Summertime: On Gratitude, Grief, Patience, Hope, and Family
On Gratitude
“What do you think would have happened to me if you hadn’t adopted me?” S wanted to know one afternoon, as we were making the long trec from our hometown to where my aunt, whom S calls “yiayia,” or grandma in Greece, lives in Detroit.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, because I don’t.
“I don’t think it would have been good,” S said. I let that statement hang in the air as we passed some horses grazing in the distance along the highway. I didn’t know what to say. The truth is, we still don’t know what will happen, exactly—and that has been a major stressor all summer.
“I’m so glad you adopted me,” she added, “and that you love me so much.”
We both took a deep breath. “I’m so glad you love me so much, too,” I said.
She put the seat back and tried to nap. The dog in his backseat kennel stirred, looked over at her, and lay back down.
---
On Grief
This summer has been a time of major growth for both of us. Thanks to two good friends—one a long-time, old friend whom I’ve gotten to know a lot better this summer, and the other S’s most recent “college buddy,” actually a slightly-older-than-college age woman who has had an incredible impact on S’s life—I’ve found my way out of a depression that lasted more than a year. The depression was brought on by the death of my student and the losses, through death or moving, of so many other good friends and beloved family members this past year.
Both friends were going through major life changes and dealing with memories from their past, and our time together started with me finding a way to open my heart to them—to not hold back in how I helped them as I had been doing, unconsciously, for far too long out of fear of getting hurt by loss. Whenever we grieve, all of our past, unresolved griefs are unleashed again, and we have to struggle to figure out how to live with one foot in the present and one in the past. It becomes difficult to think beyond the next moment, or to love anyone, because loving yourself is a full-time job.
But I was clearly called to help these friends through crises, to put my own grief on hold, to step out of the dark place where I had been hiding. And, in time, our conversations developed into truly reciprocal friendships, and I felt cared for and loved, like someone finally knew the day-to-day details of our lives enough to be there for me through all the ups and downs.
One of them, Lisa’s college buddy T, will leave in a couple weeks, which will be incredibly hard for us—but for once I don’t feel sad that we got so close and now I will have to lose her. Instead, I feel grateful for all she’s done for us, grateful that I was able to be there for her, grateful that I had, even for a brief time, someone with whom I could talk late into the night, could completely lose a sense of time around. It has been so long since I’ve had a friend like that in my life.
---
On Patience
All summer we have been grappling with a variety of social service agencies, the details of which I outlined in an earlier post. We have been trying to determine what resources S is eligible for as she enters her senior year of high school, and because none of these agencies communicate with each other, it has been quite time-consuming.
I was working half-time this summer, and so I set my schedule to be 8:30-1:30 four days a week (at work) and another day with the same hours which I spent at the coffee shop struggling through forms and phone calls and other details related to S’s care.
It paid off; in the end, I was able to leverage more assistance than we’ve ever had, as opposed to less. Adoption assistance will continue until she graduates high school. A very helpful social security worker, while not succeeding in getting S disability payments, figured out that she was owed payments from her bio parents—and we got, quite out of the blue, a very large check for back payments, and will continue to get a check every month until she graduates high school. And, we got a family support grant from Human Services.
What this means is that I will be able to pay all of S’s tutoring, child care, and job coaching with resources other than my own—and begin to make some progress on my debt, not to mention always have enough money to pay our bills and for other necessities. It is a great relief.
There are a few items that still need to be resolved—my insurance and her MA which covers the co-pays for her meds and therapists are now refusing payment on many services, and I’ll be in a battle with them for the foreseeable future; I didn’t get my tax refund because the federal government is suddenly, for the first time, suspicious about whether S was actually adopted and actually has special needs (OK, federal government, here are the 70 pages of assessments she’s had in the last year proving she is)…etc.
But somehow I am managing to, well, manage. I am not feeling nearly as panicked as ever before. Even though all of the resources we have will be cut off once she graduates, I now have a year to figure out what to do, as well as a very helpful social security worker who thinks she can get S qualified next year for disability (once the other resources are cut off) and a very helpful social worker.
T, S’s college buddy, helped her get ready for pursuing a job for this coming academic year, and she now has a long-term placement with the local Humane Society. It is a perfect fit for her--she wants so much to do the job well, and she is in love with the animals. I just hired a new college student to be her job coach, and I’ll be able to get her credit for this experience.
