Jack Brennan Perspectives

For those who are not reading the comments, whether at the blog site, or through the “Comments RSS,”  I was asked last week, in response to my last posting, what the difference was between “bearing witness” and “simply observing something.”  It’s a thoughtful question, and I responded too quickly and on the run.  I have since been giving the question a lot of thought.

Observing something – what witnesses do in court, for instance – is to report on what one experienced with the senses.  I saw something; heard something; tasted something; smelled something; touched something.  In each situation, the “something” was outside of myself, and had some sort of objective measurability.  The witness, if they are simply reporting on what was observed, can than walk away with no further thought to the experience, as though they were, let’s say, a camera.  (Factoring out, of course, the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses.)  There is no necessary personal connection to the event to which they give witness.

But to bear witness requires a personal connection, a perspective from the inside of the witness. My cousin Michael stood up in the Church and said, in effect: “From my perspective as his son, this is who my father was.”  And because he was my uncle’s son, we listened. Likewise, Bernard Layfayette, Jr., was one of the actual freedom riders. He was there.  He can talk from the inside about what we (as a society) witnessed only from the outside.  So when he speaks of his experience, we listen.

But while these two guys were articulate in their bearing witness to their respective experiences, it is not articulateness that is required in order to bear witness.  It is experience.

And which of us does not have experience?  A beaten battered baby bears witness to the abuse he or she suffered, even if the baby is dead. Bearing witness connects – if it connects, if we allow it to connect – to the decency within us. And then we find ourselves saying “yes” both to the witness bearer and to the decency to which they bear witness.  No baby – and if we connect, we’d all agree – deserves the abuse that the body of that battered baby bears witness to.

Each of us, because of our experience of each of us, bears witness to each of us. That is our power, and that is our responsibility.  [And it is really not complicated. In the end, for instance, it underlies why our parents taught us that if we have nothing good to say about someone, then we should say nothing.]  If we didn’t automatically bear witness to each other, then it wouldn’t matter what we say, not say, do or not do.  But we each know better: it matters.  And oftentimes it matters more, sometimes far more, than we realize.

How much bearing witness matters to those kids who have no parents to bear witness to their singular importance can be too easily measured by counting those homeless, those prisoners, and those mentally ill, who grew up in, and then aged out of, foster care. The numbers are terrible.

Doesn’t every human being need a parent, or at least an adult, to stand up for them; to bear witness to them that they matter?  An adult who puts himself or herself on the line for the child?  An adult who insists that the needs of the child must come first?

I believe that. I was also given that experience: by both Aunt Rita and by Msgr. Huntington. It’s why I am such a believer in adoption for people, like Ted (see earlier posts), who have no parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents – any adult – who believe in their own responsibility to stand up for him; an adult who chooses to bear witness to Ted’s value. How on earth do we as a society allow any one of our children to grow up in essential abandonment like that?

If I’m right, then whether we like it or not, we bear witness every day. And – if I’m right – and our witness is always to what we believe is decent, then we can find out a lot about ourselves by looking at what we stand up for.  But – again, if I’m right – we can find out a lot about ourselves also by looking at what we don’t, and/or won’t, stand up for.

If I’m right.

Jack

I am trying to clean off my desk; I mean truly clean off my desk.  So I decided to take today and not get distracted and really make that happen.  But then while eating breakfast,  I read an Op-Ed article (1) by one of the original freedom riders, Bernard Lafayette, Jr. talking about his experience of the witness of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Witness.

Last Friday, my cousin Michael, gave a wonderful eulogy (2) for his father which connected with so many of us at the funeral as Michael witnessed for us his experiences of my uncle.  It was Michael’s witness that made the eulogy so real and thus got inside of us.

Again, witness.

And for a few weeks now, I have been thinking about a particular form of witness that is powerful, common, and more or less invisible. So the heck with the desk…..

