Needing a Family
Brene Brown has written beautifully about her experience with addiction, and the fact that for her, the real struggle has been with food. Alcohol and drugs you can quit. Food is a little more complicated.
It’s one thing to struggle with something you don’t need.
It’s quite another to struggle with something you do need.
I think this is a useful frame when thinking of kids in foster care. They have every reason to struggle with something necessary: having a family.
I don’t like this reality, but there it is: my daughter has every reason, given her lived experience, to not trust my parenthood. Will I go away? Will I still be there? Who do I belong to? Will this change?
After all, it has all changed before. How could she know that this time is different?
This isn’t a pressing daily conversation for us so much as an undercurrent, something I do well to remind myself of. Somewhere in her survival brain, she is scanning her environment to make sure she is safe.
Every kid needs to feel safe, but the amount of energy a child who has never faced significant danger spends on this task is much less than a child who has. It’s like a program running on a computer in the background, using memory that could be going to something else.
Legally, foster care and adoption is in the past. But biologically, she is still accounting for her history.
At the adoption the judge didn’t wave a magic fairy wand and reset my daughter’s brain’s sense of safety. That work can only be done by my daughter, who can only accomplish it with the help of supportive, stable relationships over time.
A lot of people see adoption from foster care as foster care, and its challenges, being “over.” But it’s not, not by a long shot.
The repair work is ongoing. A steadiness of days and nights and rythyms and routines, the sewing together of experiences to shift her being from one reality to another. Building another set of positive family experiences to add to and hopefully dialogue with the negative ones takes time.
This is why foster and adoptive families and parents need long term support for themselves, as well. We can’t give something we don’t have, so refilling our cups, finding our steadiness amidst the daily stressors of life is important for us, too.
Our kids need to push our buttons to find their own boundaries and sense of safety. We adults need to be able to sustain this reality, stay resilient in the face of it. This is true of all kids, and all parents, but it can be a considerably larger task for those of us with children who, through no fault of our or their own, have very good reason not to trust this whole family thing.