Category Archives: parenting

Tara Stories

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When my children have their birthdays everyone tells them their story–how the delivery went, first memories of the child, what we ate in celebration.

Your mom told me about your birthday. She was in the hospital for a some time before you were delivered because you were a multiple birth. She was so excited about you. You all were delivered (most likely c-section) around 33 weeks old.

You were each tiny and perfect from the beginning.

She was overjoyed by your birth. They told her she would need help since all of you would spend three weeks in the NICU before leaving with three identical apnea monitors. They said they asked your grandmother to help out but she said no.

So they call us. I was young and stupid. The other foster mothers were older women. One had fostered and adopted many children, the other had only your sister and her own grown daughters. They made up lullabies for her.

When we left the hospital together people mistook me for the mother and them for my supporting family. We explained this was not the case.

I did not get to know your mom until they told me they were taking you away. She fought for her parental rights, but the system was well rigged against her.

Sometimes she would call me. She told the most interesting stories. It is these stories I wish I had written down, recorded, preserved for you, best would have been recorded, in her own beautiful voice.

So you could hear them now. So close to her birthday.

Break Up Songs

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Since I lost you I have developed a small bag of tricks to cope with grief. The best of them is prayer, others include running, swimming, mixed martial arts, and writing stuff down. I did not begin to write about grief until I lost the others as well….mostly because others had written about us.

At the time I wrote to judges, elected representatives, functionaries, dignitaries, and Hillary Clinton, and I still lost you.

The other tricks included comfort eating or not eating and pretending that all the cheesy break-up songs in the world were for you and me (because for some strange reason there are none for grieving foster moms, per se)

This is a part one-of-two letter, dearest Little One. Don’t make my mistake, start writing now. It will help a little now and a great deal later.

You have a story, beautiful Rapunzel.

Tell it.

Foster Care

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Trees remind me of home, as do the adorable wearable blankets one might buy for a baby born in a winter country. I struggle with the pronoun I, construct tree houses and wearable blankets out of words strung around the neck of a woman turning into the composite her grandmothers long gone on to the next thing…home…give me a cup full of it, your face, voice in my head, Man who shows up just in the nick of time in sorrow as piercing as joy.

Perhaps you know this place. Perhaps it is just up the hill, just around the corner, just out of reach on the spectrum of visible light

Dog-whistle-there

For-those-who-have ears to hear

Cat’s Elea

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She mistrusts me now, with good reason. I took her smallest one and when I brought her back it was only to say goodbye. She moves the surviving ones to the back corner of the closet where they are surrounded by the fragrance of girls’ Sunday dresses, sashes the vines and tangles of a forest we can only see through the window. She shuns the crass plastic takeaway boxes for the Formica bowls we bought in South Korea before you were born, before you were the little ones stashed in the closet for safety. I wish more things were just metaphorical thought experiments and fewer things were laced with grief and its outsider ways.

I understand when she lets me feed her and when she growls be careful, lady, I am done with white man’s justice.

“Don’t worry, Girl,” I tell her. “No white men here anymore.”

Letters for Strangers

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What if people (at least four dimensions, mandatorily eternal) could be reduced to letters? You might me a J or a d, I would be the more stolid E, B, or m. But there would be others, people we knew from yesterday or long ago. People like K or even another J or two.

We look for meaning in things like letters, and we are right to do so–meaning is everywhere, the meowing cat left behind to remind us of his master–Living God, whose own call is both fluid and foundational at the same time–living water and corner stones, foundations not washed away by floods.

M asked me how I knew J was gay. I told her an odd story about a single wistful look caught in a rearview mirror–oddest thing always knowing it was you, not me he would have loved.

It did not matter. He was both four dimensional and a parable of letters, sometimes numbers too as he sat in the sun by the pool trying to extract meaning from a single fortune cookie when the inimitable light of the sun through clouds was a painting lit for him by the frickin God of the Universe.

I grew exasperated–Why are you looking for direction from a fortune cookie when His love is right there for the asking? His attention so focused and ransoming?

See so many letters, when you know the real story is much more like a very good doctor doing whatever, whatever he can to save a dying kitten

For love.

Wonder Cat

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Six weeks ago we lost a beloved cat who was originally named Billie Holiday until she survived a traumatic near-death experience. We renamed her Miracle.