I call them “witness statements.” They are statements that land in deep places within us. Not because they are so incredibly true – they may in fact be completely untrue – but because of whom they come from.  This week’s episode on “The Criminal Minds” spinoff was about a girl who wore a whole head mask because her father had convinced her that her face had become too disfigured to look at (as a result of him burning her years earlier.) In point of fact, her face had healed fine. But she believed him – she believed a complete and obvious untruth – because he was her father.

We give credibility to those whom we are surrounded by, especially when we believe that they care about us.  What they say then, apparently, does not get screened by our truth/error filter that we might ordinarily use. What just popped up in my head are the airport screeners. Once we are past them, there is no longer any searching for or fear of, say, weapons.  Everyone we are surrounded by, at that point, has been screened for safety.  We can trust them.

This deep power to witness, then, which belongs to each of us within our own worlds puts a tremendous responsibility upon us to take great care to identify truthfully what we are witnessing.  Not what we are feeling – the great American be-all and end-all – within us, but what we are seeing within the other. That means also that we have to develop our ability to see.  That ability to see – go back to the op-ed article and to the eulogy – is pretty much the sine qua non of being able to witness to truth.

I realized that with Ted (see earlier posts) my job is first to get past his screening so that I become a witness in his head; so that what I say lands deeply within him. And then I need to witness to that which I see, about his wholeness, his blamelessness, and his essential goodness in an attempt to overweigh (word?) the witness messages he has been left with by his abandoning, betraying “parents.”  And then I need to witness to his personal importance to me to overweigh the witness messages all kids in residential treatment get just by being in residential treatment, being dealt with only by assigned staff. That last walks a line that I too often fall over, as I did e.g., when I met Ricky and then ended up with so many kids. So, as a professional, I do not really cut it [and my salary – 😦 – witnesses to that.]  But, to leave a person – any person – with no personal witness that (s)he matters for their own sake, is, from my perspective, to leave a person with neither food nor water.

Nay, and far worse, it is to leave them without oxygen.

Jack

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I don’t know why you can simply click on the link to the Times, but not on the link to Facebook. But, no matter what, these are the addresses.  I tested them.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/opinion/20Lafayette.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

2. http://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-brennan/my-dads-eulogy/10150249891388420

I ended last week, as many people my age spend far too much time doing, going to a wake and funeral.  My Uncle Mike was only seven years older than me and because of that we never thought of him as our uncle, but rather a cousin, I guess.  At the wake, of course, were relatives from our side of the family, and also from his wife’s side. Mike was married for forty five years.  Even though our numbers are diminishing, there were still at least twenty people there who have been some part of my life for going on, if not over, fifty years. My parents’ generation had that experience, as did my grandparents’. I witnessed it.  It is – to me – normal.

But nearly thirty nine years ago, I walked into Children’s Village for the first time on my job as a child care worker and met an eleven year old kid, for whom that experience would have been unfathomable.  Ricky, whose words to me that night would impact, even determine, the course of my entire life from that day to this, might as well have had no one. I promised myself that first day I met him that I would change things for that boy, and I did. I ended up adopting him and all four of his brothers.

Yet, here I am this morning, on my way to take to Mickey D’s for lunch another eleven year old who has no one – not even siblings. Forty years later and I am still dealing with the same problem. For those reading the blog regularly, this would be the boy I refer to as Ted.  I have been searching for a new family for Ted with no luck thus far.

But what really gets to my gut, both with Ricky and with Ted, is that had I been looking for a family for either boy ten years prior to me meeting them, we [Family Focus] would have had families clamoring at our door.  In a week, literally, for a child just over a year old, once we put out the word (and that’s without Facebook) we would have had – easily – over one hundred families. A child a year younger than that, meaning new-born? Over a thousand. Easily.

But for the same exact children, only now with ten years experience of grief under their belts, there is next to nobody, oftentimes literally nobody. I know all the arguments: they are damaged, or even broken, they are too difficult, or they can’t be molded, and so on and so forth.

