Jack Brennan Perspectives

When you adopt a kid from the foster care system, especially a teen, and more especially one who was living in an institution (the old orphanages), you have to recognize that their experiences have led them to thinking  – and not thinking – in a way that is often very surprising. And troubling. 

Anthony’s video about his own adoption is out there online now (Family Focus Adoption on Facebook or Instagram) and I know that he wrote, and then spoke, the truth from beginning to end – which is why we recorded it and put it online. I am writing this afternoon to talk a bit about my perspective on him and his adoption. 

Anthony’s judgement is not good. Like many of the kids with his kind of background (and far too many Americans) he lives by his feelings.  Like a young kid, he wants what he wants when he wants it. And this has caused him problems. And driven me crazy. 

Example: he had a great position at Amazon for the past year and a half. He liked it; he was good at; and he got paid really well. But he wants to be on his phone when he wants to be on his phone.  For doing it more than once, it got him put on probation. Then, last month, he did it again, while on that probation, and he was immediately fired.  

Prior to that, my second car, that I was letting him use, died. He decided that he wanted to get a fancy-dancy car. As my car dealer called it: a “vroom vroom” car.  Anthony found a used one at a dealer in the Bronx.  I told him not to buy it: that a car in the city would most likely have much more wear and tear on it than a suburban car. But he was determined. I told him what to watch out for from this used car dealer and I watched as Anthony just blew past every red flag that I saw and pointed out to him. And there were plenty. I asked: “What are you going to do if this lying guy is selling you a lemon; what if you have to bring it to him for repairs and he keeps the car for weeks to do them? What if the lemon can’t be fixed? Where will you get the money to buy a different car?” And so forth and so on.   But he’s 20 years old – I couldn’t forbid him. So, he bought it. I told him that he was on his own. I wasn’t helping him buy it; I wasn’t driving to the Bronx, etc. (of course I violated that when I took him to my mechanics later.)

Within days, the “check engine light” came on. My mechanic, around the corner, opened the hood and said that there was no way he could fix the car.  We took it to my dealer’s mechanic and he said something that he had never said to me in 25 years: “We cannot fix this car.”  He recommended a specialty shop that fixes “vroom vroom” cars.  We brought the car there a month ago and they – on first look – told us to bring it back to the dealer he got it from and get his money back. But Anthony wanted this car, this model specifically. So, we asked if it could be fixed.  They thought so – but it would cost. They gave us an estimate and began work. And as they did the work they came up upon more and more issues. The estimate kept going up and this week had reached 10 grand. 

Yesterday, they called us in and told us that it wasn’t worth fixing; that there was some (even criminal) issues regarding how it passed inspection etc. They told us what to do to walk away whole and how to get the dealer to buy the car back and pay for the repair work already done using DMV. We will do it and see. Meanwhile, Anthony is without a car still. 

But three times, while we were in the garage, while we walked to my car, when we were in the car, Anthony said to me, “Pop, what are we going to do?”  

I wanted to scream at him for bringing this all down on his head, and mine.  I wanted to tell him that he’d made his bed and he will have to lie in it. I wanted to tell him that “I told you so.”  I wanted to tell him a lot of things. 

But I didn’t. 

Because I was experiencing in that very moment, through his language and his presence with me,  his conviction that he and I were a “WE.” I wouldn’t have talked like that at his age. I would have said, “What am I going to do?”  Anthony said, “What are WE going to do?”

Not a doubt in his mind that WE would be doing something. 

That, folks, is the joy, and the realness, of being a father to this young man. And to all those who have been betrayed as he was.

That is what adoption is about: “Pop, what are we going to do?”

WE.

