One of the main purposes of creating this blog was to help folks think about the population of the multiply betrayed kids in a new way. 

I have been amazed over the past few days that I personally know three families on Long Island who have lost their homes completely.  Three. Three!  Three?  Three?????

I haven’t lived on LI for over forty years.  What an oddity I thought.  And, with 90% of the Island still – four days later – without power, phones, and Internet, I may end up knowing more.  Odd.

I measured it by the horror of the World Trade Center.  I personally knew nobody who had been killed there. I knew folks who knew folks, of course. I had relatives of relatives who died. I had neighbors of neighbors who died. But personally? I didn’t know anyone.

Yet now I know three families, living in three separate towns, whose houses are gone. Three separate families who lost everything.  Clothes, mementos, bills, pictures, letters, financial records, computers, tools, furniture, even cars.  The very house itself, for each family, is either gone or will have to be condemned and razed.

Then, this morning, watching on TV the continuing coverage of this storm from hell, I was taken aback by one of those “factoids” rolling on the screen at the bottom.  It said that the Long Island electric company (LIPA) was estimating that 100,000 homes in their catchment area have been destroyed or severely damaged. One hundred thousand?  Not counting the ones in Jersey or the city?  One hundred thousand on Long Island alone?

And I thought that now it makes sense; my perspective shifted.  I had assumed, without thinking about it, that the three I knew were maybe three of a few hundred. It was an automatic assumption on my part. So, I had then consciously asked myself: “What are the odds of me knowing so many of these people?

But with 100,000 on Long Island alone, whose houses are gone or might as well be?  I know only three hundred thousandths of the total of those with such losses.  0.00003 percent?  Don’t hold me to the math – just to the enormity of what’s happened in the metro area.

Perspective. That’s the only real way to clarity, and therefore to understanding. 

Perspective.

Jack

With thanks to my nephew, Gregg Willett, for posting this on Facebook. Thank you Gregg, on behalf of Luis, and Justin.

Love, as always, Uncle Jack

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An Open Letter to Ann Coulter

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Tim Shriver

John Franklin Stephens

The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.

Dear Ann Coulter,

Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow.  So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?

I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow.  I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you.  In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.

I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.

Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.

Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.

Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.

After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me.  You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.

I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.

Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.

No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.

Come join us someday at Special Olympics.  See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.

A friend you haven’t made yet,
John Franklin Stephens
Global Messenger
Special Olympics Virginia

Using the word “retard” to describe me hurts

On Saturday, my thirty three year old son, Luis, moved downstairs into an apartment that we created for him.  From the inside, it’s a real apartment – kitchen, living room with dining area, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.  But from the outside, it’s not real as it’s part of my house: both his front door and his back door open into my house, not into the street. 

Nonetheless, it is a perfect solution for a very real problem. Luis has a very slow growing brain tumor. He was first operated on when he was eleven – before I met him.  He lost that part of his brain that controls peripheral vision, but gained overall in that all of his long term and very serious seizures dramatically ended.  But they couldn’t get the entire tumor out without risking him losing more function.

When he was twelve, he was referred to my agency, Family Focus Adoption Services, as he needed an adoptive home.  We tried a number of families, but nobody would take him. Perhaps because this cancerous brain tumor was practically guaranteed to kill him by the time he was twenty. Ultimately, I made the decision to adopt him and he moved in twenty years ago last week.

His tumor began to grow again and he had to be operated on again – a fourteen hour surgery – when he was twenty.  But he didn’t die. Soon after that, he graduated from his high school special education placement. He couldn’t easily find a job, so he went to work at McDonald’s on the weekends. Shortly thereafter, he miraculously secured a position as a part time janitor at the local school district.  This was his dream job. As some dream of Harvard, Luis dreamed of this. He is now in his thirteenth year on each job.  In the meantime, he also managed to get himself NYS certified (outside only) as a volunteer firefighter, a huge point of pride – deservedly so – for him.

The purpose of Luis moving into his “own place” is for him to develop even more independence, especially from me. It is the heavy weight of all parents of handicapped kids, to worry about what will happen to their grown kids when we are gone.  Reading about the recent abuse that goes on in these adult NYS group homes terrifies us.  So I want Luis to buy his own food, plan his own meals, cook his own dinners. I want him to walk from room to room without seeing me.  I want him to decide whether he likes living by himself or not. All before I die (nothing planned on that – just covering.)