The school was, as usual, totally unhelpful in this process, and didn’t answer any of my questions about whether this experience could count for credit until three days before the start of the new year. The answer was yes, but only if a paraprofessional went with S to the site during the work day. By this point, S had gone through her training (which the paraprofessional would have had to complete, and which isn't available during school hours) and was scheduled for evening hours—and the Humane Society isn’t in need of help during the periods when the school had scheduled her work experience.
So, I gave up and said I was going to home school her in the work experience, math, and her fine arts credit (she’ll be taking piano again this year). I decided this was easier than trying to negotiate. Ultimately, even though it was utterly flawed, I also decided not to fight the evaluation the school did—I have given up. I have decided I will get her through high school with a combination of daily communication with her teachers and some homeschooling, and that trying to use the special education department to help is pointless. She will have an IEP, and I’ll fight for it to include the accommodations she really needs—but ultimately, I realize I need to do most of the work, to communicate directly with teachers and not expect the special ed department to help either with organizational skills or academic skills. I know this may sound defeatist, but I have wasted so much time and energy communicating with her special ed teacher and the staff in the room, and I’ve finally realized I need to eliminate this stress from my life.
And…it’s only one more year! After that, I’ll likely need to advocate for her with other people and agencies, but I can’t imagine any advocacy that will be more difficult than what I have been through with the schools.
I am learning, slowly but surely, to let some things go if they truly can’t be resolved, and to find creative solutions for them. I am learning, slowly but surely, to stay present in the present and not be obsessed with the future. And, I’m learning patience. I feel like there have been so many utterly amazing gifts, and so much growth, in all of this.
---
On Hope
In June, S had her first seriously violent episode in a long time. Her ballet obsession had become all-consuming after her recital in May. She got violent with both T and me when we tried to set some limits on her obsession. So, I cut her off altogether. This involved a very difficult conversation with her teacher, who had been part of the problem all along—a good, kindhearted person who really cares for S, she had not been able or willing to be honest with her about her abilities in the area of dance. S imagined herself as being graceful and beautiful on stage; she could barely follow the steps. I realized her teacher had put her on pointe much too early, and that the result had been incredibly damaging to S’s understanding of the work that is needed to make achievement in any art.
After a month off completely, she has been, for the last month, allowed to dance, read about dance, or watch dance videos for a half hour each day—but most days, she forgets to ask for this time. I also bought her a new pair of pointe shoes over the summer to show her that I would be willing, someday, to let her dance again—but that she needed to learn some limits.
She goes back and forth. We had another incident last night where she said, “I’ve been doing really well with my limits, so I’ll start dance again when school starts, right?” Well, no. We had decided that the very earliest she would be able to start again would be October, after at least a month in school, and that she would have to agree not to be in any recitals, as they tend to cause a lot of the obsessiveness. But, she wasn’t satisfied with this answer—again. This time, though, she apologized within 24 hours for resisting the rules we had already set up.
It is hard for me to write this next part. When she got violent with me over ballet, during the incident that led to a complete cut off of any talk about dance, she tried to choke me. She realized quickly what she was doing and pulled her hands away--but she had her hands on my neck for long enough that I was scared. She was so sorry—immediately sorry, for the first time ever, maybe.
But then, two days later, we learned that a boy she’d known from school—another student in the special ed department—had choked his mother to death last Christmas. The case was finally closed—he had admitted that it was him (and his brothers) who did it. News like this can’t be easy for anyone to take in—but imagine if you were the same age as the boy and had sat next to him in the Resource Room. Imagine if he had been quiet but likeable, although you had been bothered that he called the room "the retard room," and wished he would stop. Imagine if, two days before his arrest, you had put your hands around your mother’s neck and squeezed. How could you ever trust yourself again?
S was devastated. It took many long, hard conversations to make sense of what had happened. The image of violence laid out in the local paper—so many details—led to nightmares and memories from S’s past. But I feel as if she came through this hard time stronger, with a deeper sense of who she is, and a deeper understanding of how her actions affect others. It has been amazing to see her growth.
