Jack Brennan Perspectives

On Sunday, my son, Abraham, more or less woke up from his coma. He had the breathing tube in his throat so he couldn’t talk, but he was able to respond to questions by nodding or shaking his head.  It seemed that he could see also.  Whew. With all that, he had obviously beaten the odds and avoided the brain damage we were so terrified of.

On Monday morning though, he crashed and his brain “herniated.”  They ran him into the operating room and he survived their desperate operations. But not with much hope. On Tuesday morning, they ran their tests, and early yesterday afternoon, Abe was declared brain dead.  He is three months shy of his 40^th birthday.

Today, they will “harvest” – how I hate that term – his organs, and disconnect him from his life support.  I dread it, though I dread it less than this horrible waiting around with nothing real to do.

I met Abraham when he was twelve; he moved in with us when he was thirteen; and I finalized his adoption when he was fourteen.  I knew nothing of his background except that he was in foster care for many years, was a very badly behaved kid, and had no contact with anybody in his birth family. His memories of that family, and of his younger years, were off – they didn’t make much sense to me. But, I didn’t do anything about it.  In those days it didn’t dawn upon me that his history would matter to him.  It was over; he was safe. What else was there?  I was very stupid.

Abe was a good kid – determined to be good. I didn’t know that there were kids whose good behavior was a desperate attempt to block enormous pain.  I had no problems with him day to day at all. He was honest, responsible.  He was so good that I remember saying to people that I thought he was God’s gift to me as a reward for what I had gone through with my older kids. I remember one day asking him what had happened to all that bad behavior that he had in foster care.  He said to me, “Do you want the troof? Do you want the troof?”  I said yeah. I wasn’t really interested in hearing any lies, I told him. So tell me the “troof.”  “You treat me right,” he said.

I treat him right?

I treat him regular.  I treat him as parents treat their kids.  What the hell did that mean that I “treat him right?”

At seventeen, Abe fell apart.  He found a cartoon one day in the Daily News and he brought it over to me and said, “Pop, this is how I feel.”  Whoa…an explanation?  Coming from him? I needed to pay attention to that.  I wrote about that cartoon in this blog last March. (copied below).  For nearly twenty five years we have used the cartoon, and its implications, as a partial foundation to build our adoption practices on at Family Focus.

Over the course of the past week, especially the past few days, everyone wants to know who did this to Abe; did the cops get the people?  Etc. etc. I could care less.  I find it a distraction and I wonder if folks use it that way in an attempt to avoid the pain of seeing Abe hurt so bad.

Abe gave us another gift at Family Focus: the concept of adoption transference.  After seventeen, Abraham blamed me for all the pain he’d experienced when he was young. The fact that I hadn’t even met him till all that was over, didn’t lessen the depth of his fury. The fact that I was the guy who took him out of the system that allowed him to suffer so, didn’t change how he felt.  It took my sister to help us figure out that he was blaming me because I was his father and I had failed in my primary job as a parent. I had not protected him.  The logical fact that I could not have – because I didn’t even know him then was irrelevant to that much greater truth: I was his father.

Abraham wanted help, he wanted to be free of all of it. He didn’t want the anger; nay, he didn’t want the rage; he didn’t want to carry around the consequences of his history.  Over the course of his adulthood, I tried to help him.  But nothing worked. Not because of Abe – though he would infuriate me. But because of us.  Not because he refused to cooperate, but because our solutions are nonsense. Nonsense.

If we can’t see that in looking at kid after kid after kid, year after year after year – and now I am old enough to say – generation after generation after generation that we are not helping, what is our problem? Our ways are not cutting it; our solutions don’t solve it, so then what chance does any kid have who had the horrific experience of being born into a family of people who don’t protect?

I loved Abraham. I love him still. I hate how he carried those consequences around; I hate how he himself, in turn, did not protect me, his son, his brothers, his wife. Himself. Right up until not protecting himself last week (by avoiding the circumstances. He is not to blame for his own murder.)

But never will I grant – ever – that he could have solved this himself. Never. We invented the foster care system that hurt him. We have not yet invented the way to help him heal from it. That’s on us. To say that he was damaged or broken in his early years is a cop out. I never experienced him – ever – as damaged, or as broken.  Normal reactions to abnormal circumstances look abnormal.