Luis is incredibly happy; incredibly proud; incredibly excited.  He chose his own paint colors and insisted on doing the actual painting himself (ruining the rugs, of course). I took him food shopping and he liked buying what he wanted and not the things I would buy.  And so on and so forth.

So why do I tell this story here?  Luis was adopted through Family Focus.  When I met him he was living in the locked “ward” of an institution with about 40 other boys.  Twenty of them were profoundly disabled. But the other twenty were Luis’ peers.  I have often wondered, as I have watched Luis blossom over the years, what happened to those boys.

Luis got the life he’s gotten over the past two decades because of the personal approach that Family Focus takes.  When he was visiting those possible homes all those years ago, it wasn’t whatever staff member was on duty who drove him back and forth. We don’t work like that. It was me, the same person every single time.

The model that Family Focus has been working on developing over the past twenty-five years is not the model that other agencies that work with foster children use.  Family Focus is not a business whose particular “widget” is adoptive homes for foster kids.  Rather, we are a community of people – a community of like-minded people – who recognize that the foster kids who cannot go back to their original families, and then are not adopted by their foster parents, are a special group of  extremely betrayed kids.  And the services that they need, above all else, must always contribute to their healing. And that means personal connections of exactly the type we would want for our own kids. That’s what Luis got and that’s why Luis is where he is today: downstairs in his own apartment.

Family Focus has just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Keeping it alive and healthy for the next twenty-five, as the original staff move on into retirement is our primary goal.  And that requires a funding plan.  The traditional funding plan of fee-for-service is never sufficient, but for an agency like ours with creative and inventive services, sometimes decided upon very quickly, it is extraordinarily insufficient.

The alternative of finding permanent sponsors usually means looking to folks with big money.  But that is not only far more difficult than one might imagine, but generally folks with big money live in an entirely different world than do our kids, and the families who adopt them.  It is too often a cultural mismatch, causing difficulties on both ends.

So, what they – we – have decided to do is to look for regular people who “get” our kids and the need for the personal connections. We decided to create a “club” for these folks who will commit to supporting Family Focus to the tune of an automatic $25/month. Monthly, as another of my sons pointed out, it is not enough money to pay any other bill he has, but annually it can add up to enough money to support the agency’s creative work and pass it down to the upcoming generations.

The club is called the “Chocolate Milk Club” in recognition of the power of chocolate milk as an adoption metaphor for our population of kids: a real adoption can no more end than one can remove the chocolate from the milk, once combined.

We are proud of this club and we have high hopes for its long-term success.

I am writing about it on the blog for the obvious reason of looking for new members. But for the less obvious reason of the respect I have for the people who read this blog or even subscribe to it.  There is no reason to read it – and there have been 8,723 “hits” from 32 different countries on the blog from the time it started eighteen months ago until this morning – unless you are one of those who “get” it.  And if you do get it, the Chocolate Milk Club is a very real way for you to join in our work.  I am already writing monthly updates about that work to send to all our members. The links throughout this posting will give you more information. Otherwise, go to www.familyfocusadoption.org,  I will be reminding my readers of this club each posting: it’s that important.

Luis is only one of the four kids whom I have met, and adopted, because of and through Family Focus. Each has his own incredible story. But then doesn’t everybody?  Isn’t that the reason why it must always stay personal?  Doesn’t each one of us know that in our guts?

Please join us.

Jack

It’s only in adoption, I think, where one’s oldest child is not always one’s first. I became an adoptive parent due to my experience with my son Ricky whom I met when he was eleven.  But, although I adopted all his brothers, I never adopted Ricky until he was way into his adulthood. I had helped get him into what I mistakenly thought was a wonderful institution in Miami, when he was about 14 or 15, and he never returned to live in New York. By 21, he was in prison down there and though we wrote and he called, I only saw him about once a year.

Before he went to Florida, he was in a number of institutions up here, including a psychiatric ward and a psychiatric hospital.  None helped him. I remember seeing him in those hospitals all drugged up and out of it. It was how they controlled his behavior.  I visited him wherever he was.  But none of us were giving him what he needed.