---
On Family
We took an epic road trip with our dog to see my aunt this summer; we had never been to her house before, because we usually meet in Ohio where the rest of my extended family (except for her and my sister) live. We had also never had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with just her and her husband—even when she has visited, time always felt hectic.
It was the best vacation of our lives. We had a wonderful party for S’s 18th birthday, and several family members came up from Ohio or from other parts of the Detroit area. We went to the zoo and to Greenfield Village, an old-fashioned village S absolutely loved. We stopped in Chicago for a day on the way there and in the Wisconsin Dells for a day on the way back. We had long mornings of playing with our dog in a fenced-in backyard and long evening conversations with my aunt and her husband on their screened in back porch. I felt so lucky to have this family, to be so deeply loved.
My family is hardly completely functional, to say the least. My mother’s death when I was 13 affected all of us, and the family dynamic, in so many ways. In the more than 25 years since then we have had times of deep connection and disconnection—but all of that seemed so far in the past when we were together this summer. I realized that although things have not always been easy, I have never had to question, as S did for the first ten years of her life, whether my family loved me. Even my father, at his most abusive, clearly always loved me—though he made a lot of mistakes in knowing how to show it.
I have that safety net of love that has always held me up, even when I’ve felt like an outsider among my own family, even when they have deeply hurt me or haven’t been able to accept all parts of me or my life. And now, S has that love, too—she knows at a deep level that we aren’t going anywhere.
In some ways, being part of a family—and, for that matter, opening oneself up to deep and real friendships--means being willing to get hurt, being willing to experience loss and failure, but knowing you will still be loved and that you are still capable of loving.
Last night S wrote me an apology after a fight that, in the scheme of our relationship, was relatively minor. She gave it to me this morning. In the letter was this line: “I know you will always love me no matter what I do. But I am still sorry.” That’s the kind of certainty everyone should feel about their relationships with the people they love.
That’s not to say we should allow ourselves to be abused or that we shouldn’t set some limits on the ways we are treated or treat others—but that we know we can forgive and be forgiven within those limits we set for our own safety and sanity. I am glad to have learned this lesson this summer—glad we have come so far—and I feel hopeful about this coming school year, which, for S, begins in three short days.
“What do you think would have happened to me if you hadn’t adopted me?” S wanted to know one afternoon, as we were making the long trec from our hometown to where my aunt, whom S calls “yiayia,” or grandma in Greece, lives in Detroit.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, because I don’t.
“I don’t think it would have been good,” S said. I let that statement hang in the air as we passed some horses grazing in the distance along the highway. I didn’t know what to say. The truth is, we still don’t know what will happen, exactly—and that has been a major stressor all summer.
“I’m so glad you adopted me,” she added, “and that you love me so much.”
We both took a deep breath. “I’m so glad you love me so much, too,” I said.
She put the seat back and tried to nap. The dog in his backseat kennel stirred, looked over at her, and lay back down.
---
On Grief
This summer has been a time of major growth for both of us. Thanks to two good friends—one a long-time, old friend whom I’ve gotten to know a lot better this summer, and the other S’s most recent “college buddy,” actually a slightly-older-than-college age woman who has had an incredible impact on S’s life—I’ve found my way out of a depression that lasted more than a year. The depression was brought on by the death of my student and the losses, through death or moving, of so many other good friends and beloved family members this past year.
Both friends were going through major life changes and dealing with memories from their past, and our time together started with me finding a way to open my heart to them—to not hold back in how I helped them as I had been doing, unconsciously, for far too long out of fear of getting hurt by loss. Whenever we grieve, all of our past, unresolved griefs are unleashed again, and we have to struggle to figure out how to live with one foot in the present and one in the past. It becomes difficult to think beyond the next moment, or to love anyone, because loving yourself is a full-time job.
But I was clearly called to help these friends through crises, to put my own grief on hold, to step out of the dark place where I had been hiding. And, in time, our conversations developed into truly reciprocal friendships, and I felt cared for and loved, like someone finally knew the day-to-day details of our lives enough to be there for me through all the ups and downs.
One of them, Lisa’s college buddy T, will leave in a couple weeks, which will be incredibly hard for us—but for once I don’t feel sad that we got so close and now I will have to lose her. Instead, I feel grateful for all she’s done for us, grateful that I was able to be there for her, grateful that I had, even for a brief time, someone with whom I could talk late into the night, could completely lose a sense of time around. It has been so long since I’ve had a friend like that in my life.