A few hours ago marked the forty fifth anniversary of my Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank, coming into my bedroom to wake me up and inform me of my mother’s death.  Less than twenty months later, my brother, my sister, and myself, were living with that aunt and uncle. Thursday and Friday, their now-long-adult-kids were with me, my brother, and my sister, at (Uncle) Mike’s wake and funeral.

Did my aunt and uncle, I wonder, argue that we were too damaged, too broken, too difficult, or unmoldable, before they made the life changing decision (for all of us) that they made?  I doubt it.  We needed protection; they responded.  When, only five years later, I saw that Ricky needed protection, I responded.  What on earth does age of the child needing protection have to do with it?

Why aren’t those thousands of families available for the newborns, or the hundreds available for the one year old – or even just one adult – coming to me asking to be allowed to respond to Ted?

I am in the field nearly forty years; I am sixty years old. And I don’t get it.

After all these years, I still don’t get it.

Jack

Some time ago, a prisoner I met went to some effort to explain to me that the media stories about male prisoners being raped were greatly exaggerated and things had changed in prisons very much since the days of “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.”  Some time later, way after that initial discussion, he admitted to me that he had been raped while in prison.

Recently, a former foster child, adopted as a teen, and now an adult, told me that he rarely told people about his foster placement history, because they would automatically believe that he was “damaged.”

I guess both guys were telling me the same thing: that assumptions would be made about them, and they would be stigmatized, simply because of their respective at one time statuses (is that a word?).  Their issue wasn’t about the truth of what had happened to them. It was instead about their right to privacy and their right to protection from those assumptions. But it was bigger than that, I think.

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the many different ways that our kids are stigmatized, and the consequences.  In every situation, it appears to come to the same thing.  They are viewed as “lesser” because of whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Rachel Lloyd (see last post) had a wonderful response to her girls about the girls’ own beliefs that they had been “damaged.” Rachel told them that they had developed normally in abnormal circumstances.  I think that is exactly right.

I think that it is also right about our kids.  They are not damaged in their personhood.  They have developed normal reactions and responses to the abnormal circumstances of their lives.  That means that any one of us, in the same circumstances, would have developed as they have.  The object, the purpose, of their development, like the development of each of us, has been to protect their psyches. They are not – media to the contrary – broken. But broken is what they believe they are.

All the therapeutic interventions in the world will not get them past that. On the contrary, such might well reinforce their belief by the very fact of “needing” therapeutic intervention.  What they must have to begin to believe that they are not broken, is an experience of being part of a “we.”  They need a person – often, but not exclusively, a parent – to meet them where they are, not to demand that they meet us where we are. A person who says to them: I am no better than you, no matter our respective circumstances and no matter how it appears or feels otherwise. To say to them that: “as people, we are exactly equal.” Meeting us where we are allows a person to become part of “us.”  Meeting them where they are allows a person to become part of a “we.”

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, and the author of “I and Thou,” says it much better than I ever could.  I have little doubt that what I have written is not clear enough. And I know that I need to work on making it clearer and explaining it much better.  Still, I am certain of the truth of it because of my own experience of living – and parenting.

The day that I knew that my brain-injured son, Luis, would be fine even when I was gone, was the day he came home from work and told me that some guy at work had given him grief.  I asked Luis how he responded, and he told me that he had said to the guy, “What makes you think that you are so much better than me?”  Luis had come to believe, in his very gut, that, as a person, he is the equal of anyone.

Because he is.

I am watching out for the implications of every message I hear, especially by every helping person I see, about those of us who are from worse circumstances than typical, being broken people. And I am going to start yelling – and yelling very loudly – no.

The starting point of any “we” has to be the recognition of, and assenting to, this:  There but for the grace of God, go I.

Jack

Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the NY Times, has written often about the commercial sexual exploitation of children, both domestic and international. I have quoted him for the title of this post. Last Monday, he wrote his latest column on the subject of human trafficking and the sex industry. This time he recommended “a terrific new book called ‘Girls Like Us,’ by Rachel Lloyd.”

