foster parenting
sastyk | March 7, 2017Four years ago we were foster parents to two wonderful children whose family was broken up by deportation.
The parents had overstayed their visas (ie, they entered the US legally), in part because their children were both born (while in the US, ie the children were citizens) with kidney disease and their homes in rural Central America had no hospitals to treat them nor adequate medical care. They left their country because they were part of a disenfranchised indigenous minority that was historically denied access to things like education - they could do better in the US. They also were a…
sastyk | July 13, 2015My children made me try a chocolate-covered gummy bear the other day. Now a chocolate gummy bear is not a local, sustainable or home-grown food, and frankly, I don't like gummy bears (the only good use I ever had for them was in college, where nothing would keep posters on cinder-block walls without damaging the walls like a gummy bear melted on with a lighter), and I'm not that big a chocolate person. But the kids kept telling me that this was better than either the low-quality chocolate used to cover them or gummy bears. I tried one, and they were right - it was better, an official…
sastyk | February 5, 2015If you've thought about foster parenting at all, even for a couple of minutes, you probably grasp that someone has to do it. Because the truth is that kids whose parents can't care for them has been a global problem for all of human history. It is a problem that could get better or worse with various interventions, (and I am 100% in favor of any interventions that make my work less necessary), but it is never going away. As I said in my last post, you won't stop being needed just because you aren't there.
While you've probably thought broadly that foster parents have to exist, you…
sastyk | February 5, 2015Take five little pieces of paper, and write down the five things that matter most to you in your life, whatever they are. Your parents. Your partner. Your kids, Your community. Your grand passion - art or the Red Sox, guitar or hunting or knitting. Your home. Your favorite chair. Your dreams for the future. Your best friends. Your free time. Prayer. Your dog, your cat. Your neighborhood, that place where everyone knows your name, your religious community, your buddies from work or school. Your music. Mint Milanos and a glass of wine with someone who understands you. That super-soft stuffed…
sastyk | August 15, 2014I should have known, but did not, that being read aloud to was a learned skill. It never occurred to me to think about it from my privileged place in the world of literacy. I was, for a time, though a teacher of writing, a fish who swam in words without thinking of the water.
Like a lot of book-valuing, over-educated parents, I read to my sons from the moment they were born. Tiny babies snuggled on my lap as I read _Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop_, _Jamberry_ and Eli's favorite cliff-hanger _Who Says Quack?_. We graduated on to picture books, and then Winnie the Pooh, Little House and other…
sastyk | May 22, 2014Exactly a year ago at the end of a crazy, long week (Eric's final grades due Tues, thought we were getting three kids Wed., annual "hey, let us look under your beds and in your closets" foster care recertification, which annually gives me PTSD because my limited cleaning skills get close scrutiny on Thursday, heavy garden push on Friday... we promised the kids a completely relaxing, laid back, nothing-going on Memorial Day Weekend. These would be famous last words.
At 3:30 on Friday afternoon as I was shaking off the compost from planting almost all my tender plants (a rare efficiency that…
sastyk | February 13, 2014The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has done more to get kids in care adopted than just about anyone else - their facebook page and websites have done a lot to draw attention to the needs of kids for families. The biggest new face of foster adoption comes from an adoptive family that put up an image that has their adorable little girl holding up a sign saying "I was in Foster Care for 751 Days But Today I got Adopted!" The image has been liked almost a million times, and the site's FB page crashed because it was viewed so often. 11,000 people requested information on foster care…
sastyk | November 15, 2013My family looks pretty different, and it gets a lot of attention. The vast majority is positive, and most of the rest is just curious or wondering - but every now and then someone says something REALLY stupid, unkind or offensive. A lot of the time, if the kids don't hear it, I let it go. If they say it in front of the kids, I sometimes take them to task. And sometimes, I give free rein to my sarcastic side.
(Note, some of these questions are not, in and of themselves, that offensive, and so don't worry if you've asked them. It is HOW people ask them - in front of the kids, loudly,…
sastyk | October 24, 2013A reader sends me a letter and gives me permission to reprint it here, because I suspect he's not the only one with this question:
"I think what you are doing with your family is great, but I feel like you've moved away from peak oil and climate change to write about foster care, and I don't see a connection. I feel bad saying it, but I miss the old stuff. Is there a connection I'm not seeing?"