Jack

I’m an old man now, by any measure: I’ll be 75 in September. But I’m still working full-time. I have a twenty year old whose adoption I finalized 15 months ago. And I reopened my foster care license two months ago for two kids not known to each other; one 15 and the other 18. My oldest three kids are 61, 63, and the oldest, dead now, would be 64 this May. I am an old man, by any measure – it’s true.
But I don’t feel old; I don’t act old; I don’t think old. I live in the present. And in the present, it is time to begin this blog again. Because maybe my words, my stories, my musings will touch someone enough that that someone will decide to give a teen living in foster care with no permanent parent the gift that I was given when I was seventeen: the gift of forever connection to an adult who chose to love me.
For free. Neither Aunt Rita nor Fr. Chris Huntington asked anything of me but respect. Respect for each of them, respect for myself, and respect for every person on earth. They believed that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. After nearly 75 years of my own life, I have seen enough evidence that they were on the money. 100% on the money. That’s why I originally dedicated this blog to their memory. And tonight I renew that dedication.

I don’t know how often I will write, but I will write regularly. I need to reach the people who are able to recognize the inside truth of a teen who has no one; people who then might decide to give that teen a parent, a home, a real life. The people who might decide to choose to love – as Aunt Rita and Fr. Huntington, separately, chose to love me. And thereby gave me this most incredible life. I am, as I expect will become clear going forward, the luckiest man I’ve ever met.
Jack

I was at a meeting last week where adoption workers and supervisors from different counties got together in an attempt to find families for kids who are in particular need – kids who have no one personal in their lives at all.  They are the same kind of kids who get referred to my agency for adoptive placement going back decades.  They are older; many are young teens or close to it; they have psychiatric diagnoses; they have had lots of foster families and so forth.  Finding homes for those kind of kids is why my agency – Family Focus Adoption Services – exists.  I know the type of kids; I have heard the stories for all these years. But this time, there was a significant difference to what I was hearing. Maybe not significant for these caseworkers, but I was new to these meetings, and this was definitely overwhelming for me.

The workers present the kids verbally and thoroughly and it takes a long time to get through them all.  But kid after kid after kid, they reported, had been previously adopted. Not just placed for adoption, but actually finalized in court.  That means, in NY, that their birth certificates, e.g., had been permanently changed. Because they permanently belonged to their adoptive families, the names of the adoptive parents were on their birth certificates – forever.  Yet, here these kids were, most of them years after their finalizations, needing families. It made me berserk.

Our kids have difficulties beyond the norm – no doubt. But our kids have been abused, neglected, and betrayed beyond the norm also.  They are going to have a rocky road growing up. I certainly know this. I am an adoptive parent with some kids now past 50. I get it. But it’s not like any of us didn’t know what we were getting into.  The worst training out there for foster parents gives people enough to know this is not going to be an easy road raising these kids.

And if it turns out to be harder beyond anything we ever dreamed of, so what?  I had no idea – none – of the experiences I would have with my kids when I took the first of them 36 years ago. Plenty of birth parents are raising kids who turned out to be harder to raise than they ever dreamed.  I am not saying one must live with a kid whose behavior would be defined as criminal, were he to be an adult. No one should have to do that. I am saying however that one must remain open to one’s kids, no matter what. No psychiatric, criminal, or any other kind of behavior necessitates closing off one’s heart.  On the contrary, watching one’s child go through those kind of behaviors, should result in opening up one’s (now-broken) heart.

Our kids were targets of other people’s feelings. These kids didn’t ask for the internal consequences that that abuse, neglect, and betrayal, brought inside them, such as PTSD.

We are the adults; we took them on as our kids; and we need to hold on forever. That is the core definition of “parent” isn’t it?  Holding on forever.

Or what’s the point?

Jack

Okay, I’m back. Or more accurately, I think I’m back. It’s been six months since I made a blog entry and I can’t believe that it has been that long. Where have I been?  Busy, of course.  What else could I say?

And what is it that has brought me back this morning? Boiling blood. That is, my blood is boiling. About what? The usual, the always, the ridiculous: bureaucrats and their nonsense.

I got a call last night from a young guy who aged out of the foster care system. He’s 24 now. Like so many of his aged out peers, he has not been doing well preparing for his adulthood. Like so many of them, for whatever reason, he has never learned to protect anything or anybody. He’s thrown away opportunity after opportunity. He blew college; he had his driver’s license snatched; he has no money; no career direction.

As we talked, he told me that he had gone back to a job that I know is not good for him. He knows it too. I asked him why the heck he was doing that. And his response is what made my blood boil – still this morning.