I experienced him as confused, as hurt, as lost, and in terrible terrible pain from seventeen years old….until Monday.

Yesterday, standing by his bed, what convinced me that he was really gone was that the morphine was gone. His pain was really done.

Abraham – let me repeat for the last and loudest time – did not choose the pain, the confusion, the hurt nor the loss. Nobody chooses that.  It doesn’t work to “just say no.”  It doesn’t work.

Abe is the fourth of my kids that I have lost. It didn’t work with Gilbert (October 15th, 1985), nor with Irving (February 4th, 1994), nor with Ricky (May 9th, 1995). It didn’t work because it doesn’t work.  Not because they are broken or damaged.  I loved them, I know.

Each of them was whole. I experienced their wholeness. I experienced it from each of them.

We have not figured out yet how to protect our foster kids, nor heal their wounds. That’s on us. Not on them.

I told another of my adult kids last night that one of the things that Family Focus has discovered is the importance of apologizing to our kids when we give them a family that gives them up.  When we don’t apologize to someone who has been wronged, especially those who haven’t much power, the wronged person can rarely be sure that they were wronged.

Abraham did wrong in his life, no doubt. But that life began with Abe being wronged to a depth, and for a length of time, that I doubt I will ever know, or understand. I hate that for him.  I hate that for all of them.

I am sorry, Abe. I love you so much and I wasn’t able to give you what you needed.  But I am sorry. And, God knows, no matter what else, I do love you.  You were, for a long time, my baby.

I am posting this as is. I suppose it’s turned into Abe’s eulogy. So be it.

And so much for not being a diarist, huh?

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[Many years ago, my then seventeen year old son brought to me a cartoon and said to me, “Pop, this is how I feel.”

It was a man in a spacesuit, standing on the moon, reading a note, left by his fellow astronauts, who were in the spaceship flying way above and leaving the planet. The note did not say what it should have. It didn’t say, “Henry, we are so terribly sorry to have left you here. We did wait as long as we possibly could. But the window of opportunity for us to get off the planet was upon us. Had we stayed any longer we all would have died. And we chose not to let that happen.”

Instead, it read: “Dear Henry, Where were you? We waited and waited, but finally decided that…”

Not only blaming Henry for their decision, but minimizing what they have just done. “We finally decided to go to the movie without you” does not have the same import as “we finally decided to abandon you on the moon.”

And what on earth does “where were you?” matter now? Blaming the victim was a concept that I first heard named in college when I read the book of the same name (thank you William Ryan) – but by no means was the experience it named new to me.]

When I walked into Children’s Village for the first time to apply for a job as a child care worker with their population of emotionally disturbed kids, I remember thinking how the kids there must be on the road to being model citizens. After all, I turned out okay; my sister and brothers and cousins and friends all turned out okay.  And none of us had access to the incredible support that these Village kids had: psychiatrists, and psychologists, and social workers, and special ed teachers, and so forth.  How could they not turn out (beyond) okay?

Furthermore, I believed that it would be an honor to be chosen as worthy enough to work with these kids, who had all been – in today’s language – so traumatized.  To be hired meant, to me, that I was being assessed to have the capability to help these kids.  It came as a shock to realize that my (naive) standards were (just a wee bit?) higher than the reality called for.

So I got hired, and I adjusted to the fact that it was all about behavioral control of the children. I bought into the therapeutic model that, if nothing else, we were taking the street and familial pressures off the kids and allowing normal growth processes to reassert themselves.  As time went on though, it became clearer that normal growth processes were apparently not enough.

When I took my first kids it was obvious to me that a protective family, and normal community living – what my aunt and uncle gave me – was the minimum that the kids needed to heal and that is why I became – and remain – such a strong believer in adoption. But as the decades went on, it became clearer still that even that was not enough.  I wasn’t buying into the “damage” argument – that the kids had been internally structurally damaged at some point – and I still don’t. I have seen growth and I have seen major change in some kids where no one would have expected it.

