The randomness? Hard to believe, but this is not a dirty house. I've pulled children from dirty houses. Trust me. This is not That. This is me pulling things out in order to pack strategically. But 8 rolls of wrapping paper? How does a single-ish girl even COLLECT 8 rolls of wrapping paper? And how does a single-ish girl PACK 8 rolls of wrapping paper?
and wanting to kiss
these cheeks so badly.
Her mommy's too.
Many blessings coming in this move ....
... I won't ever *really* be able to tell you how my little girl from my last post turns out. We did, however, wrap up our camera project and oh, how I wish I could really, really tell you the joy she captured on film.
What else?
A 3 day trip to the Olympic Peninsula. One last, stolen getaway before the chaos of the move and the beginning of graduate school. Lots of time in the car. Lots of time discussing, sharing, relating, discovering.
Falling?
Crescent Lake. A long, clear, beautiful expanse I wanted to jump completely in and let it swallow me. Fear of hypothermia, however, is a dream killer ...
Places on maps exist in real life. I need to remember that more ...
An hour or so here at Rialto Beach does a soul good and makes a girl happy. {Pick me, marketers! I can do soooo much better for your tourist advertising than capitalizing on Forks ~ which is a sad, sorrowful place coincidentally ...}
I'm not so readily armed with details, but hints are my forte. Piano forte!! It was a lovely weekend. I am a lucky girl.
And sooooooo popular with new four year old friends named Michael:
I am not the mermaid, but I am the face immediately to the left of the mermaid. Lifelike, right? Thanks, Michael!!
And now, on to finishing my last {4} days of employment with the County. Time to assimilate and process and develop some closure.
... at my current position, I've found I have an issue. I have a little girl on my caseload who has no childhood.
Specifically, I have a little girl who, in her current foster home, has a shoebox of belongings, an envelope of letters and one drawer full of clothing.
That's it.
That is the totality of what she owns.
What she is missing is not just the material goods to call her own, however. She is missing a family. She is missing her future family, her past family and is blessed to have found a gem of a "right now" family ... but. But.
She knows This is not It.
It's not the lack of material goods that break my heart. It's seeing her lay all of what she owns side by side on her bed and listening to her tell the same story over and over again.
That's what breaks my heart. It's listening to her talk about her "real" family vs. the family she hopes one day will want her. It's having her remember her birth family and having nothing to hold, nothing to look at, nothing to validate that she has this entire history that was very Real, and she has a family she misses wholly.
Hole-y.
So she compartmentalizes.
Don't we all?
This hurts, so I deal with This here, but I don't deal with It here, because when I'm there, I need to feel / think / focus / BE / somebody else. At a foster home, no fault of the foster home, she's part of the temporary, in and out, loved but not a birth child flow. Her items are in a shoebox under the bed. It is not her bed. Her clothes fill a drawer. It's a dresser shared by multiple children.
She can love her birth family once a week for two hours.
She can be at school and learn.
She can be a giggly part of her foster home.
They are all separate. Those worlds do not collide. She does not talk about the other parts of her life during the Other Parts of Her Life.
I understand this about her. I was very much like this right after my divorce. I talked about it with These people, but not Those people and Work was Work and Church was Church and I was fragmented and not connected and it helped.
Sure.
For a season. But not that long. Truly ... honestly ... it was exhausting. And people are not straight lines. They are circles. We are connected to ourselves, every bit of ourselves; ourselves are connected to every part of our lives and we are so very connected with each other. Totality. {The heart of God.}
Today I dropped off several disposable cameras to many people in Little Girl's life. They will take pictures. She will take pictures. I will develop the film.
And when we are done, there will not be gaps. There will be pictures to hold. She chooses to compartmentalize or not ~ that decision is hers.
But in that shoebox under her bed will be mounds of pictures of the people she loves. And no matter what happens in the next few years, there will not be a missing gap of information (as is so often the case with foster children. They are ghosts in family pictures for the amount of time they spend in foster care). This is her reality, no matter how much we wish it could be different.
We need to help her choose to face it in love. In the end, we cannot give her her childhood back. But what we can give her is the sense that what this is, Is, and that what her life is, is what she chooses to make it. It's real. I'll give her the tools to help make it real. She can look at the pictures. Or not. She can live in her fragmented life. Or not. It is so entirely up to her.