He told me that he had no choice.

Yeah right. What does that ever mean?

Well, it turns out that the only picture id he has – since 9/11 required by almost all jobs – was his license. Once it is an expired license, it doesn’t count as an id. So he needs his birth certificate to begin the process of getting his license back. He claims that he can’t even get a non-driver’s photo id because despite the fact that the DMV KNOWS who he is is – they gave him his license after all – it is bureaucratically irrelevant. His old license, which he only got because he once had the right paperwork and showed it to them, and they know it, is EXPIRED. His picture is on the damn expired license, keep in mind. He has his SS card; school records, etc.  But his evidence that he is himself is EXPIRED!

So, my boy contacted Dade County Florida (Vital Statistics Office) where he was born – in order to get a new copy of his birth certificate. And guess what? He must submit a photo ID to get the birth certificate.   He was on the phone with them for over an hour, he told me, and got nowhere.   And this is the CATCH-22 that drives me berserk.

I figured he was missing some vital detail in his story and there had to be a way to get the birth certificate, even without the picture id. So I tried every which way I could to get it this morning on-line.  And I could not get around the system. There was no way to deal with this not-so-unusual circumstance. Except one, right there on the form: a lawyer. Hire a lawyer. Just what every aged out foster kid can afford.

I did that this morning. I asked a long time friend of Family Focus, who is a lawyer, to take this young man on as a client and she has agreed to help. But where would this guy be if he didn’t know me or I wasn’t willing to help? Exactly where he is: working a job that he shouldn’t be doing with no hope of resolving this.

The kids aging out of foster care continue to have enough things stacked up against them. They don’t need the bureaucracy to make it all worse.

Some of these bureaucratic systems feed hopelessness and disempowerment.  And it’s not just poor folks either.  Have you heard about this medical insurance nonsense that some doctor who is not covered by your insurance can be called into the operating room while you are under, to help out. I’m sure we signed – under duress, of course – permissions for it before the operation.  And then folks are getting hit with medical bills from these non-covered doctors for tens of thousands of dollars.

Thieves and criminals are bad enough, but at least they don’t hide what they are doing under a cloak of reasonableness.  Bureaucrats do. These anti-human systems should be outlawed, dismantled, or drastically changed.  They are disgraceful, and even disgusting, in their disrespect for the person.

Taking away hope from people is very wrong – and very dangerous besides. We don’t get that.

I guess I’m back for real.

Jack

Note: As I quoted Rod Stewart’s line in his song, “Mandolin Wind,” in another context: “Oh, the snow fell without a break….Through the coldest winter in almost fourteen years…” Having a school kid at home, when school is cancelled on even the rumors of snow, has made this the winter from hell for me. Sadly, the blog took a four month hit as a result. But I’m back now. Maybe even bigger and better?

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God and I do not agree on the way He has created the world. I realize He wins, and I lose…. but I believe what I believe anyway. Were it I who created the world, I’d have at least allowed the dead to come back – say, once a year – just to pick up the conversation, in the light of all the experience I’d have had since they died. Sadly, God doesn’t work that way. I plan on discussing that with Him, among all the other things on my list, when I die.

But if He did, I would bring Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington back in a flash. The two people whose conversations and witness gave me more ability to think and put it together than I’ve ever received from anyone else on the face of this earth. There are times when I miss each of them almost to the point of pain. This blog, as I’ve said before (repeatedly, I know) is in honor of each of them.

Aunt Rita, unwittingly I think, once gave me one of the most powerful lessons of my life. She told me that when she was a kid – during the depression – she was poor. But, she said, that she never knew that. She thought that the way she lived was normal. Our whole family lived as she did; all the neighbors lived as she did; and there was no TV to show anyone anything else. It takes – I learned and never forgot –  contrast to recognize where one’s experience fits in the scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in conversation with a boy, now fourteen, who was given up by his adoptive parents, when he was ten. His behavior was out-of-hand. It’s a story one sees too often when working at an adoption agency, as a new family is sought for these kids.