When Ricky was dying from AIDS in a prison hospital in Florida, in 1995, I flew down to visit him.  My visit was limited to an hour – maybe two, I can’t remember – on each of the two days I was allowed to see him (bureaucratic prison system). Ricky was in isolation, looking almost as bony as anyone coming out of the concentration camps ever did – he weighed, he told me, under 100 pounds.  He was very sick – they were worried about TB, as I remember – and though neither of us knew how close it was, he would be dead not six weeks later.

During the visit, looking back on his life, Ricky made the observation that I had “always been there” for him.  That was simply not true by any standard of “always been there” that other people, including me, would use.  I wasn’t there when he got out of Montanari’s (the place in Miami); I wasn’t there when he got arrested; I wasn’t there at his trial, etc. I was here – I was raising his brothers – I was working two jobs – I was busy.  I loved him; I’d always loved him; but I wasn’t there as I wished later I had been, or wished, at least, that I could have been.

But since I had met him twenty three years earlier, I had always been in his life; I had adopted all of his brothers; and when I ultimately woke up – he woke me up –  I adopted him also, although we finalized the adoption only eleven months before he died. He had always been mine, and I had always been his.   In the end that’s what constituted “always being there” to him.  I had hopes for Ricky. I felt his loss very much and I miss him still all these years later.

It all adds up to “family,” doesn’t it?

Last night, almost forty years after I met Ricky, I visited one of my grandkids – I won’t name him – who is himself currently in a psychiatric ward of a hospital.   His parents are nowhere to be found. When I walked into the ward, the staff advised me – in retrospect, it was a warning – that my grandson had just been “injected” due to some violence on his part. They put me in the dining room, where the visit would take place, and they went and got him. He came in with his own personal staff member. They call it one-to-one.  And as my grandson walked through the door, I was brought back in memory to two very sad places. The first was Ricky in the hospitals so medicated that he was out of it and could barely hold his head up, let alone talk. And the second was to the book, the off-Broadway play (that I saw over 20 times), and the movie: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”

They had my grandson on some cocktail of injected drugs, including the infamous Thorazine.  Like Ricky, he couldn’t hold his head up. He could hear me, he could respond to me, but it was like talking to someone who has just come out of a very deep sleep, and was still exhausted. A zombie is not too far off as a description. I wondered if he’d even remember our conversation later.

I knew that I had to do two things that I had not done with Ricky: first, I had to reassure him over and over and over that he belongs to me, and I to him, and that nothing will get between us ever; and second, that what has happened to him in his life, that’s brought him to this point, no matter what he thinks, is not – absolutely not – his fault.  It never was. Those who know me, know that I often bring into my conversation whoever else is around, to make my points. The young guy who was on one-to-one was terrific, just terrific, in going with that flow. He allowed me to talk to him about the issues which allowed my grandson to hear without being obliged to respond. I was very grateful to that aide.

As the decades go by, I still keep thinking: what are we missing?  What are we not getting? What are we not giving these kids, who feel to me so incredibly – and deeply – trapped?  I remember Fr. Huntington telling me so very many years ago, that the older he got, the more he had come to believe that all the psychiatry and psychology in the world amounted to very little.  He told me that it was becoming clearer and clearer to him that it was simply – no matter how difficult – a matter of love.  Certainly, for me looking back, it was his love, and Aunt Rita’s, that saved me. The rest of it amounted to little compared to what they gave me.

Because what they gave me – and what seems to be missing, or more accurately blocked, for our kids – was me.  They gave me, me. 

I think that that is what Ricky was referring to in that prison hospital room.  Not that I had succeeded at it – he was, after all, in prison dying – but that that was what I had always been trying to give him.  Certainly, it’s what I knew I had to give my grandson last night.  What Fr. Huntington taught me in words, and Aunt Rita taught me in actions, is that one has to be given oneself through a person who chooses to love you.

And, I realized earlier this week, that most of choosing to love someone appears to be simply hanging on, no matter where they take you.

The difference between Ricky and me then vs. my grandson and me now?  I guess after all these years I am clearer.

Every person has to do their own work in saving themselves, I know that. But without having the context and the anchor of being loved by someone who is bigger than oneself (read: parent or parent substitute) what chance is there for anyone to do that? 

And, so again, my belief in, and trust of, adoption.  Because it allows for the parent-less to get real parents. I know it’s not enough, but it opens the road to enough.

As I told my grandson, and wished I had been so explicit with Ricky: “Nothing gets between us; no feeling, no behavior, no person. Nothing.”