---
On Patience
All summer we have been grappling with a variety of social service agencies, the details of which I outlined in an earlier post. We have been trying to determine what resources S is eligible for as she enters her senior year of high school, and because none of these agencies communicate with each other, it has been quite time-consuming.
I was working half-time this summer, and so I set my schedule to be 8:30-1:30 four days a week (at work) and another day with the same hours which I spent at the coffee shop struggling through forms and phone calls and other details related to S’s care.
It paid off; in the end, I was able to leverage more assistance than we’ve ever had, as opposed to less. Adoption assistance will continue until she graduates high school. A very helpful social security worker, while not succeeding in getting S disability payments, figured out that she was owed payments from her bio parents—and we got, quite out of the blue, a very large check for back payments, and will continue to get a check every month until she graduates high school. And, we got a family support grant from Human Services.
What this means is that I will be able to pay all of S’s tutoring, child care, and job coaching with resources other than my own—and begin to make some progress on my debt, not to mention always have enough money to pay our bills and for other necessities. It is a great relief.
There are a few items that still need to be resolved—my insurance and her MA which covers the co-pays for her meds and therapists are now refusing payment on many services, and I’ll be in a battle with them for the foreseeable future; I didn’t get my tax refund because the federal government is suddenly, for the first time, suspicious about whether S was actually adopted and actually has special needs (OK, federal government, here are the 70 pages of assessments she’s had in the last year proving she is)…etc.
But somehow I am managing to, well, manage. I am not feeling nearly as panicked as ever before. Even though all of the resources we have will be cut off once she graduates, I now have a year to figure out what to do, as well as a very helpful social security worker who thinks she can get S qualified next year for disability (once the other resources are cut off) and a very helpful social worker.
T, S’s college buddy, helped her get ready for pursuing a job for this coming academic year, and she now has a long-term placement with the local Humane Society. It is a perfect fit for her--she wants so much to do the job well, and she is in love with the animals. I just hired a new college student to be her job coach, and I’ll be able to get her credit for this experience.
The school was, as usual, totally unhelpful in this process, and didn’t answer any of my questions about whether this experience could count for credit until three days before the start of the new year. The answer was yes, but only if a paraprofessional went with S to the site during the work day. By this point, S had gone through her training (which the paraprofessional would have had to complete, and which isn't available during school hours) and was scheduled for evening hours—and the Humane Society isn’t in need of help during the periods when the school had scheduled her work experience.
So, I gave up and said I was going to home school her in the work experience, math, and her fine arts credit (she’ll be taking piano again this year). I decided this was easier than trying to negotiate. Ultimately, even though it was utterly flawed, I also decided not to fight the evaluation the school did—I have given up. I have decided I will get her through high school with a combination of daily communication with her teachers and some homeschooling, and that trying to use the special education department to help is pointless. She will have an IEP, and I’ll fight for it to include the accommodations she really needs—but ultimately, I realize I need to do most of the work, to communicate directly with teachers and not expect the special ed department to help either with organizational skills or academic skills. I know this may sound defeatist, but I have wasted so much time and energy communicating with her special ed teacher and the staff in the room, and I’ve finally realized I need to eliminate this stress from my life.
And…it’s only one more year! After that, I’ll likely need to advocate for her with other people and agencies, but I can’t imagine any advocacy that will be more difficult than what I have been through with the schools.
I am learning, slowly but surely, to let some things go if they truly can’t be resolved, and to find creative solutions for them. I am learning, slowly but surely, to stay present in the present and not be obsessed with the future. And, I’m learning patience. I feel like there have been so many utterly amazing gifts, and so much growth, in all of this.
---
On Hope
In June, S had her first seriously violent episode in a long time. Her ballet obsession had become all-consuming after her recital in May. She got violent with both T and me when we tried to set some limits on her obsession. So, I cut her off altogether. This involved a very difficult conversation with her teacher, who had been part of the problem all along—a good, kindhearted person who really cares for S, she had not been able or willing to be honest with her about her abilities in the area of dance. S imagined herself as being graceful and beautiful on stage; she could barely follow the steps. I realized her teacher had put her on pointe much too early, and that the result had been incredibly damaging to S’s understanding of the work that is needed to make achievement in any art.