This particular boy, call him Joey, over the course of time has been slowly revealing stories about what happened in the house. Things he didn’t like; things that hurt his heart. They were done to him in response to his behavior, which he recognized as “bad,” so he accepted that he deserved them. Pretty typical thinking for a kid.

Two of his stories are enough, I think, to reveal the truth of what he was in the midst of.

The first happened at some Christmas when he was not yet ten. While all the other kids in the family had a normal Christmas, he received only coal as a present. That was it. He told me that he cried and cried and cried and finally his adoptive mom called Santa and Santa delivered presents the next day.

Now, threatening one’s kids or getting threatened with getting coal in their Christmas stocking is a common experience for those who celebrate Christmas. It’s implied even in the Christmas standard: “Santa Claus is Coming To Town.” Why else start with “You better watch out; you better not cry; better not pout; I’m telling you why….” But in all my 63 years, I have never known anyone who really did it, except perhaps, and only as a joke, wrapping a piece of charcoal and putting it – with all the other presents – in a stocking. You can’t even find it in the movies or the cartoons, as I remember. It’s a threat no one EVER acts on.

The second was when Joey revealed that there were family photos on the walls in the house. But his adoptive mother would take paper and cover over the images of him. What???? And doing that to your child? Who was less than ten? In front of his siblings? And whomever walked through the door?

My grandmother, and separately my great-aunt on the other side of the family, used to cut out from their family pictures the photos of some relative they were on the outs with. I had no idea what that was supposed to do, except express their anger at the cut-out person, and I always found it funny. But that was not this.

In both situations that happened to Joey, it was done in front of the other kids and relatives (humiliation) and it was done by his mother (I don’t even have a word for that.)

What Joey did not know until he revealed these stories, is that this woman was not only wrong – she was wrong to the point of evil. Where her thinking came from I don’t care. What she did to her son was evil.   She did it, she told him, because of his behavior. He saw the behavior, he accepted the logic, and he blamed himself. He has been, in his head and for his whole life, a bad person.

But this posting isn’t just about that. It’s also about Joey’s father. The man didn’t participate in any of this – this wasn’t some version of “Bonnie and Clyde” or one of those torturing couples one sees on “Criminal Minds.” No, he was worse. He stood by and allowed his wife to do what she did to a boy who, after all, was his son. He went along with her soul-stealing behavior. Aunt Rita would say, that he did that because it was easier. Yep, the true mark of a wimp.

All this left Joey no out; no way to measure how depersonalizing his mother’s behavior was. Mom did it; dad, by his silence, allowed it. Joey, in his normal human drive for health and wholeness, had no choice but to act out in order to stand up to this torture of being depersonalized by one’s own parents (after, and on top of, his infant experience of being given up by his birth parents). But the acting out was labeled “bad”, he believed that was so, and that made him convinced that he was a bad person.

Which brings us to today. For a fourteen year old to grasp the concept that his being bad was good; that being bad saved your sanity and your soul from this soul-thief of a mother, is very difficult. But in the end it is what will free him from the horror of his history.

My experience was very different than Joey’s. I saw both Aunt Rita and Chris Huntington stand up to wrongness wherever they witnessed it. I saw it. They gave me what Joey’s father did not give him: not only perspective and hope, but through their witness, they gave me myself.   Joey’s mother was a sick woman to my eyes. But his father did much worse by Joey.

Wimps always do. Without the wimps, the evil-doers don’t get very far.  And I suspect that hell is less filled with the evil-doers, than it is with the wimps.

In the end, Joey is a very lucky boy to have learned at his age what he’s learned about how soul thieves and their enablers work. I suspect God has great things in store for this boy. And that is lucky for us.

Jack

Ordinarily, I am in bed by 10, as I have to get up at 5:30 because my grandson has to leave for the bus at 6:20.  But last night, watching a recording of the “Soul Train Awards” which were honoring Dionne Warwick, whose music from fifty years ago I still love listening to, I decided to stay up to finish the show.  I could have skipped ahead to the Dionne part, but knew that if I did, I’d never go back to watch the rest of the show.  Nor would I ever delete it from the DVR, until I had watched it all.  So I stayed up.

