A Pilgrim’s Digression

This past week saw the departure of our foster son for college.  This is a difficult subject to write about, because if I write about my family’s feelings upon his leaving, or about him generally, we are going to come across as heartless and cold.  The experience of fostering J. over the past year has taught me a lot about myself.  First and foremost, it has removed any illusion that I am an altruistic person at heart.

Perhaps that is a bit harsh, since my initial agreement to take him in was an act of altruism, or foolishness depending on how one looks at it.  My family told me not to do it.  My friends told me not to do it.  But I did it anyway, not really understanding what it would entail.

To me, it was no different than taking in a boarder for a year.  The only problem is that this boarder was 18, going on 19, a complete slob, and an irresonsible, arrogant person with no regard for household rules or our personal property.

Everyone told us not to do it.  We did it anyway.

What’s interesting is that even our Christian friends told us not to do it, for various reasons ranging from having a sexually active teenager in the house to issues surrounding the normally rebellious nature of teenagers.  But we thought we knew J. pretty well; he was one of my wife’s students at the high school.  As it turned out, you never really know someone until you live with them for a year.

I won’t even go into all the events that turned our initial altruistic act into something closer to simply bearing the pain and counting the days until he left for college.  To write that blog post would require more time, and more patience on the part of readers, than either of us possess.

Suffice it to say, J. was a normal teenager.  That should be enough.  Aggravations stemmed from little things–he was an incorrigible slob, having to be reminded constantly to take a bath–to big things, like having to bail him out when he overdrew his bank account to the tune of four or five hundred dollars at a time (this happened twice!).  Everything adds up over time, and eventually we got to the point that we just didn’t care much about him anymore.  We helped him, over and over, and tried to correct his bad habits and teach him to function as an adult (because legally, at 18, he was an adult).  And we were repaid with arrogant condescension and disregard.

Perhaps for those with teenagers of their own, that story sounds all too familiar.  To us, having only a seven year-old of our own, it was a real shock to get a sort of preview, if you will, of what life is like with a teenage son.

In a way, it might actually help us, since my wife and I have both vowed that our son will never turn out like this boy.

The experience of fostering J. was also unnerving to me in another way.  I’ve been struggling with my feelings about growing older anyway.  Although I will be just 35 next month,  I do often feel like time is getting away from me.  My grandmother’s terminal cancer has exacerbated this sense of a shortening of my own life.  Also, I have been growing restless in my job, feeling stuck in a rut professionally; I think about the ambition I had at 25 and wonder where it has all gone.

Living with this teenager for more than a year has only made me feel older.  Imagine to yourself living with a teenage boy who regards you not as a slightly older, wiser peer, but as a relic of another era–possibly prehistoric times–with an archaic knowledge of the world that does not apply today.  Every time you suggest something to the boy, he not only disregards your suggestion or advice, but seems to actively scoff at it as irrelevant.

For awhile after we took him in, I made an effort to get to know J. and be a friend or peer, because I thought I was a peer.  At that time, I did not feel 35 years old inside; I was still in my twenties as far as I was concerned.  That youngster was quickly proven to be disguising his true age.  When I would advise J. about the college application process, he not only ignored my advice, but often rudely ignored it.  He gave me his college admission essay to read, and when I marked it up extensively–to the point of re-writing a lot of it–he did not take a single one of my suggestions, instead submitting the piece of utter shit he had written originally.

Naturally, he was not accepted to the college of his choice.  However, I did not necessarily feel vindicated that his disregard for my advice had led him to be rejected by his preferred college.  I simply felt crushed that something I regarded as my particular and only talent, writing, had been discarded by this whelpling as unworthy.

Overall, the whole foster care experience was disillusioning in the same way as when he disregarded my advice on his essay.  What I came to realize was that no matter how much my wife and I tried to help him, we were going to be fighting an uphill battle against his own self-regard.  He knew everything; we knew nothing.