Jack

During July, someone responded to one of my much earlier posts. However, when one does that, the comment is attached to that posting and so people who read the blog currently do not ever even know that there was a response.  The only way around it, I guess, is to subscribe to the “comments.”  Then any and all comments are emailed to you as they are published.

Anyway, her point was that no one should be judged for giving up a child that they adopted unless one had walked in their shoes. Yes, that’s right.  I wrote to that person (“Mom” – 3.11.2011 posting) at the email address the site had but it bounced back to me. So I responded online to her comment – something I never do – and asked her to get in touch with me, but she hasn’t as of yet.  Maybe she will if and when she reads this posting.

Our stance at Family Focus fits right into the mainstream of the adoption world (for decades now) and it is pretty simple: every child is entitled to a permanent, loving, committed family.  There is no child, our common wisdom claims, who is “unadoptable.”  Yes.  But there are children who – for extreme behavioral reasons – cannot live in the community, either temporarily or permanently.  To expect adoptive parents to be running residential treatment centers, residential treatment facilities, jails, group homes, physical hospitals, or mental hospitals in their homes and communities is ridiculous.  It is unfair. And it is counterproductive.  Children who belong in those places do not belong living at home. What does that have to do with having families?  Theoretically, nothing. But in real life, the bureaucracy often insists that the adoptive parents of these children must hold onto them, and give them no options – certainly no easy ones – for placement outside the family home.  That puts tremendous – and immoral – pressure on the families often putting them into Catch-22 situations.  In order to get the help that their children need, – and that’s only a maybe – they are forced to re-surrender their children to the system – ending their legal relationship and, most of the time, ending any contact. By the time it gets to that point, parents have long had it and have given up hope. And that is what “Mom” was talking about.  She’s right. As far as she goes.

That road that she apparently went down is one that must be avoided. The system must take these kids who don’t belong living in the community back into their care.   And they need to do it earlier and without all the blame that is so easily flung around. Let’s change the laws; let’s change the financial incentives or penalties to allow it.  But whether the system does it or doesn’t do it, adults have a responsibility to protect their own.  Their own families, their own feelings.  That’s what I was getting at all those many months ago; that’s what adoptive parents need to hear; and that, in no small measure, is why I write this blog in the first place.  

It is conceptually pretty simple: behavior in the community has nothing to do with whether or not a child is entitled to a family. Behavior in the community has to do only with whether or not a child should be allowed to live in the community.  Sometimes the very act of adoption triggers incredible depths of pain, loss, and traumatic feelings and memories within a child that were repressed while in foster care.  The vulnerability within the family relationship brings them back to their original vulnerabilities. And that, in turn, triggers extremes of behavior that no family – do you hear me “Mom”? – should be asked, let alone required, to tolerate. Until we figure out how to help these kids therapeutically they need to be removed from the community.  And if the local DSS won’t help and forces parents to surrender their children to get those kids out of the community, then so be it: surrender them guilt free.

But no legal surrender also demands an internal surrender. Those also are two very different things.  The legal relationship that is created by adoption, is nothing compared to the personal relationship that adoption creates -and always between two people of unequal power.  And since it is the adult who has the power always, it is the adult who must protect their internal relationship with the child, no matter what the child or the system says, implies, believes, or does.  Adults adopt; children are adopted.

That “Mom” was not given the help that her family was entitled to is simple inexcusable. But what she needed more was a perspective of hope that it is the job of the adoption community to give her. Hope that her child will one day straighten out?  The child might, so I guess so. I’ve had my kids go both ways.  But no, the hope is that her commitment to be her child’s parent need not be a victim of either her child’s behavior or of her particular (apparently useless) DSS.  The commitment lies inside her where no one else can ever touch it, without her permission. That is theory. And that is personal experience.  And that is what the adoptive parents of “Ted” (see old posts) took away from him. We gave them the perspective I offer here, but they refused it. Walking away from his behavior was fine; walking away from him was not.  Too little, too late?  This boy, this human being, was their son. One takes whatever little wisp of hope one can, and wherever one can find it.  One then builds that hope up over time.  But to internally walk away from one’s child?  No. Unacceptable. And, as I said then, phoney-baloney.  Without that stance that adoption is irrevocable, unconditional, and forever final, then adoption becomes make-believe. And make-believe is the last thing that multiply betrayed people – especially our young and vulnerable children –  need.