Then a few years back the trauma model developed and took off.  I haven’t been impressed by the implementation that I’ve seen, but I remain hopeful that maybe this is a key.  In the end, though, I believe that our kids beliefs about themselves have been distorted by what they have – and haven’t – learned. I believe that getting the kids to recognize the core of those beliefs, allowing them to examine them in the cool light of day, is their ultimate hope for change.  But I also believe that when they pull out those beliefs, one of the deepest core beliefs that they would find is the belief that there is no hope.  For them.  I believe that they believe that they are broken, damaged, and worse of all, just plain bad.  I also believe in the very deepest part of my own existence that they are wrong.

But I know that if someone believes that they cannot walk, then no matter how able they really are, they will not walk.  As a culture, when we reinforce to our own – especially to our kids – that there are people who are truly hopeless, we ourselves become the models for the power of hopelessness.

One of my adult kids is in the hospital after being beat very badly earlier in the week. He is in an induced coma and we wait until the bleeding in his brain stops to assess any long term damage.  The medical staff is very straight with us: three days later, and he still may not live. But they act as though he will. They treat him as though he will.  They’ve told us that he may end up brain damaged. But they act as though he won’t.  They treat him as though he won’t.

The medical staff lives with hope. And their procedures insist on hope. Not blind hope. Not false hope. Real hope.  What they say is: We don’t know yet.  We are going to protect his body and his brain in every way, in every least risky way, that we can. While we wait. Their approach doesn’t come from being nice: it comes from being respectful.

My son – himself a multiply rejected and multiply betrayed foster kid till he came to me when he was twelve – has no job, and no money.  You would never know that from the way he is being treated.

That approach, that perspective, is the model that I am talking about – a model of hope that reinforces hope, based upon the needs of a person, as a person, not as a bureaucratic object.  It is the model that we use at Family Focus, which is all about hope.

But it is a model that is missing from much in our society, including our criminal justice system and, in days to come, I want to come back to that.

Jack

When we talked, often, (at Family Focus Adoption Services) about me starting this blog, I put it off for many many months.  I was afraid that I would run out of things to say.  The people around me weren’t worried about that (hmm….) but I was.  I sensed, and then realized, that while it may appear that I have a lot to say, I actually say the same things over and over.  One of my colleagues pointed out that that is also true of the many columnists who write for the newspaper and whom I never tire of reading.  That’s true.

But the other day, reading something or other somewhere or other, there was a line written that grabbed my attention. It was about someone sliding over the line between writing a blog and becoming a diarist.  Immediately upon reading that, I knew that that was a line that I worry about.

My intention in creating this blog was to get the people reading it to think about our kids almost as though the kids were their own.  I hoped that readers would respond to the situation of our kids some way or another. The ideal, of course, would be that they would go so far as to adopt one or another of them.  Short of that, was that they would at least keep the kids in the forefront of their thinking. Perhaps they would think of a person whom they could encourage to adopt – or help with an adoption.

Maybe my readers would think of some way to help us stay in business.  One of our board members – a subscriber to the blog – found a site that encouraged people to donate a dollar to the charity of the day (Philanthroper.com). I’d never even heard of them. But he contacted them; they liked what he told them; they took us on; and that brought us in nearly a thousand dollars out of the blue.  Significant money for a small nonprofit.

So that was my intention. I did not want this to be a blog about me. I did not want to be a diarist (as I see that term).  But walking that line is hard.  People tell me – and I know that it’s true – that I have a million stories.  But most of those stories are personal in that they belong to other people.  I haven’t the right to make them public the way the Internet makes things public.  Getting permission, as my son Luis has been happy to give me, works sometimes. As does disguising people (“Ted”). Again though: sometimes. If someone is dead, it feels fairer to tell a story about them.  But even in all those circumstances, privacy matters, because respect matters.

So I am not sure where I am going to go with the blog.  “Ted” will be visiting every weekend beginning Friday, until he moves in.  Then my nearly sixty one year old self will have an eleven year old living in the house full time. Something that hasn’t happened here in thirty years.  Thirty years.  Half of my lifetime ago. I was only thirty myself the last time an eleven year old lived here full time. Carter had only recently lost to Reagan.  That really was a long time ago.