The beauty of the Kindle app is that one can download about 5% of a book to see if the book is worth buying.  I did that, read what I downloaded, and immediately bought the book. I finished it over the weekend and I was knocked over by it, or more specifically, by Rachel Lloyd.  Again and again, as I read the book I was taken aback by the parallels between what she had written and what I have heard from our kids over the years.  The authenticity was more evidence of my belief that if something is true, it is true no matter what angle you come at it from, no matter what approach you take.

It is a pleasure for an old guy like me to be able to go to Google and find out so much immediate information about an author; an ability unimagined for most of my life.  Rachel has received a number of well-deserved awards, and I also found a clip of her on YouTube, testifying before Congress. She has done the world, and her obviously much loved girls a tremendous service with a program in NYC named GEMS that she founded. But with this book, she has done a different service for the far bigger community. Especially those of us dealing with other abandoned people who are too often blamed for their own abandonment.

On a personal note, I was delighted to read what she said about the johns who are “buying” these young people. For many years, I have asked the question “who are their customers?” After all, for anyone to make a living from prostitution, there have to be many many many more customers than there are women (and men) in the “life.” But one rarely hears about the johns, and certainly they don’t identify themselves to their families, co-workers, friends, or pastors in anywhere near the numbers that there must be. It is all a very secret and hidden life, apparently.

Rachel does a great job of identifying who the johns are; who the pimps are; but most importantly, who the victims are.  And she does a phenomenal job of pointing out how the victims are taught -trained, she says; conditioned, I would say – to buy into their own victimization.

[Commercial: It is a point of pride with my agency (Family Focus Adoption Services) that we have devised some very important ways of teaching our kids how to opt out of their victimization. Additionally, we have set up structures that prevent our kids from being victimized by anyone – including themselves – except, perhaps, by accident.  That self victimization is probably the worst consequence of abandonment for all the abandoned.  As we did with another author of another great book – Ashley Rhodes Courter and her “Three Little Words” – I hope to get permission to reach out to Rachel to see if she’d be willing to join our honorary board of directors at FFAS.]

My thanks to Nicholas Kristof, who writes, “Lloyd guides us through this world in an unsentimental way that rings pitch perfect with my own reporting.”  Uh huh: Pitch perfect with his reporting; pitch perfect with our adoption work. Once again, no matter what direction you take, no matter how you approach it, truth is truth.

Hmm….

Rachel Lloyd: thank you, thank you, thank you.  For your book; for your work; but mostly, for your witness: It is never the fault of the lost for being lost.

Jack

Two weeks from this evening, and the same day of the week this year as back then, will mark exactly forty five years since I last saw my mother. She, with my father, went out that evening to a party. On the way home late that night (so technically the next day) my father crashed the car into a concrete bridge abutment on the Long Island Expressway. He was severely injured, but my mother was killed.  I was then, and remain now, a religious believer. I didn’t blame my father for her death – it was God who allowed it – but I did hold him (and her) accountable. The family story was that he fell asleep. Likely that is so. But I was fifteen and I was there and I knew that he was drunk when he left the house that evening – I can’t imagine he sobered up at the party. It was a different era, but he still should not have been driving, and my mother should have not gotten into the car with him.

One night, months later, long after his discharge from weeks in the hospital, my father was sitting in our living room drinking with his cousin. I was directly above in my bedroom. He must have said something that piqued my curiosity because I got out of bed and went to the top of the staircase to hear him.  And what I heard stunned me.  All these decades of experience later and I am still stunned.

What he said – this first time I’d ever heard him speak of my mother’s death – was that it was “Norman’s fault” that my mother was dead. My father was a cop and Norman was an old boss of his. Norman had transferred my father to protect him either because my father had done something wrong or because Norman believed he had.  At the new precinct, they threw this party and my father was invited. That’s the party he was driving home from when he crashed the car. So – voila – if Norman hadn’t transferred him, he wouldn’t have been at the party, and my mother would be alive.

I was stunned because it was all true.  Every step in his logical progression had followed directly upon the earlier one. From Norman’s decision we went directly to my mother’s death.