I hope she chooses a gentle path for herself.
.... of driving back and forth to Portland every week.
It's 4 hours.
One way.
But will be so worth it.
Eventually.
This latest trip ... a job interview ... a new "favorite" restaurant (of which there will be oh, so many) ... and the discovery that our new ceilings are vaulted ... to the moon.
So delicious.
Cheryl thought so, too.
How to take pictures of an apartment? I do not know ... this is a talent I surely don't possess. After wiggling, laying down, squinching, angling ... this is the best I could do. Maybe more later. Once boxes are unpacked. Maybe not.
Time for a nap.
... I'm introducing her just a tad more. She's the one on the right.
Slightly out of the norm for me, as I generally keep my family, my friends and any charming young men I date tucked carefully close to my heart. Facing me.
But we're moving in together, and so my stories become her stories become our stories become your stories ... kind of ... those of you who read this.
I've got sisters.
I've got a sister Liz who's older, married, has 4 children and lives in a town close to Portland.
I've got a sister Hannah, who's 18 years younger than me and lives not near Portland but in the same state.
(Ok, in all fairness, I have a brother, too - Greg, whom I can't NOT mention, even though this posting is about sisters.)
And then there's Cheryl. Who's been my sister the longest (blended family). Who knows how deeply family dysfunction can run and knows how hard we all fight to keep above it. Who has fought with me and borrowed my roller skates and had the better Barbie house and played hide and go seek with me and loved horses while I was deathly afraid of them and used to watch "labyrinth" in my room (much to my chagrin) almost every day and went to Pebble beach with me and went snorkeling in Oahu with me and sang duets with me in the bathroom and watched Ghostbusters with me when we were kids (and didn't laugh at me when I got scared) and loved the cartoon "gem" and made up dance routines with me.
Cheryl will be going to the same school, undergraduate, finishing her degree in biochemistry (she's a smart one). We will drive each other crazy, fight, make up the next day and drink a lot of Starbucks together. We'll go through periods when we'll only shop at organic markets and then go through periods where taco bell seems like an incredible idea. We'll make a million plans and follow through with two and a half with them.
She'll finally introduce me to Korean food (she's fluent! ~ in the food and the language) and maybe even teach me to run. I'll stick by her side as she starts yoga with me.
We've worked hard at being "family", Cheryl and I. No doubt due to our
peripatetic upbringing (I just learned that word 10 minutes ago! :D ). My dad was in the military, and the four of us that were the family at the time lived in Europe until I was 9, and then we went to the Philippines when I was 11 (short stay there due to extreme political instability). I started to get to know my extended family (grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.,) when I was 18.
So stay tuned. Once you know her, you love her.
I think I'm having one. Will somebody please come motivationally interview me? (That was a terrible social work play on words. I'm almost embarrassed enough to remove the question. Almost. ;))
Some of you know me personally, and I think it's fair to say that I can be easily described as a type A, get things done, detail oriented type of personality. In other words, I take care of my business, all along so arrogantly thinking it's no big deal.
I'm dedicated to my job and to the children I represent in court. I care about the volunteers' reports and making sure they're perfect (they become part of WA Superior Court record forever, after all). My house is {normally} clean. I know where my money is and where it's going.
Sure, I love to have fun and relax, but usually not at the expense of everything else.
Only, lately .... wow.
Case in point: I have 4 minutes to get back to work from lunch. And am I super motivated to do so? Absolutely not. Am I making it to the office by 8 in the morning? Not exactly. Is this incredibly unusual for me? Yep. Will it last forever? Absolutely not.
And work? It's becoming a joke. I'm trying super hard to stay motivated and ensure that I'm providing appropriate clinical supervision to my staff, but .... some things ... are starting to slip. I'm also delegating a LOT more and letting go of that (their) final product ... it will, after all, be somebody else's responsibility in just a few short weeks. {I'm also having to work lots of random evenings and weekends, which, no doubt, is making it worse.}
But, oh, how I'm ready for this move.
Is it time yet?
1:01. Better get back to the office.
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