I have forgotten a lot about what that was like, living with an eleven year old.  But I am starting to remember…and what I am first remembering is that my time was not my own. I can’t imagine that the blog will not be impacted one way or the other.

I hope it’s for the good.

Jack

This blogging website has a spam catching service. Suspected spam comments are grabbed and deposited in a folder. After a few days, they are dumped.  Over the months, I have on occasion checked the folder and I have been impressed by the accuracy. Always, it was spam in there. But the other day, after seeing that they had grabbed over 200 spam comments since the blog began, I checked the folder which only had one current comment in it. It was, however, not spam. It was a real comment, which I then marked so, and it was then posted.

All that has led me to realize that others might have sent comments that I never saw because they were defined as spam and now they are long deleted.  The way it’s supposed to work is that all comments, not first defined as spam, are emailed to me for approval for posting – precisely to protect the blog from spam.  This automatic decision about whether a comment is spam or not is how legitimate comments might get past me.

I apologize to anyone who might have sent me comments and they never got posted. I have never rejected any comment (don’t get any ideas, Matt) unless I knew it was nonsense (Chris!).  If you sent one and didn’t see it posted, this is what happened to it. Again my apologies.

Jack

It’s been over seventeen years, not fourteen, since Irving died. I don’t know where my head was when I wrote fourteen.

Jack

Today, I found a clipping from last month’s (paper) NY Times on my desk. I reread it, and knew immediately why I had cut it out originally:  “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response.”  *

The words took my mind immediately to the experience of too many of our kids who are “surrounded by something so big….” that is incomprehensible to me, let alone to them – who actually experience it.  I speak, of course, of their experience of abandonment.  But is it the original abandonment in and of itself, or is it that they are continuing to be abandoned by the very society that they continue to live in?

Dr. Francine Cournos, a psychiatrist in her mid-60s, teaching at Columbia, wrote a book (“City of One”) that we give out to all the people interested in foster care adoption who come to our introductory training (at Family Focus Adoption Services – [for Google as always]).  Dr. Cournos lost her father at three and her mother before she hit her teens. She then lived with her grandmother who eventually developed dementia. At thirteen, the rest of the family got together (aunts and uncles) and placed her into foster care in New York City, where she stayed till her adulthood.  Dr. Cournos writes that the fact that her family could so deliberately do this to her was a worse pain for her then the loss of her parents and grandmother. That is a very strong statement.

The foster kids who need new families often have their pictures and a short blurb about them posted on the Internet, at what are called photolisting sites.  What does it do to a kid to know that year after year after year nobody is interested – despite the “advertising” – in giving to him the family commitment that (s)he needs?  Nobody in the entire country?  Our question, as adults of course, is what does it say about our culture, our society, that we could leave any kid unclaimed and unloved?  But most of the kids don’t have the wherewithal to question the society.  Rather, they blame themselves for their circumstances.  And that blame reaches to a level inside themselves that makes it very difficult for them ever to transcend the self alienation that is an almost automatic reaction to the depth – such depth – of recognizing that they do not matter enough to anyone.

We, as a society, teach our foster families that “love is not enough” to heal the wounds the children carry.  The phrase probably comes from the wonderful book of the same title by the psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Bruno Bettleheim, written forty years ago and talking about children in institutions.  But in truth, I don’t know of anything that can overcome alienation, but love.

The reality that our kids have learned in their guts is so big that they are required to change everything about the way they think and see the world. But the denial probably belongs to us more than to them. What I have come to believe through my experience with these kids is very anti-cultural. I have learned that while there is lots of emotional attachment among people; even lots of very real caring; and even more feelings which are labeled love, the truth is very much darker.

