Micah and their attachment struggles that were exclusively aimed my direction. I cannot tell you this child will be okay. I can only say he has every chance to fight for okay in his life now. His story and his future is still being written and his healing is still actively being sought. Now that he is adopted and has citizenship, and the power of the abusers has been permanently revoked, I am free to talk about my son in ways I could not to this point.

Teach a man to fish

This week, we had a new graduate in the clinic. I am absolutely positive, based upon how I have seen them treat others and how they treated me, that the days before I worked they treated him without accepting him. When he learned my proclivity for being able to teach, he decided to drag me all over the clinic and teach him everything he could find for me to show him. I told my co-worker today that I haven't seen a new graduate as enthusiastic as this one yet.

It was fun to help teach a new graduate the ropes. This kid showed up with raw talent and no confidence. He had had very little clinical time in nursing school, having completed a hybrid bachelor's to RN program where they focused heavily on the didactic and passing the examination board but came up terribly short on clinical time. Yet, despite having never started an IV before this week, and totally bombing his first two days, I was able to walk him through how to start an IV earlier this week and by the second time he was getting it the first time, every time. Today, eager to get every chance for practice he could before his week was up, he started almost every IV in the clinic. He also got them the first time, each time, even on a patient that is a terrible stick for us.

The kid has a bachelor's in biology before he altered and went to nursing school. It's not as if he doesn't have the head knowledge to be a nurse. He just lacks both experience and confidence. His first two days, he was basically left to sink or swim on his own. By midday on Wednesday, he was asking me to please show him every thing. Today, he was doing it all on his own. He kept going on and on about what a terrific teacher I am and how very grateful he is that our clinic was his first stop on his year of training.

The thing is, teaching people is what I am best at doing. I stop whatever I am doing anytime a patient wants me to give them knowledge and I give them as much as they can handle, in the format that they can understand. When students or new graduates into the clinic, I have the same response with them. I spent two decades homeschooling children, multiple of those children with learning struggles or language issues. I'm very good at deciphering when someone truly understands what I said and when they are completely lost. I know how to alter my words until I find a method of explanation that makes the confusion clear for someone.

I know that others can see this talent I possess, not because they all rave about how grateful they are to find a true teacher, but because I encounter it. I see the grateful look when someone finally gets something they hadn't gotten before. I hear it from my instructors in school and my manager on my annual review. I know that I enjoy this when it comes up, whether it is at home with my children or elsewhere.

What I don't know is what I'm supposed to do with this talent. I am moving forward with my intentions to become a nurse practitioner, and I know I can teach nursing. I also know that sometimes in my own coursework I take time to teach other students instead of merely be a student myself. This week was not the first time a professor asked permission to use my work to teach other students even after I complete a class.

We don't pay teachers peanuts in this country. So, if I went into strictly teaching, I would never made money. I can do a hybrid of practice and teaching, but there is only one of me and I'm not certain that I want to work two jobs per se, especially when each is complicated in their own right. For now, I teach whenever and whomever the opportunity arises. This week's student had already learned that nurses eat their young and was so grateful to find a nurse who nurtures and teaches instead. There will be more. Whether it is a patient getting a blood transfusion, or a new graduate who made it through nursing school without starting IVs. Until I can figure out how to merge both sides of my personality, I continue to pursue nursing and teach when the need arises.

Climbing the mountain

Last month, I got some nasty malware on my computer. II is supposed to have virus protection on my computer, but something got through the firewall, something very nasty. Ultimately, he had to scrub the harddrive and completely reformat it. He always saves my files when he does it, and it's happened a surprising number of times--I'm terribly at safe web surfing, it seems. However, when he restored my favorites links, he alphabetized them. It drives me insane because I organize them by priority and they come back in a way I cannot navigate them, including finding the link to my own blog. Life has always taken priority over anything online, but especially blogging, so the blog sits silent while I live my life. Probably best that way but I started this to record my thoughts and sometimes it is best that I write and let things out.