In some measure this is just a fair cop, in that my subject matter HAS changed as I've spent more time working on issues of families in crisis. It isn't that I don't have things to say about peak…
sastyk | October 17, 2013In my last post, more than four months ago (oy, that's bad!), we had just acquired four new children, 11, 3, 3, and 16 months, and were settling in and getting adjusted. And then I didn't blog all summer. Or for most of the first month of autumn. A few people wondered whether I was eaten by a Yeti or had gone entirely feral. Neither is true (that I know of - I'd probably have noticed the Yeti thing.) It just turned out that going to nine kids, four of them 3 and under, several with major disabilities, pushed my limits a little. Or a lot. We pulled it off. We settled in, we did it, but…
sastyk | June 3, 2013So it has been an embarassingly long time since I last wrote anything for this blog. Long enough that I owe you all an apology. It started out simply enough - I did something I've done a million times, picked up a full water bucket for our cow. Not sure what I did differently, but I did something nasty to my elbow - my right elbow. I've had carpal tunnel syndrome for years from too much time writing books, and as long as I'm careful about not overdoing it, I can write, but this made it a lot harder and more painful. It also meant that when I did wedge my arm into a comfortable position…
sastyk | March 12, 2013This essay is a little different than most of my stuff. It is the result of a collaborative discussion on a foster parenting list I'm a part of by a group of foster parents. I've paraphrased and borrowed and added some things of my own, but this is truly collaborative piece, and meant to be shared. I do NOT have to get credit for it. So if you'd like to circulate it, use it in a training, distribute it at foster-awareness day, hang it on the wall, run it somewhere else, give it out to prospective foster parents, whatever, go right ahead. This is a freebie to all! I care much more than…
sastyk | January 24, 2013A lot of readers have emailed to ask what's going on with Baby Z. If you will remember, in the beginning of July, we were placed with a newborn baby boy, straight from the hospital who, because of confidentiality issues, is known here as Baby Z. I haven't talked tons about Z's story because it is private, but it has been a while and people are reasonably wondering what's going on. The most common question I get is "Is he yours yet?" I promise, if he ever becomes so, you'll hear! In fact, the foster care process takes quite a while, and while we are cautiously hopeful that we may get to…
sastyk | November 16, 2012So the kids didn't come into care yesterday, which means we can go back to being our usual slacker selves about putting away the legos, tinker toys and other choking hazards - until the next batch of little ones arrived. I admit to a mix of relief and sorrow. Relief that the children in question are not in such dire straits that they have to leave their home and family. Relief also because even though I'm loving having a baby around again, I'm not sure I really wanted two of them, plus two toddlers.
On the other hand, I really feel like our house is too empty right now - we have space…
sastyk | November 9, 2012Last Friday afternoon my mother and step-mother came to visit. My mother had surgery on her foot back in the summer and has had a long, slow recovery, and is only now able to travel and drive, so this was the first visit in nearly six months. As we sat around the table, we joked that it would be a great day for our family to get a phone call about a foster placement.
Five minutes afterwards, my mother was walking by the phone when it rang and she called out "It is the county!" I laughed, thinking she was joking. She wasn't. It was a call about a sibling group of five kids. We said yes…
sastyk | September 21, 2012Most of the comments people make about our slightly changeable and somewhat odd family are lovely. Like all parents my husband and I love hearing how beautiful our kids are, how well behaved (even when it isn't always true), how nice it is to see us all together, what fun it is to see a big family having a good time.
There are a few that trouble me a little, but I understand why people make those comments - our family is different and strange, and people are processing how to respond to it. I've made mistakes when in those kinds of situations too, so I don't mind it. I know some people get…
sastyk | July 20, 2012Hi Folks - The more I look at my life, the more I think I'm not doing things as well as I could be - too many balls in the air. Many of the things I care about are paying a price. The addition of the chronic sleep deprivation that goes with a new baby is pushing me to strip down my life to the bare minimum.
What's frustrating me most is that writing and online work are taking up time I should be spending on sustainability measures - while I'm writing about the joys of pickling, I'm not actually making pickles with the kids. For a long time this was manageable, but right now, with a two…
sastyk | July 19, 2012Every time my life settles down enough for me to return to regular blogging, crazy stuff happens. First there was the sudden arrival of newborn baby Z. - we were called at 2:30 pm and by 4:30, Eric was picking him up at the hospital. Since normally one gets more than umm...two hours to prepare for the arrival of a new baby, we were a little discombobulated.
Then there was much back and forth insanity as the County and C. and K.'s family attempted to make possible a visit from across the US to our area. We didn't know until last Friday whether it would happen - and all of a sudden it was. …
sastyk | May 29, 2012The minute I announced my pregnancy with Simon, the first question most people asked me was "Oh, are you trying for a girl?" I admit, the question annoyed me. The implication seemed to be that everyone dreams of the perfect matched set, one boy and one girl. In fact, I always had a strong intuition from the first moment that my babies were boys (Isaiah was the only time I wasn't totally sure), and I was never at all unhappy about that. I also objected to the implied impugning of my math skills - if I didn't want a CHILD, I certainly wouldn't bet on a 50-50 shot ;-).
As my house filled up…
sastyk | May 10, 2012Let's be honest, when you work on energy and environmental issues for a living, good news is always welcome. And when it is good news that makes your kids happy, well, even better. President Obama's coming forward in support of gay marriage didn't fix all problems, but it made everyone in our home more cheerful.
All the children living in my house have close family members - parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles etc... who are gay. I would say that there is more than passable odds that one of these days one of the little boys in my house will be coming out. All of them know that…