A Pilgrim’s Digression

I have not written about this yet, because until yesterday it was not a sure thing. Now, it is pretty much a done deal: Lynn and I are taking in a foster child. I know, it is ironic that in only a week, I am having an operation that will permanently prevent us from ever having another child of our own, yet at the same time we are adopting (is that the right word?) a foster child. Yet, this is what is happening.

Back at the end of the school year, Lynn learned that one of her students was not going to return for his senior year because his foster family had thrown him out, and he was going to live with another family in another county in Virginia. No one in our county was willing or able to take him in, so that he could finish his schooling here.

Lynn has known the boy for several years, and I have met him a couple times. He held a part-time job at the local theater, until his foster family gave him the boot. Our impression is that he is a good kid with an artistic sensibility, who ended up in a home with other foster children, and foster parents who ran the house like a military academy. According to his social worker, a typical punishment for any infraction of the house rules was that he was grounded from working for anywhere from two to three weeks, thus making it hard for him to keep his job. Even so, the movie theater owner apparently liked him well enough that he would allow him to come back, once his grounding was over.

Still, knowing him and liking him as we do, allowing him to come live with us has not been an easy decision. Over the past couple months, we have debated it endlessly, it seems. We have had multiple meetings with his social worker, in which every aspect of his case has been opened to us, so that we can know fully what kind of person we are taking in. My opinion hasn’t changed. I think he’s a good kid, and don’t expect any problems from bringing him into our home.

Before going on vacation last week, we had to be fingerprinted for a background check, the last step in the foster parenting preliminary process. Yesterday, Lynn called the boy’s social worker to find out the status of things. She told Lynn that though they are still waiting for the results of the background check, the deal is as good as done and Josh (that is the boy’s name) will be coming to live with us possibly by mid-July.

This means some significant changes are in store for us. I think we have to consider him a family member. And although he is eighteen and will live with us for only a year before going away to college, I hope he will consider us as his family. We will invite him to travel with us, when we go home to our families in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, but we will not compel him to go with us. He is also old enough to make his own decision about the extent to which he participates in our family life. From what we have learned, it sounds like his former foster parents treated him like a child, and we are not going to do that. I hope that treating him as an adult is the right way to go, yet that remains to be seen.

Who knows how this is all going to work out. Maybe he will view our home as just another half-way house on the road to adulthood. Or maybe he will genuinely enjoy living with us. Right now, I don’t really have any misgivings. Maybe I should have some, but I don’t.

It’s funny how things happen in a small town, though. It quickly became common knowledge in our community that we were going to take in a foster child, and suddenly people with second-hand knowledge of Josh were calling us, “just to warn us.”

One woman who attends our church and purports to have her information direct from the former foster mother told us that Josh was kicked out of the home because of “poor hygiene” and constant tardiness at school. Lynn told her that she sees Josh every day during first period, and he had never been late, and no one had ever complained about his hygiene. The woman just said, “Well, this is what the foster mother told me.”

Another person, a co-worker of Lynn’s, warned her about Josh’s depression. Lynn simply told the person that she and I are both medicated and seeing therapists, so depression is nothing new to us.

And yet another co-worker of Lynn’s asked in that “you’re not really going to do this” way, “What if you have him as a student next year?” Lynn pointed out that parents often teach their own children in school. If no one else is available to teach a particular class, such as a foreign language, there is little choice but to put the child in class with their own parent. It may even be a benefit to Josh’s French grade to have Lynn for a foster mother.

In a recent appointment with her therapist, Lynn actually mentioned all the busybody activity suddenly surrounding this move on our part, and the therapist told her that she just needs to tell people that this is a matter between Josh and us, and though we appreciate their concern, we don’t want to discuss it. That sounds good to me.

I honestly don’t understand why all of a sudden people would try to warn us away from this decision. The boy’s teachers all seem to like him; he’s a bright kid. If he suffers from depression, well, I can imagine why.

Anyway, right now I am looking forward to having an older kid in the home. We will lay down a few simple rules, such as no swearing, and see how it goes. In a way, it may be good training for the future to have a teenager in the house, and hopefully Brendan will enjoy having an older brother, of sorts.

As I see it, this will be either a monumental disaster, or one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. But however it comes out, a year is really not a lot of time to give to someone who needs help.