Fourteen years ago, after I buried my barely 21 year old son, Irving, I came back to work and decided that if our training was to be worth anything, then we had to begin to talk about the nature of love, because adoption (which is necessarily always of a person who has been abandoned) cannot be about anything else, and still be real.  We developed a wonderful exercise that we still use all these years later.  At the end of the exercise, in one of my infamous imaginary scenarios, we change the original story (see below**) of King Solomon and ask our families: if Solomon had not changed his decision when the one woman told him not to chop the baby in half, but rather to let the baby go with the other woman, and that baby was never to be seen by her again, would you say that she loved her baby? 99.9% of our people say yes, and they say it pretty much immediately. Which shows – to us and to them – their intuitive sense, no matter how much they have been influenced by Hallmark, of the true essence of love: the willingness to sacrifice anything and everything we want for the good of the beloved, as a gift requiring nothing in return.

And by that definition?  I say it all the time – and get people very bothered by it: There is very little love in this world.

We all get it. The exercise proves that. But we don’t do it. The sheer number of kids with nobody is only one example among many that proves that.

It is very sad.  And very dark. Very much darker than most of us prefer to believe.

Jack

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* Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the NY Times, quoting a guy named Paul Gilding, from a book Gilding wrote about the environment.

** With my apologies to the religious folks who know the story better than I: King Solomon was a biblical judge who was very wise. Two women came to him, after the baby of one of them had died, each claiming that the living baby was theirs. Solomon decided to cut the baby in half to settle the claim. With that, one woman immediately said no. “Let the baby go with the other woman.” And with that, Solomon changed his first decision, now saying, “Now I know who the real mother is.” And he gave the baby to that woman  who was willing to let the baby go.

I met with “Ted” yesterday; told him what I wanted to do; he told me he wanted it too. As a matter of fact, he told me that he was “going to ask me to adopt him.” Oh yeah?  And when was that going to occur, pray tell?  “When the time was right,” he proudly said.

I told him that if he were to be my grandson, then he needed to stop calling me Jack and begin calling me “grandpa” immediately. He did so, although he told me that it “felt funny.” But within the next hour, “grandpa” rolled off his tongue, like I’d been his grandfather forever.

When I brought him back from the visit to his unit, I updated the staff person about what was going on. She – very good move – asked me, in front of him, if that meant that when Ted was acting up, she could tell him that she was going to tell his grandfather. I said absolutely. But, I continued, “I better not find out that you are causing trouble with my grandson.” Guess whose eyes lit up and who got a huge smile on his face?  He gave me, and I gave him, a big hug and I left.

I received a report today that “Ted” has been walking around since yesterday smiling and acting as though the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.  Uh huh.

That’s just wonderful. It actually made my day when I heard it.

And then I stopped – and asked myself the question I’ve been asking for nearly forty years:

Why should any kid have to walk around with that kind of weight on his shoulders in the first damn place?  Every kid has a God-given right to be loved, and claimed forever, by some adult.

Don’t they?

Jack

I finished a good book last month by a man older than me who was in prison in Angola (Louisiana) for 44 years.  Angola has had a rep for decades as being among the nation’s worst prisons, and I was intrigued that this man – Wilbert Rideau – had survived there for so long.  The name of the book is “In The Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance.” I’m always, also and of course, intrigued by the notion of “Deliverance.”

At one point, Rideau was taken under the wing of a warden named Phelps.  Rideau later referred to Phelps as the “big brother and even the father figure I never really had.” Phelps was a good man and taught Rideau much.  But one thing that he taught him has gotten it’s grip on me for a few weeks now. Warden Phelps told him, in some context where action was required: “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so.” Both Aunt Rita and Msgr. Huntington acted for me, when each was the “only person in a position to do so.”  And in so doing they gave me a life that I’d have never imagined for myself.

Our theme this past year at Family Focus has been a biblical quote from Holocaust survivor, author, and witness, Elie Wiesel: “Thou shalt not stand idly by.”  I believe that. I believe that each of us has a responsibility to act, for instance, when we see evil taking place before us. But the interpretation of evil covers a big subjective ground. The warden makes things much more personal, much more specific, and therefore, much more demanding.  I’d have liked to have met him (he died a few years back – at my age.)

The warden’s words have been haunting me. And haunting me.  And haunting me still again.

Because of Ted (see way earlier posts).