So, I took my father’s logic and went further: had my grandparents never met, my father would never have been born and – voila – my mother would be alive.  Actually, had my great grandparents never come over from Ireland, my grandparents wouldn’t have been born either and – voila – my mother would be alive. I sat in that hallway and I kept going with these true statements. I ended up all the way back at Adam and Eve. My mother was probably dead because of that damn apple.

But my father’s drinking? Apparently, it didn’t play a part even worth mentioning.  Norman, if not Adam and Eve, was more responsible for my mother’s death then my father’s drinking was.

I was stunned by my father’s sincerity. I learned a lot that night – about blame, and fault, and sincerity, and denial and responsibility. But I learned one lesson I never dreamed then that I’d be blogging about now: things can be true, and yet completely and totally irrelevant.  As a matter of fact, there are many things that are true, that are irrelevant.

The chronological sequence of events that directly followed upon each other did not lead to my mother’s death, even though they did. Years later, I connected immediately to the phrase when I first heard it that the “facts were getting in the way of the truth.” Facts can, and too often do, masquerade as truth.

Facts – like my father’s that night – can be irrelevant. Truth, I’ve experienced, is always relevant. The truth is that my mother should not have gotten in the car; and my father should not have been driving.  The actions of Norman, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and Adam and Eve, are all totally irrelevant to what happened that late night forty five years ago, no matter how factual.

“True, but irrelevant.”  An unintentional gift from my father that has saved me from confusion, or brought me back from confusion, more times than I can remember over the course of my life.

Jack

I took a long time to decide to begin this blog because I was afraid that I would very quickly run out of things to say. For the past two weeks or so, since the last post, that’s an issue that has come back to trouble me. It’s not really that I have nothing more to say. It is that I’m not sure where the line is between what I want to say, and what is fair to say.  What, that is, is private information that does not belong on a public blog?  Even if a story’s characters are disguised, one quickly reaches a limit where the disguise so distorts the story that it is too often not worth telling.

One of my continuing disjointing experiences of this blog – for any blogger, I suppose – is to see what the site reports to me: that there are people reading the blog every day and yet I have no idea who those people might be.  The link from the Family Focus Adoption Services website is certainly sending people here – the site reports that to me.  But it doesn’t account for all the numbers that are being reported as coming to the site. So, everything I write must be written with the reasonable expectation that it will be read by some high school kids (some have sent comments) as well as adoption professionals (some have subscribed) as well as my colleagues at work (both comments and subscriptions) and, of course, my friends and family members.

And that goes to the heart of what I wanted to say this morning: it is my absolute belief that if something is true, then it must be true no matter what angle or direction that you approach it from.  Which means, in turn, that if it is good for me, then it must also be good for you. Or, if it is good for you, then it must also be good for me.  It also means that if it is bad for either of us, it is bad for both of us. No matter how it may look, sound, or feel otherwise. Therefore, the only way to be even reasonably certain that something is true is to see whether or not it works from all approaches.  One of the reasons that we are so confident about our transition process at Family Focus is because it works for everybody. The adoptee gets all the time they need to make their decision about being adopted; the family gets all the time that they need to do the same; and the child’s agency is charged the same fee no matter how long the process takes so they lose nothing by giving us the breathing room that we need. Actually, by not having to pay for alternative placements, they save real money the longer it takes.

That is a very simple example of what I am saying, but it shows my point. In my experience, I have never seen this to not be true.  I remember one time talking to the very enabling girlfriend of a very abusive guy.  The young woman told me how very deeply she loved this man and that’s why she had to put up with his abuse.  She wasn’t happy when I told her that there would come a time when he would end up murdering her and then it would have been her “love” that had allowed him to become – even supported him in becoming – a murderer. Tolerating his abuse was obviously not good for her – but it also was not good for him.