Busy is a good state of being for me. It's not that I cannot address the grief of the last year. It's that if I actually stop, if I let myself fall apart, there will be no one here to pick everyone else up again. I give myself moments, permission to weep, to wail, to scream at the universe and a god I'm not sure if I believe in or not anymore. I am only allowed moments. More than that and the family falls apart. The children need me, and while I truly believe they have been instrumental in my getting through this for their sakes, there are times I get frustrated that their needs mean I must keep my own under control so tightly. E's therapist asked me last week if I have people to talk to. She said I don't have to have a formal therapist, so long as I have a way and a support when I need to talk and vent. Thankfully, I do have that. I have a good support system, a long list of friends I can reach out to, and a massage therapist whose main job is not the massage he gives me weekly but the question he asks me first--how are you doing this week? Eddie keeps me honest about my grief and my processing, and his touch on my body relieves the physical struggles I battle from both the grief and the medical conditions which escalated in this grief.

I am 1/3 of the way through this second Bachelor's in nursing and rapidly remembering WHY nursing was the one type of course I made Cs in the first time. I don't enjoy nursing courses the way I enjoy other classes. Sadly, I enjoy practicing nursing, so I must tolerate the formalized nursing classes to get there. My nurse practitioner friends assure me that nursing at the graduate level is far more my level of investment. However, for now I've taken on two very complicated nursing courses with heavy workloads. One of them challenges me and I enjoy, the other is tedious clinical work. In the fall, I get to take cultural nursing which should be much more enjoyable, as well as a basic math course that I don't really need but exempting would force me to choose another unneeded class to meet the residency requirement for this degree.

More importantly, we faced the anniversary. I really feel we're still on shaky ground, but we all seem to be settling down somewhat with it behind us instead of right before us. We went on vacation, camping as a family. We had not gone camping for four years. Our last fateful camping trip involved a trip to the beach, Micah's one and only camping trip. We took the kids to Gulf Shores for the fourth of July. Micah was not impressed. Our memories of that trip have become family lore. Until we made camp and found the remnants of that trip. There was sand still inside the tents, reminding us that when the storms came we gave up trying to manage Micah's constant raging from the change in pattern and left quickly. The hole he made his first night camping, when he howled at the moon (literally) while he busted through all of his medications given to help him sleep, was still taped with the tent tape II ran to Walmart at midnight to repair. There were rocks he had collected in the tote of supplies. A diaper that was packed for J on that trip, so tiny compared to the big preschooler he is today.

Our tears were mingled with laughter this time. Camping was tremendous fun and it was heartbinding that we gave S his very first camping trip of his life. We wanted to take Micah camping often. We found a way to manage his medical needs while camping (a flutter device and a campsite with electricity were required). We never found a way to manage his autism while camping. I know now that camping was simply far too sensory stimulating for a little one who was so sensory avoidant. After that fateful camping trip with Micah, we contained traveling with him to hotel rooms. Remembering all of that always reminds me of his last vacation trip. Labor Day 2011, we went to the Atlanta Fire Cup, as we had done every year for A's soccer adventures. That year, Micah's behaviors had suddenly escalated. I knew already what I had not told any of the siblings. I knew his CF doctor was stymied and had sent us home so he could rethink all that he knew because Micah was not responding to the treatments he was giving him. I knew he was dying already. When A asked if we could leave Micah home with the nanny, I told him there was a strong possibility that this would be Micah's last soccer tournament and that he was always such a die-hard fan of his big brother and his soccer abilities. I told A he had to bring Micah. Micah was actually on decent behavior that weekend. Hotel rooms were much easier for Micah, and hotels with pools meant I could distract him if he did get overwhelmed. A's team won the tournament and Micah was SOOO proud of his big brother that weekend. I am so glad I made sure Micah had that tournament. It was Micah's last vacation. The move to New England was not vacation and he was so terribly fragile during that trip that I worried if we could get him moved in time.