When Miracle died suddenly I rushed to stuff meaning and hope into the place she had left with us. We adopted a gregarious shelter cat and began to foster a litter of kittens.

For a brief time things looked manageable. We grieved, but we also marveled. Then, one by one the kittens succumbed to something awful. After the first few died we surmised it was panleukopenia. It was an agonizing week of trying everything and then losing them. We lost, then lost again.

I kept thinking this must have been what the plague felt like (worse, of course).

Against cooler heads we adopted a second cat for my college-aged son. She is amazing and is going to be a great city girl.

We knew–no kittens, the panleukopenia is too strong, lingering like a vengeful ghost all around us in the house.

Then we got an email–momma cat, four week old kittens, needed a foster home. I told the coordinator our story. She said she would keep looking, hope for someone less contagious.

No one emailed back.

When we got to the shelter there was a hesitation, some consulting over Momma Cat’s listlessness. They sent her home with us, humans of last resort. It has been a rough season for cats, for shelters, for life or death decisions.

We took this little feline family home and sensed something was wrong. Mama seemed wan and apathetic.

I called the vet the next morning, emailed the shelter. Nothing materialized in terms of veterinary answers so I enlisted the help of a trusted medical professional whose patients are mostly human.

We dosed mama with “subq” liquids and antibiotics left over from the last bacterial thing. We knew this was a race against time. She needed to eat soon.

Last night at 12:30 she started eating. Miraculous.

She went from skinny, listless, glassy-eyed to an engaged and selfless mama cat.

Selfless because she has a moon-shaped laceration on her belly, right across the nursing plain.

I am not sure all the little ones will make it. I am not sure what we will do with our grief if we lose even one.

One thing is sure for me though, this little feline mother is a Wonder Cat to me.

Foster Mom

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It was Texas-July hot, with no chance of rain when, for reasons beyond the ken of ordinary foster moms, the air was filled with a host of juvenile butterflies. Tender and small, their origami wings beat the air, carrying some insistent message.

Perhaps about how fragile we are

Or how only God knows

how to bring the rain.

Waning Gibbous

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What phase is the moon in tonight? The woman asks the boy. Waning gibbous, he answers after a squint and a wave of his hand at the glowing orb, close enough to touch. She asks herself if she should look at the pictures, they could look at the photographs together. Decides it is too soon. No clouds to hide them, nothing but clear skies in the forecast as each fresh loss had come

In the sunny days

After rain.

Dearest Little One

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I believe in regrief. I believe you and I will continue to regrieve the death of your mother. Recently we lost all four of our kittens to a fast moving, devastating affliction. In a week we went from joyful to devastated.

And I regrieved, the way I lost them reminding me of the way I lost you. The pain of one overshadowed by the pain of the other–even after 20 years.

Both griefs were characterized by my naive belief in the authorities in each case–the judge, the caseworkers, the lawyers for the lost daughters, the veterinarians for the kittens.

In your case I discovered that the entire system all the way to the state regulators was riddled with greed, prejudice, and corruption. You and your siblings were sold or bartered in exchange for federal subsidies for your care. Your adopted father had not only abandoned his first family, he had placed all of his assets in your adopted mother’s name to dodge child support. At one point he faced a jail sentence for failure to pay child support for his children. Things which should have hindered his ability to adopt you.

And the kittens?

Their veterinary clinic was indifferent, too busy. They were not seen in time. I could not get them any help until I found another vet, and by that time it was too late.

So in the midst of grieving for the lost kittens, I grieve for you as well–you and your siblings, you and your beautiful mother.

She had no chance in the rigged system. She had no chance but me.

And I was not nearly enough.

Panleukopenia

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You do load after load of laundry, grateful for the workhorse machine from a low-tech era and the hot Texas sun–ad hoc laundry assistant

You drag the oriental rug outside, wash it like a corpse before burial, ask if it can be saved

You scrub fabric, bleaching where you can, trying to wash out a virus which will not, does not, abate.

Push aside the agony of why you have to do all this. Walk this road. Pray for the resurrection of the dead and the impossible watercolors of heaven

Our Father

Who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

Here in us, as it is in heaven.