Do I blame “Mom” for what she apparently did?  No. Choosing among terrible options, one does the best one can. But not blaming her doesn’t mean that I agree that her decision was correct.  Adoption is a forever claim of the head and the heart. By an adult.  And no one has the power to drop that claim, but the adult.

No one.

Jack

Aside from the forty five or so subscribers to this blog, there have been close to 7,500 hits on it from other people since it began, about sixteen months ago.  Astonishingly to me, although maybe not to younger people who get – and live – all this social media stuff, is that I have no idea who all those hits came from.  I know they came from people in twenty four different countries – and that alone blows me away – so there are at least twenty four people reading it, aside from the subscribers.  I’m sure some large group of them must be people who come back and then get counted again.  And, I do know that a good number of them come through the link that is posted on the web site of my agency, http://www.familyfocusadoption.org.  Beyond all that, unless they post comments,  I have no idea who the readers are or why they come.  As one who constantly tells people that I can neither speak nor write publicly unless I know who my audience is, I find all this discombobulating.

And there is more. In just the first six months – and I know I have slowed down since then – the blog’s word count was over 22,000. To my mind, that is a heck of a lot of writing – far beyond anything I’d ever dreamed of doing here.  The consequence of that – beyond the memory issues of an old guy – is that I cannot possibly remember all that I have written – or even most of it. And the consequence of that is that either I figure out some way of tracking what I say and being able to search it prior to writing (which can’t be done at the blog site); or I say the heck with it, go with what I want to write, and if I repeat myself – or at least repeat myself too often – accept that people are going to stop reading the blog.  Is there a natural life span to a blog?  I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, let me repeat myself….maybe:

What brought this all up today is that I have been thinking recently about what it means to help somebody.  Years, actually decades, ago – and I suspect this is a story already posted in the blog – I came upon a cartoon in the paper, that remains for me the best one I have ever read.  I carried it in my wallet for years and it became more and more frayed as the years went by and now I can’t even find it. I searched the internet for it also, but it’s nowhere to be found.

A man and a woman walk into a used car lot.  A salesman comes over to greet them and asks, “Can I help you?” And the husband replies, “No, thank you. We’d rather be treated decently.”  I nearly fell out of my seat when I first read it:  helping someone was seen as the opposite of being treated decently?  I cut it out and carried it because I knew there was a profound – if exaggerated – truth there.

Some time after that I learned of a priest who ran a Christmas giveaway in poor neighborhoods in the city. He would bring food – turkeys, canned hams, etc – and gifts and distribute them to very poor people in their homes.  I thought that was terrific.  Seeing to it that kids had something to open on Christmas day and that their parents had holiday food to cook.  And delivering it, yet? How more personal could it be?

But one day, another man of the cloth, whom I respected very much, told me how terrible this was, what this priest was doing.  Terrible?  How could this incredible annual and personal act of generosity and kindness be terrible?  And when I questioned him, he told me that it stole people’s dignity. I was blown away by that. Because as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. What, I asked him, would be the alternative? Should we ignore the need? I questioned him, but I had seen he was right.

He said that what he did in his small circle, was to collect presents and lay them out in a big room of some kind.  And then he invited individual families in to go “Christmas shopping” for their kids.  To this day, I am blown away by that simple act of respect. He let the parents preserve their dignity in front of their kids, and themselves, by giving  them the opportunity to go out shopping for their kids as all other parents did at Christmas.

What he did was to see to it that the family’s material need was not used against them.  He removed power – his – from the equation.  He treated these parents as his equals, despite their poverty. He treated them with respect.  The world knew what the priest was doing; but no one knew what this man was doing.

It was a lesson that I’ve never forgotten; and one that has served me well all my life: help is not measured by the needs, wishes, desires, feelings, ideas, or beliefs of the helper.

Help is measured by the one who receives it.  And so no one ever says to an offer of real help, “no, thank you, we’d rather be treated decently.”

I recognized immediately the second guy’s gift to these folks:

It was help.  It was being treated decently. It was beautiful.

Real help always is.

Jack

At the end of last week, I, and a number of my colleagues,  attended the NYS Citizen’s Coalition for Children annual two day conference.  It consists of speakers, of course, and a series of workshops that are relevant to adoptive parents, especially those adopting from the foster care system.  It’s really the only opportunity most of us get to hear, in person, thinkers from across the country.  These are the folks who write the books. But they aren’t ivory tower thinkers: they have experience with our kids and many got into the field via the adoptions of their own kids.  You could not ask for more relevance. And they know their stuff.