This belief – the title of the post is the exact words – has been enormously helpful for me in understanding lots of things that I didn’t before I was given it (by Msgr. Huntington, of course). No matter how the train engineer, for instance,  justifies his driving of the Jews on his train route which is now terminating at the concentration camps, it cannot possibly be good for him, nor for his family, for him to keep that job.  What he is doing is bad for the Jews, and therefore automatically bad for him.   That it’s his livelihood now – and pension later – pales before the evil he is bringing onto himself and his family.  The logistics of getting out of it become political, of course. But the decision to get out is very simple. Not simplistic, as I have been accused of in my life. Simply: simple.

Deciding what to post must be measured by what is private to another. Violating anyone’s confidence or privacy is out of bounds.  And it couldn’t be good for me – or you, the reader – if it weren’t good for the person whose story I tell.  Simple. But it does make it harder to know what can be fairly written.

Jack

Earlier in the week there was a thought provoking letter in the NY Times. Professor Dena Davis insists that in countries with less than full democracies, the mindset is that President Obama could not only have stopped the Koran burning in Florida, but could have arrested the minister who did it. The “could” really is seen as “should.” Since he did neither, he is viewed as sanctioning the behavior.

“Sanctioning the behavior” was certainly one of the most difficult parental balancing acts that I experienced.  While I imagine that that is probably so of all parents, it is all the more difficult when one adopts into one’s family a person – child though (s)he may be – who already has years of history outside the family with different values, different beliefs, and different behaviors; too often, many different values, many different beliefs, and many different behaviors, from their many different homes. Our family positions seem like only one more imposition in a long line of such.

It seems there is a continuum with “minding one’s own business” at one end – Obama and the burning e.g. – and “sanctioning the behavior” [“enabling” being the farthest extreme of that] on the other. I suppose toleration is along the continuum somewhere.

But we are taught over and over that every single decision or non-decision; speaking or not speaking; acting or not acting has meaning and communicates our beliefs to others. And I agree with that. But it brings parents back to their fear of sanctioning behavior that they do not agree with.

Simple: When I was a young adult, I was sometimes given a much appreciated carton of cigarettes as a gift. I never interpreted that to mean that the gift giver agreed with my smoking.  Yet today, I wouldn’t even consider picking up a pack of cigarettes for my kids on my way to their house – even though I might well be picking up a gallon of milk for them at the same store.

Difficult: For those against abortion, how does one drive one’s young adult daughter to the abortion clinic when she gets pregnant?  Yet how does a parent support a daughter’s right to make her own decisions by refusing to drive her?  If she has the abortion, can she continue to live with you? Or is that enabling her because your cheap room and board allowed her the money to go to the clinic?

Where is the line?  I have just recently finished MAPP training – the local standard of training for foster and adoptive parents – and this issue of the line was not once addressed.  It’s further interesting to me that in all my years of working in the field I never once saw a training to address this very real and very painful parental dilemma. I have had to fly by the seat of my pants every single time I came up against it and I know now that I too often blew it.

For adoptive parents of older children – especially if there are birth children in the house – the dilemma is seriously multiplied.  Allowing the children the freedom to do what they do because one is committed to unconditionally loving them does not cut it.  There must be standards of family behavior that must be followed, or one turns into a group home, no?

At the risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, the “Sex and The City” columnist character, who today would probably be a blogger: If you are not with me, aren’t you against me?  And if you are not against me, aren’t you automatically with me?

Thank you, Professor Davis, for giving us your insightful and, for me, personally relevant perspective.

Jack

I was reminded last week of a belief I hold that held me in good stead when my kids were younger and taking all things to the extremes that they did.  There were times when some one or another of my kids, even as very young adults, would get mad at me, disappear, and cut me off.  Months, sometimes years, would go by without a word. It was impossible to know what to do. In a culture where being divorced is almost a rite of passage now, there were no permanent relationship models to look to for what to do in the face of silence. It was hard to figure out how to keep the relationship alive when it was so silent, and sometimes silent for so long. Or even if it could be kept alive.  Is there a relationship time limit for silence?  Beyond a certain time period of silence does a relationship automatically die?