We have not been able to find a family for Ted, try though we have.  Ted apparently told his social worker that he wanted me to adopt him and the powers that be asked me if that was my intention. I laughed. Ted turned eleven this year; I’ll be sixty one in two months. My kids are mostly in their forties or heading there pretty quick. I have five local grandchildren within a year of Ted’s age, and the rest range from a few months old to twenty three. No, I’m not adopting anybody.  I am, as they say, too old.

And then the warden’s words come back to me: “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so.”  No one had stepped forward for this boy. No one had even responded to our outreach on him.  I already have one grandson living with me, though he’s now twenty two. I started thinking. Why not take Ted, not as my son, but as my grandson?  He’d be surrounded by uncles who’d more or less themselves been in his position of abandonment; and he’d have cousins his age. Being a grandfather has been a heck of a lot easier for me than being a father.  Legally, of course, it wouldn’t fly, but anything reasonable can generally be worked out one way or another.

Damn warden. Damn book.

Am I the only person “in a position to do so”?  No. Others could, but they aren’t stepping forward. And I have the history with Ted in trying to get his adoptive parents to keep him in their family.  And then experiencing with him his horror when they walked away. I have the room in the house (well, I’d have to build a new bedroom – the eighth!); I most certainly have the experience raising kids like Ted.  And I was given what I needed when I was only six years older than him, by two of the best folks I’ve ever met.  How could I not offer it to Ted?

What I don’t have, probably, is a long future. The Brennans don’t have a great record in getting much past 70, and my mother’s family is worse. But by the time I turn 70, Ted would be almost 21.  The measure isn’t whether this is a good idea or not.  It’s not. I can think of plenty of better ones. The measure is whether or not this is a realistic idea – and for Ted, I can’t think of any others that aren’t wishful thinking. The truth is that his future, if I don’t do this, is group care of some sort with not a single legal relative anywhere. A true legal orphan. And that’s no future.

So I go full circle. My life as a parent began four decades ago with meeting Ricky, another eleven year old who had nobody real to parent him and that led me ultimately to what has been a wonderful life for me.  I guess there is some justice to finishing that life with parenting another eleven year old.

Was this what I was looking for for my sixties? My sixties???   No.  No way. No way at all. Absolutely not.  Not even in my wildest and most scary dreams.  But John Lennon probably put it best: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Yep.

And this was not in the plans.

Jack

Trying to create this new training for families looking to adopt kids whom they don’t know from the foster care system is forcing me to do some deep, and occasionally frustrating, thinking.  These kids have not only been multiply rejected by individuals (mother’s family, father’s family, their foster parents etc.) but they have been betrayed by our culture.  The purpose of the foster care system is to get the kids back home, but these kids, through no fault of their own, aren’t going back home.  The backup system is to get the kids adopted by their foster parents, who know them.  But these kids, again through no fault of their own, are not being adopted by their foster parents. The final plan is to get them adopted through agencies like mine (here goes: Family Focus Adoption Services).  But that takes money that is simply not there.  I could tell stories for a year’s worth of blog posts just of the kids I personally know about over the years who’ve lost adoptive families simply because there was no money available to do the work it would take to bring the child and the available family together – and then, of course, have them succeed.

So, we have to scrounge, and scrounge we do.  We beg for money, we cut pay, we skip paydays, we do work gratis.  It is never enough.  But the real heartbreak comes when we do make a match between a child and a family and don’t have the resources to do the work that would keep them together.

Many years ago, a woman came to us for a unique request. The agency which had responsibility for the child her family had been matched with wouldn’t pay our fees. So the woman came to us and asked us to teach her everything we knew and she would do the work herself. We did, she did, and the adoption succeeded.  We see her every once in a while and the boy she made her son is now long an adult.

That then is our latest plan: change our training, intensify it, teach the families as much as we can about what we know so that they need less outside services.  Easier said than done.  Because the real training isn’t about how to raise our kids; it’s about learning about your self so that, among other things, you can understand how to love our kids. And that is a killer to get into a training curriculum.  Especially one that one wants to keep interesting.

Over the years, one thing that I have learned in trainings is that I hate “role plays.”  I find them general, impersonal, artificial and forced.  And I know that many of my colleagues also hate them. So we won’t use them.  What we will teach instead is something I call “imaginary scenarios.”