Yet.

Consistently over the years, I have felt something missing. I feel it at these conferences; I feel it in the books; I feel it in the case conferences of individual kids and so forth. I have said for years that those of us who haven’t gone through what our kids have gone through can never really comprehend their perspective.  I know, I know….we can try.  But trying doesn’t cut it for me so I can’t believe that it cuts it for them either. My solution has always been: get some of these kids past their histories and let them figure it out. In the same way, for instance, that all twelve step programs use the peers in addictions to help each other, and not the professional “helpers.”  It has been an answer that made sense logically, but it doesn’t solve my issue with the “what is missing.”

Sometime last evening, the word for what’s missing hit me.  It is absolutely so, that we can never be where our kids have been nor experience what they have experienced.  But that was true for the white civil rights fighters from half a century ago. And it’s true right now, for example, for the straight supporters for the gay right to marry.  One need not be part of a particular group to stand with those within the group.

Stand with.

Not “stand above.”  And standing above is what I have experienced as permeating our field.  Our kids are “broken”, “damaged”, “hurt”, and the newest word:  “traumatized.” “Broken” as measured by where I am. “Damaged” as measured by where I am. “Hurt” as measured by where I am.  And now, “traumatized” as measured by where I am. Or think I am.

And where are we? Above them.  No wonder we can’t figure it out. We will never figure it out while we stand above our kids.

Standing “with” is a recognition that we would have reacted, and responded, exactly as our kids have were we weighed down with the same horrific experiences that, by the way, we as a culture did not protect them from.  Standing “with” is the only true recognition that we will never get it from a position “above.”

In my last post, I talked about my first real supervisor and how abusive he was despite how good he looked. His stance was that he was better than I. He couldn’t put himself in my shoes; because he couldn’t get out of his own.

We have a rule at Family Focus that whatever we create; whatever approach we take must be one that our kids could say, at least, “Fair enough.”  But preferably, would be able to say: “Thank you. Finally someone gets it.”  We should be willing to go under our own knife. Is that too abstract?  Let me make it concrete: we should be willing to live by our own definition of adoption: “unconditional, irrevocable, and forever final.” That means when a foster family tells a kid that they are going to adopt him and then change their mind later on, the child should be removed forthwith, in recognition of the betrayal.  We should be willing to live by our very clear stance: “Adults adopt; children are adopted.” That means that we guarantee that our approaches prevent any blame from falling on the kids for adult decisions. Hell, we should even be willing to turn our case notes over to the kids (when they grow up) and stand behind those notes (fat chance.) Our transitions; our covenants; our concepts must all meet the same rule: would I be willing  to be the kid experiencing these things we have created.

That is what “standing with” means.  No bureaucracy can ever “stand with” in its rules and structures, although individuals within the bureaucracy can.  Standing with is always personal.  Martin Luther King stood with. So, I believe, did Ghandi. And thus their real power.

What is missing from our system is standing with our kids – not (take heed helping professions), standing for our kids. Not, not, not. Until we make that our stance, we will never get it. Standing for is not the same as standing with. It’s not even close. No matter our experience, our brilliance, our education, our logic, and our degrees, if we don’t stand with the kids, we will understand nothing real about them.

And standing with has a name that doesn’t apply to standing for.

It is called: solidarity.

Jack

Family Focus is a private not-for-profit agency which is funded by fees for service; donations and grants; and a staff willing to tolerate low pay, regular cuts in that pay, and then sometimes skipped paydays. Our official salaries are low enough; what we actually see of them is too often far lower.  Without having a paid off mortgage, I couldn’t do it. My co-workers each have a phrase like that, They all begin: “Without …fill in the blank………… I couldn’t do it.”

In addition, we could place a hundred kids over eight years old into adoptive homes tomorrow if we only had the families willing to make the sacrifice and commitment of parenting permanently these multiply betrayed kids.  We have the fee structures, we have the reputation, we have the services. But we don’t have the families. And this economic environment – aka a depression for the very people who would consider adopting such kids – is not helping. (If my job is at risk of being lost, and my house is at risk of foreclosure, I don’t bring new kids into the family.)  It is frustrating always, but heartbreaking at the times when you actually meet a real kid and you have nothing to offer him/her.