After a month off completely, she has been, for the last month, allowed to dance, read about dance, or watch dance videos for a half hour each day—but most days, she forgets to ask for this time. I also bought her a new pair of pointe shoes over the summer to show her that I would be willing, someday, to let her dance again—but that she needed to learn some limits.
She goes back and forth. We had another incident last night where she said, “I’ve been doing really well with my limits, so I’ll start dance again when school starts, right?” Well, no. We had decided that the very earliest she would be able to start again would be October, after at least a month in school, and that she would have to agree not to be in any recitals, as they tend to cause a lot of the obsessiveness. But, she wasn’t satisfied with this answer—again. This time, though, she apologized within 24 hours for resisting the rules we had already set up.
It is hard for me to write this next part. When she got violent with me over ballet, during the incident that led to a complete cut off of any talk about dance, she tried to choke me. She realized quickly what she was doing and pulled her hands away--but she had her hands on my neck for long enough that I was scared. She was so sorry—immediately sorry, for the first time ever, maybe.
But then, two days later, we learned that a boy she’d known from school—another student in the special ed department—had choked his mother to death last Christmas. The case was finally closed—he had admitted that it was him (and his brothers) who did it. News like this can’t be easy for anyone to take in—but imagine if you were the same age as the boy and had sat next to him in the Resource Room. Imagine if he had been quiet but likeable, although you had been bothered that he called the room "the retard room," and wished he would stop. Imagine if, two days before his arrest, you had put your hands around your mother’s neck and squeezed. How could you ever trust yourself again?
S was devastated. It took many long, hard conversations to make sense of what had happened. The image of violence laid out in the local paper—so many details—led to nightmares and memories from S’s past. But I feel as if she came through this hard time stronger, with a deeper sense of who she is, and a deeper understanding of how her actions affect others. It has been amazing to see her growth.
---
On Family
We took an epic road trip with our dog to see my aunt this summer; we had never been to her house before, because we usually meet in Ohio where the rest of my extended family (except for her and my sister) live. We had also never had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with just her and her husband—even when she has visited, time always felt hectic.
It was the best vacation of our lives. We had a wonderful party for S’s 18th birthday, and several family members came up from Ohio or from other parts of the Detroit area. We went to the zoo and to Greenfield Village, an old-fashioned village S absolutely loved. We stopped in Chicago for a day on the way there and in the Wisconsin Dells for a day on the way back. We had long mornings of playing with our dog in a fenced-in backyard and long evening conversations with my aunt and her husband on their screened in back porch. I felt so lucky to have this family, to be so deeply loved.
My family is hardly completely functional, to say the least. My mother’s death when I was 13 affected all of us, and the family dynamic, in so many ways. In the more than 25 years since then we have had times of deep connection and disconnection—but all of that seemed so far in the past when we were together this summer. I realized that although things have not always been easy, I have never had to question, as S did for the first ten years of her life, whether my family loved me. Even my father, at his most abusive, clearly always loved me—though he made a lot of mistakes in knowing how to show it.
I have that safety net of love that has always held me up, even when I’ve felt like an outsider among my own family, even when they have deeply hurt me or haven’t been able to accept all parts of me or my life. And now, S has that love, too—she knows at a deep level that we aren’t going anywhere.
In some ways, being part of a family—and, for that matter, opening oneself up to deep and real friendships--means being willing to get hurt, being willing to experience loss and failure, but knowing you will still be loved and that you are still capable of loving.
Last night S wrote me an apology after a fight that, in the scheme of our relationship, was relatively minor. She gave it to me this morning. In the letter was this line: “I know you will always love me no matter what I do. But I am still sorry.” That’s the kind of certainty everyone should feel about their relationships with the people they love.
That’s not to say we should allow ourselves to be abused or that we shouldn’t set some limits on the ways we are treated or treat others—but that we know we can forgive and be forgiven within those limits we set for our own safety and sanity. I am glad to have learned this lesson this summer—glad we have come so far—and I feel hopeful about this coming school year, which, for S, begins in three short days.
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