This weekend, we reaffirmed as a family that we need to go camping again. We can carry Micah in spirit and memory even though he was not so good at camping when he was alive. We hiked a mountain, literally. We followed a waterfall up the mountain and then the trail went back down the other side. J and I struggled with our asthma so we took frequent breaks, but we did it just the same. It seemed to be the epitome of the weekend and the task faced by all of us in this grieving journey.

It's not that this gets better. It's just that time passes and we survive another milestone. I hate being able to say it's been a year now. I hate that every day that passes takes me further away from my baby. I just know I cannot stop time from passing. Getting past the 12th has made me less triggery. However, it now brings me into remembrances of the first month last year. That was the month that the crazy nanny decided to turn everyone's grieving into her own drama llama game. I would rather not have to remember her, but Micah loved her. It was one of the two reasons I let her stay so long even after I realized how crazy she was. The other was that we all feared what happened to her children if I sent her away. Once in awhile, I stop and remember her behaviors last year, how she was so desperate to control all of the attention, even to the point she forbad anyone from saying Micah's name around her. I only wonder if she had enough sanity and genuine feelings inside of her to stop and remember that a year ago Micah died. Did he actually mean anything to her at all, or was he just part of the scam she ran on this family to milk support from us as well as childrearing for her children? The only video I have of Micah's voice was when she was tickling him. She was a part of his life for the last year of his life. Did he matter to her, or did she take so much of his heart and his living and toss it away when she did her exit drama out of here? I would like to think that Micah did not love in vain. It was so hard for him to truly love people and I would like to think that his choice to love her made an impact on her soul just as it has ours. I just don't believe it did. I don't think she is capable of love in the way Micah loved her. So somehow I feel guilty that I let Micah give part of what little life he had to someone who squandered his gift. I also hope that with time the grieving Micah will not be mingled with the crazy that wasn't worthy of his life nor the attention she stole from all of us when he died.

It's all just so anti-climatic. We don't wake up with it gone, our memories scrubbed and our hearts strong. We just wake up again, having faced the mountain and scaled it. We simply know there will be other mountains in our path, other times to grieve. Micah's life was far too short, but his spirit was so very bright. I still hear him calling me sometimes. Sadly, I never find him actually there when I hear him. I would give so much to run my hands through his hair again, to listen to him breath and marvel at his long, piano player fingers. Man, he could himself into so much trouble with those long fingers!

I still miss my Micah-man. I guess I always will.

Temporarily solo

II had to travel out of state for a business trip this week. It's been since before Micah died that he left us for this long, and it's been really rough for both of us. He mentioned that he used to enjoy business trips. Setting aside what he did on those trips years ago, business trips were always a time to stay in a hotel, where he got it quiet and someone else cleaned up after him.

Now, it just aches to have him gone. He reports the same feeling. It's exhausting to be without him to co-parent these kids.

This week, I have had to work more hours due to situations at work. I have had to do two major projects for my current class in the midst of this. I am stressed and exhausted. More importantly, when I put down the schoolwork tonight, I realized I haven't spent nearly enough time being MOMMY in all of this.....and I have to work tomorrow.

I am determined to love on my babies on their way to school tomorrow, and tomorrow night when I get home. I wish there were more of me and I could do more. The truth is that I realized in those nine months I was solo and finishing my last degree, I am not a good single mother to this many children. These children thrive with both II and I. I am so eternally grateful that we both got our shit together so these kids have both of us still actively engaged in their lives. I would like to believe we would do that even if we hadn't made it. I'm just glad we did and they get the benefit of both of us...every day....except when one of us is out of town.

Thankfully, I turned in the last large project for this class. I finished my last paper for the month. I got chores accomplished, and have successfully fed the children. When II comes home, I am hoping to sleep. I don't really care if I do less. I just want to sleep. I will just be glad to be back to a parenting team again.

I miss my husband.