So why do I stay?

For many reasons. Here’s only one.

When I was past high school age – both in college and in the working world – I heard more than once from people that I had a problem with authority. And it sure looked that way to me. I knew that I’d had a problem with my father and his authority, especially when I’d come home from school and he’d want to talk to me about my report card and he was, as they used to say, “drunk as a skunk.” At 3 in the afternoon.  I had a real problem with the way he used his authority at those times.

Later on, my first boss at Children’s Village was an articulate, educated, sober, well respected man. And I had tremendous problems with him and his authority. Especially when he would point out to me in supervision, using psychological mumbo-jumbo (I didn’t know it was mumbo-jumbo then) that I had the issue, not him. It caused me a real problem because I didn’t want to leave the job.  Everywhere I turned for advice or help, all I got told – besides being told to shoot the guy – was to suck it up; or to ask for a transfer; or to leave the job.  All of which would avoid the clashes but none of which would help me understand. For all my certainty that I was the one with the problem, my feelings overwhelmingly told me it was my boss, my teacher, my father, and not me.  No matter what, I was stuck. I couldn’t understand if I was blind, or broken, or a victim. And there was no one whom I could find – that’s the key – who could clarify for me.

I spent intense hours, days, weeks, and months trying to figure this out. And, one day, I finally got it. And when I did, a tremendous weight lifted off me and I felt terrific.  It still is off me, and I still do feel terrific. Nothing changed on the outside, and yet everything did. What I saw was that my problem had never been with authority – it had been with the misuse of authority. And that I could identify behaviorally, both what was done wrong, and, better still, how it could have been done right. And the misuse of authority, I later learned, has a name: abuse.  I had a problem – a deep-rooted objection actually – with being abused. I had a bigger problem though with me allowing myself to be abused: by putting up with my father, my teacher, my boss when they were abusive.  I immediately requested a transfer and have never been troubled by the outside accusation of a problem with authority ever again. The internal problem? Gone these past 40 years.

That keeps me at my job?  Among many other things, yep.

Children who have been multiply rejected, have been rejected, by the definition of  what a parent’s responsibility is, through no fault of their own.  A kid who has bounced out of home after home after home is no more responsible for each rejection, then is a kid who, a few generations back, developed, let’s say, polio.  Or more to the point, a kid who speaks only Greek, but is repeatedly placed in a home that not only speaks only English, but has no idea that there is such a language as Greek. Frustration, blame, and rejection are inevitable. It is the job of the adults to figure out how to solve the problems that come up when a multiply rejected child moves into the home of new, perhaps naïve, and probably insufficiently supported, adults.  And they should be figured out BEFORE the kid moves in.

Family Focus gets that. Family Focus gets that kids with bad experiences need clarity on what belongs to whom so they can be freed from any self-blame. Family Focus also gets that that clarity can free someone – as it did me – immediately and for a lifetime (go read “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand for an example of that immediacy and perpetuity of freedom.)  And Family Focus gets that we can find no one else who is doing it (at least that we are aware of.)

We have a very narrow, but very deep focus, and it has helped us come up with some incredible ideas and develop some wonderful approaches over the years.  Our Covenants (see the website) are the single most protective thing that we have developed. And they cost zero to institute. The concept of chocolate milk is the single best protection against self blame for kids whose adoptive “parents” gave them back to the system. And so forth and so on.

Family Focus is focused on figuring out what our kids need from the adults and the system in order for the kids to get unstuck: to become certain to the depths of their identities that they are not broken, nor blind.  No one can do that without a committed parent or parent substitute. Thus, we do this work through the mechanism of adoption. It is a pre-requisite for parent-less kids. But as so many of the families who are struggling with their adopted children whom they love with their whole hearts will tell you: it is not enough.  The kids are struggling to figure something out and no one has figured it out yet.

Family Focus is determined to figure out the rest of what is missing.  We are determined to give our kids, and their families, that. That’s who we are.  No one will fund that search, so we stay poor. But we won’t trade in who we are for any amount of money.  Family Focus recognizes that “there but for the grace of God, go I.”  We recognize that any of us – but for the “bigness” of our own parents or substitute parents – could be one of our kids.

And that’s why I stay.  Could there be a better reason?