I knew that I was not ending the relationship; I was certain of that. Yet, it sure as heck felt ended; and the evidence also made it sure as heck seem that way.  For those of the kids whose adoptions were finalized, there was that legal tie that was there forever and I was very grateful and happy for that much anyway, little though it meant in real day to day life.   But for those whose adoptions had not yet finalized, I was forced to question: is the relationship over?  Is this what a failed adoption looks like?  And feels like?  Some of the foster kids went back to foster care and therefore had to be placed somewhere else.

Were they then not my kids?  Obviously in the material world they were not. But inside me, they absolutely were. I kept trying to figure out a model for how I could be so certain that these kids were mine, even though they were nowhere to be seen.

And then I remembered something Fr. Huntington had taught me: “there is nothing [real] that is not mutual.”  I had to take that lofty philosophical – or perhaps theological – concept and bring it down to earth.  And I did.

I figured out (decided?) that all relationships, like my television or stereo, had two controls.  The first was for the volume; and the second was the on/off switch.  I realized that the first person who walks away from the relationship only controls the volume: the relationship goes silent.  But it is the second person who then controls the on/off switch. And as long as that second person refuses to turn the switch off, the relationship remains alive and real, no matter how silent.  It worked out very well for me over the decades, and protected my relationships with, and my feelings for, my kids.  I sure believe it is an accurate representation of reality.

At the very least, it is an empowering concept.  Anybody has the freedom to walk away from a relationship. But it is the second person who controls whether a relationship lives or dies.  A child can reject a parent, but as long as the parent refuses to reject the child, the relationship remains alive, no matter what the kid does.  Very powerful and very freeing.

[Does it work the other way also?  I don’t think so, due to the need for the parent, not the child, to make the unconditional commitment. But maybe the kids think it does – and maybe that sense is part of why Ted (see older posts) and so many other kids fight against or even refuse to accept their parents walking away.  Maybe, aside from the pain and the loss,  they believe that by refusing to turn off that switch, they have the power to keep the relationship alive.  I don’t know.]

Jack

Years ago, after a serious back operation, my son Gilbert got very very sick. It was touch and go for a while and it was very scary.  I remember calling my aunt from the hospital every day…. I was 33 and I needed her every one of those hospital days.

Years after that, my son Irving died, and for various reasons, I buried him in Puerto Rico. I came home to JFK airport to a furious February snowstorm and I drove in it in the middle of the night all the way out on Long Island to my aunt and uncles’ house…. I was 43 and I needed them desperately that night of the day I’d buried Irving.

In between, my son Rodney graduated from college. My aunt and uncle drove all the way to Albany to go to the ceremony. They were in their late 60s…..I was 38 and I was so thankful to have my “folks” there for my son.

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You get the point: people need and want their families, specifically their parents, despite being adults. Turning 18 or 21 doesn’t end that need. We just don’t realize it as a need, if we’ve always had them there, and have never felt the emptiness of their being gone.  It’s not the need of a kid: it’s the need of a person.

Yesterday, I was referred to, and today I watched, a great video, on YouTube,  about older teens and adoption. It was so good, and so accurate, that I was knocked out by it and want everyone to know about it.

[“We Interrupt” produced by Ampersand Families, a fairly new adoption agency out of Minnesota. It is broken into two parts, labeled Part One and Part Two]

Immediately afterwards, I went to the website of “Ampersand Families” and found this statement on permanency:

“Permanency is not a single placement, it is not a plan, it is not a program. It is not what some call ‘long-term foster care’ or ‘permanent foster care’ – there is no such thing, as foster care is designed to be temporary. It is not an Independent Living Skills class. Permanency is a knowing, deep within, that you belong somewhere with someone…..”

Yes.  Yes. Yes. And that belonging “somewhere with someone” is always a gift from the “someone.” Ampersand Families recognizes that it is never something you can earn – it must always be given to you.   It may not be appreciated till it’s gone, but it always gives us an answer to the question that I heard on the video and knew immediately would be the title of this post.

Who do I call?

Nobody should ever have to say: “I have never had any one to call.”

Nobody.

Jack