It was just about 11 when the show was over and then my cell phone rang.  I most certainly had to get to bed now, but I recognized the area code as being from Long Island, well within the catchment area of my agency, and I am, after all, the executive director.  So I answered.

And it turned out to be one of the now-grown kids whom we had placed for adoption maybe ten or twelve years ago.  He had gotten my phone number from the agency website apparently.  I recognized his name immediately as I was his transition worker way back when.

He apologized for calling so late. He told me that he was sitting on a park bench with his “fiancée” and they had no place to go.  He said that he had tried everything he could think of to get help and that I was the last idea he had. His family had moved to a town very far away and though he’d gone with them, he’d come back to Long Island on his own.  Now he was homeless and he was cold.  “Cold?” It was 8 degrees in my yard. This is the weather that one dies from.

I asked him about relatives of his or the girlfriend; I asked about shelters; about going to the police; about going into the hospital – all just to get out of the cold.  He told me that he had tried all of that and the responses he told me that they had given him seemed bureaucratically plausible.  He wasn’t asking for money. He wasn’t asking for anything but help. There is no doubt that this kid has issues; he always did.  I could easily see his adoptive family throwing their hands up when he crossed into adulthood and still did nothing productive for himself.  I’ve been there. Sometimes you think that the shock of not being supported anymore will force these now-adults to wake up, to grow up, to DO something.  Sometimes, in other worlds than his,  it might; but sometimes, in too many worlds for too many kids,  it doesn’t.  What did it matter?  It was now 7 degrees.

I went on the Internet looking for walk-in shelters.   I could find nothing.  But one of the sites said that if you needed a place in an emergency to go to the emergency room and the hospital would let you stay overnight.  I got back on the phone and told this young man that in the end, that’s what he would have to do, and he could tell them to call me if they disagreed. It was simply too cold to stay outside tonight.

It was killing me that I had no viable solution. But I had none other than the hospital.  Staying on the phone was just using up his battery. So, I told him again to go there; I got off the phone; and I went to get ready for bed, and then I thought, “What about him going to a motel, and I’d pay for it by credit card from here (110 miles away).  I called him back and he told me that he had tried that with an aunt but that the motel only took cash.  What?  I said I’d call. Sure enough: cash only. Must be quite the dive.

Anyway, to make a still longer story shorter, we found a motel in the next town. I paid for two nights using Chocolate Milk Club funds [http://familyfocusadoption.org/thechocolatemilkclub.html]. I called him back, and told him to go there – they were going to walk – and spend today dealing with DSS.  I hung up and finally went to bed.  It was near midnight.

But more importantly:

It was now 6 degrees.

We need to do better than this.

Jack

I was having a conversation the other day with a man who has a long history in twelve step programs. He told me that as a result of that history, he lives in his “own little bubble.”  I started to laugh and told him that we all live in our own little bubbles.  We do what we know.  We know what we’ve been taught, or more accurately, what we’ve learned from our own experience and our perspective on that experience.  What’s outside our bubble we are more or less blind to.

I have seen this attributed to some anonymous person in AA, but also to Einstein: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.  We are clearly not getting the results we want and expect with what we do with our foster children.  Too many are walking around their entire adult lives, stuck.  For all our therapy and all our pills, and all our supposed knowledge, we are obviously doing something wrong with kids who through no fault of their own, end up in the system.  How do we figure out what that is? 

The first step is to recognize that our experience is not the same as a kid placed into foster care.  We don’t know what it does to the kids when they lose everything. Our “own little bubbles” are very different from theirs.  I had a former foster kid once tell me that I didn’t get it: “I lost EVERYTHING, “ he told me.  He was right. I was kicked out of college the first time I went; I have lost a job here or there; I have buried many family members whom I loved and still miss; I have even buried four of my kids.  Every loss hurt – many still do – but I never lost everything. Ever. I think that today the citizens of the Philippines would be able to identify with that man beyond anything I ever could.