Jack

I know that I haven’t gotten to part 2 of my last posting yet. I also know how long it has been since I last posted, and I am sorry for that delay.  And during this “blackout” the first anniversary of the blog came and went with no comment from me. I regret that. I simply have not had the time when I could concentrate to write this. A new posting follows.  Not part 2 – I trust that I will get to that soon.

Jack

Yesterday, I had two experiences with people I never met before. The first was disheartening; the second, energizing. As always, I couldn’t help but think of how our disempowered family-less kids would experience each.

There are three ways (that I know of) for a diabetic to take their insulin. From most aggravating to less they are:  syringes, “pens,” and “pumps.”

Danny is in the process of moving from the syringes to the pens. The pen looks like an oversize ball point pen. Instead of ink, though, it carries insulin.  The tip is a removable needle which is used one time only.  Yesterday, Danny had half a day of school (don’t get me started) which got him home by 11:15 am.  I had already decided that we’d go check out a summer camp for diabetic kids that is located about an hour and a half from here, in NJ.

When we got off the highway, Danny asked to stop at McDonald’s for our lunch. Fine with me, so we did.  His blood sugar counts weren’t bad, so I let him have the large fries and the sweet and sour (read: sugar) sauce for his chicken nuggets.  We finished lunch and I figured out how much insulin he should get. I gave him the number – more than usual due to the food – and handed him his insulin pen.  And he said, “Grandpa, where’s the needle tip?”  What? What? What?

Internally, I had to do some quick thinking to keep from panicking.  Worse comes to worst, I thought, we can go home. It’s an hour’s ride; the blood sugar is already rising; I knew where the  hospital was on the way home.  We carry an emergency kit at all times, but I had not updated it for the pen.  We had syringes and no insulin for them; we had an insulin pen and no needles for it.  Grr…..Dumb, of course. AKA: a mistake. A simple damn mistake.

But, being a thinking and a reasonable guy, I called the camp. It’s a diabetic camp, after all, and they should have all sorts of supplies. Whew. Problem solved. Till I got their voice mail (huh? We had an appointment.) Back to panic: go home. But I didn’t want to go home and miss this opportunity (ha ha) of the half day.  Next thought: go to a pharmacy and buy the tip. Whew. Shoprite right across the street. So off we went, with me greatly relieved.

We go into the pharmacy – blood sugar steadily rising, remember – and I show them the pen, which obviously makes this legitimate; I explain the problem; and I ask to buy one tip.  “Sorry, they come in boxes of 100 and we’d have to see if your insurance will cover them.”  “No,” I say, “I have no time for all that: we were just at McDonald’s and his sugar numbers are rising. I will buy the box and pay for it myself.”  Figuring I can always use them – he goes through 7-8 a day.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t sell them to you without a prescription.”  WHAT? No time to argue, I will call his doctor’s office. Well, I forgot I was going to a residential summer camp: I was in the boonies. NO SIGNAL AT ALL.  I race to the parking lot, finally get through and the signal is breaking up. The doctor can’t hear me. I am running around the lot trying to find a signal and finally find a spot but it only measures about three square inches. Doctor says she will fax over the prescription immediately. I go back inside and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait.  After a half hour, I go back to the parking lot to try to find that tiny piece of real estate where my phone will work.  I can’t find it. “You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you.”  Finally, she seems to realize that I can hear her and she tells me that the prescription has been faxed over. So, I go back inside. No fax. And we wait and we wait and we wait. Ultimately, the pharmacist says he will try. That works and we get our $40 box of 100 tips so Danny can have his now-much-delayed insulin.

At one point, my nephew, who was with us for the ride, recommends that we simply go up and threaten the staff with bodily harm if they don’t give us the one lousy tip we need – or tell them Danny is having a blood sugar reaction of some kind and that will get them to give us the tip.  I point out to him that it won’t work.  They will simply tell us to go the emergency room. By the time we got out of the emergency room we could have been home five times – where there are dozens of tips.

Accidents happen; people make mistakes; folks forget things. Why are we made to go through all this for one lousy tip. Even if at absolute worst I was a heroin addict planning on using an insulin pen (??) to shoot up heroin, so what?  It’d be a one shot shoot up.

On the contrary though, I have id; I have the pen with his name on it etc. etc. etc. Where is simply human problem solving?  One damn tip.  Mistakes need to be allowed for in our bureaucratic systems.

Okay, I am at nearly 900 words. To be continued……

Jack