When I took my first three kids, in 1978, I also moved sixty miles away from my job. I had to get a local job and I had a hell of a time finding one. A friend, who was a social worker, had told me that my best long term bet to do what I wanted to do  (change the world, of course, like a good sixties kid) was to go get my Masters’ in Social Work and my Masters’ in Business Administration.   So I headed that way. I registered in Marist for the MBA and in Adelphi at the same time for the MSW.  This, despite having three kids at home (8, 10, and 12) and (finally) a full time local job, and a second part time job.

I hated school. It’s never been my thing. I always found it too restricting, too limiting. But I went – for a few months.  Then one morning, I woke up and said to myself, “What is going to happen if I do all this for the next two years; then I graduate, let’s say, on a Friday; and then I wake up dead (imaginary, remember) on Saturday.  I am going to be berserk furious that I spent the last two years of my life doing what I hated (going to school.) And with that, I quit school and never looked back.

And so, what I began calling “imaginary scenarios” became a foundation of my thinking. (After all, one doesn’t “wake up dead.”)  Of course – thirty three years later –  now that I have no money and a current salary that is less then 2/3 of Luis’, I am recognizing that I might have acted precipitously.  Maybe.

Anyway, using “imaginary scenarios” as a thinking tool to figure out what I really want, think, believe, and – especially – feel, has been very powerful for me over the years. It also allows me to put myself in another’s shoes.  Much more effective, because much more real, and always more personal, then role playing.   It is among the first things we plan on teaching to our families.

Jack

Although I haven’t read it yet, I laughed when I saw that there is an article in this morning’s Times, with the headline: “Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth.” Many is the time that I have witnessed folks, always smart, using their logic as a weapon, but believing that it was revealing truth to them.

On my job (at Family Focus Adoption Services – damn commercials) we are in the process of changing all our training for new adoptive parents. It is shaping up as a wonderful training and I expect that it will be very helpful to the new parents and very protective for the children that are placed with them.  Our focus is on truth as it is experienced by both the multiply rejected children and the novice adopters. But such truth comes out of experience and not out of academia or science. As a matter of fact such truth may even be factually false.

For example, there is no such thing as “sunrise” or “sunset.”  Despite the fact that the newscasts and newspapers all give us the times for such every single day, they don’t really exist.  And we all know it. In reality, the sun does not rise, nor does it set. But in our experience it does both.  And it is our experience – our perspective – that matters in our day-to-day life.  The fact that the earth is hurtling through space at incredible speeds is scientific truth, but not experiential truth. None of us are holding on for dear life as the earth races through space.

It is experiential truth that we use to make our regular day to day decisions. And it is experiential truth that will determine whether or not people are willing to commit to these multiply rejected kids and whether or not they keep to those commitments. All the Erik Erikson information on the stages of child development or the Elizabeth Kubler Ross work on the stages of grief and loss – true though they may be – will not help much when one is confronted by a child who lies all the time, and about the stupidest things.

But learning that it is never the behavior, but rather the meaning that we attribute to the behavior, that consistently trips all of us up in our relationships is an experiential truth – whatever its validity scientifically – that gets us looking and thinking.  And gives us the hope of getting past our anger and frustration at the lying.  Experiential truth ultimately is what motivates us to change.

When we change our perspectives, which is the hope of the new training – and of this blog obviously – we change our experience, actually our recognition, of truth.  When our perspective deepens, we deepen that recognition of truth. Reason and logic can be tools towards that end, but no matter what either tells us, in the end experience is what we mostly go by.

When Luis was younger, the new day to him did not begin at midnight, a concept far too abstract for him. Rather, it began when he woke up in the morning.  If he woke up in the middle of the night, that was not the new day for him. It wasn’t his waking up that determined his new day, it was the sun being up.  Logically wrong. Experientially right. And midnight on New Year’s Eve did not compute for him.  He went to bed, instead.

Shakepeare had Hamlet put it: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Our job in the new training is to show our families some of those “more things.”  Even if those things would not pass muster in the scientific or academic worlds. Or more likely: within our materialistic and consumer culture.

Jack