Recently I had a young (11) boy in foster care tell me that it was understandable why his aunt and uncle didn’t keep him.  After all, he said, “They had their jobs, they had me, they had my sister, and  (he emphasized) they had all the pets to take care of.”  As though it were perfectly obvious to the world that he was the obvious candidate to be dumped. Pets vs. me? No question.

I have been looking at safety this week.  And I realize that I have missed the boat on that subject my whole working life.  Oh, I’m good at picking up things that others miss; I know a lot about keeping kids safe.  But it’s all relative isn’t it?  A forty on an exam beats a twenty. But they are both failing. 

How on earth could I keep the citizens of the Philippines safe this week?  I couldn’t. I wouldn’t even know how to begin.  Yet, I and my fellow workers in the foster care system, especially in the world of foster care adoption, assume that we know how to do it with these kids?  Whose experience, whose bubbles, are as far from our experience as our experience is from the people in the Philippines.

It is the worst kind of arrogance, isn’t it: when one doesn’t even suspect that one is arrogant?

Jack

Over the past few months, I have come to the realization that I still don’t get it when it comes to our kids who end up in foster care, especially institutions.  The depth of their fear and the horror of their experience of being essentially left to fend for themselves, even those who do have family, I have apparently glossed over. I think I did that because I saw the unsafe behavior of the kids as leaving us little choice.  I am exploring that in my thinking any which way I can. Forty one years after starting in the field….

On Sunday, came a new way to see this.  One of my kids, now 34, is developmentally delayed. He has an almost-always-fatal brain tumor that has now long stopped growing for some wonderful, and unknown, reason.  Nonetheless, he has had two brain operations in his life.  The first was covered by Medicaid, and the second was covered by Medicare (entitled to based on his work record). But at some point a few years ago, we received a letter that said that his Medicare was being cancelled due to his no longer being disabled.  What??? No longer disabled??? Yet, the doctors, and the MRIs, and I, all thought that the tumor, aka time bomb, was still there.

They measured his disability, it turns out, not by his medical situation, but by his work income from the two part time jobs he’s had for fourteen years now.  He made too much money to qualify no matter the reality of this time bomb in his head. So I had to search for replacement medical coverage. Not really full medical coverage, but enough to cover his neurology surgeon and her hospital.  Other stuff, we’d simply have to pay for out of pocket. 

With the advent of Obamacare (and I once worshipped Ayn Rand) I was very relieved. Finally, real coverage with realistic limits on out-of-pocket expenses for deductible and copays.  What a weight lifted from me, especially with my fears of what happens to him if , as now looks very likely, he outlives me.  I felt safe for the first time since he lost the Medicare.

I thought about that new found feeling of safety, and of not being left alone stranded due to circumstances beyond my – or my son’s – control.  I don’t care what anyone says about Obamacare: there is a rightness to it.  It is empowering and empowerment is always right.  It makes individuals stronger, and that, in turn, makes the societies they are part of also stronger.

And then I read an article in the paper (that I now cannot find.)  I read about a little kid with cancer who’d had to be hospitalized a number of times and operated on.  Her family had good and full insurance coverage.  But the coverage, like almost all of them (?) nowadays, was only for in-network doctors.  In the operating room, unbeknownst to the family, out-of-network doctors got involved.  Their good insurance paid nothing towards those fees. Tens of thousands of dollars in uncovered fees. 

And my feeling of empowerment dissipated instantly. Along with my feeling of my son being safe.

The way we pay for medical care in this country is ridiculous. It is unfair. It is disempowering. It is dangerous.

And I thought to myself, is this how our family-less kids feel all the time? Unsafe to their core? Disempowered always? In danger constantly? No wonder they act the way they do.  In many countries in Africa there is no free schooling. Your education depends on the financial circumstances of your parents and their ability to pay tuition.  I learned that when I was a kid and I remember thinking then that was ridiculous: no kid should be victimized through something he has no control over.  Our job as the adults is to empower our kids; and our job as citizens – adults in society – is to create an empowering society.

Those medical in-network rules are sneaky and two-faced.  I wonder if that’s how the kids whom we dump into foster care – or worse, leave there, experience us.

The thought is beyond embarrassing. It is mortifying.  And horrifying.

Jack