In retrospect, it’s ironic that initially I thought I saw a lot of myself in him.  He wants to be an artist and has a high regard for his own talents.  He has been pumped up with self-confidence in regards to his mind and art by teachers and counselors and doctors for most of his teenage life, in much the same way that I feel my own meager writing talent was falsely pumped up by teachers throughout my life.  He likes many of the same bands and singers that I liked at his age, from the Doors to the Beatles and Rolling Stones.  I still like these bands, with the exception of the Doors.

Every once in awhile I would find him reading (or attempting to read) some of the books I have around the house.  The latter, far from exciting me, usually just annoyed me because I would find some old or otherwise precious volume lying about cracked open or otherwise abused.  Honestly, I really don’t think he read Milton’s Paradise Lost, though I saw my beloved Cambridge edition of Milton’s works lying face down and open on the floor of his bedroom, the pages bent due to the awkward angle at which it lay.  I picked it up and put it back on the shelf, after smoothing the pages and making sure there were no tears; he never asked about it nor did he take it off the shelf again, and I said nothing about it to him.

The latter attitude–maintaining a quiet, contained frustration–characterized my interactions with him after I realized despite any outward similarities, this boy and I were going to be at loggerheads all year.  I exhibit the classic avoidant personality: i avoid conflict if at all possible.  I let my wife deal with a lot of the crap he dealt us throughout the year.  Only once did I snap and let him have it, verbal blow by blow.

Back in July when we spent a week in West Virginia attending my great-grandmother’s funeral and visiting family, we left J. at home with explicit instructions that there were to be no house guests, especially his girlfriend.  One night at 2 AM, our neighbor–admittedly a busy-body–woke us with a phone call to tell us that his girlfriend’s car was in our driveway and all the lights were out in the house.

Even then I was going to leave it to my wife to deal with, but she insisted I deal with it.  I figured if I am going to be woken up in the early morning hours to deal with this, I’m going to deal with it.

Whether because I was not fully awake, or because I was frustrated at having to deal with something I’d rather have avoided, I was really harsh.  I used the F-word a few times.  I told him he needed to straighten up and start respecting the rules, as long as he was living with us.  And I told him if he’d like to spend the rest of the summer before college with his girlfriend’s family, he was welcome to move in with them.  The latter comment I ended up apologizing for the next day when I realized what I’d said to someone who has been shuffled between families for most of his life and probably feels insecure as it is.  The rest of it, I made no apology for, certainly not for cursing at him.

Anyway, although I avoided a lot of the conflict and my wife nobly bore the brunt of it, I did always seem to be the one to deal with sexual issues.  We didn’t even realize there were sexual issues until late one night, my wife stepped on a used condom on the hall floor, as she was going to the kitchen for a drink.  How it got there is still a mystery, although he said it must have fallen out of his pocket (apparently they were having sex in our car or in the woods or fields and he would bring the condoms in the house to dispose of them).

So I had to have a talk with him about sex.   Did I mention this foster care experience has aged me?  I hadn’t experienced the full aging effect of fostering a teenage boy until I had the sex talk with him.  I wasn’t particularly embarrassed about the subject, and I didn’t use euphemisms or otherwise take a long time to get to the point.  I told him right from the start, if he thinks he’s a man, I will talk to him in the way that mature adult men talk about sex.

I didn’t mean for it become a lecture, but that’s what it became.  He simply sat there, not saying anything, smiling slightly with barely suppressed condescension as I warned him about the danger he had placed himself in.  I asked him if he was having sex with other girls, specifically one other, who he told me was merely “a friend,” and he said no.  I asked him how certain he was that his girlfriend was only having sex with him.  He answered affirmatively, with the arrogance of a young man who thinks he’s hot shit, and he is his girlfriend’s first and only.

He seemed very proud of the fact that they used condoms, as if that should defuse anything I had to say on the matter.

I asked him if he had thought about the emotional ramifications, though.  Sex means a lot more to a girl than it does to a boy.  She struck me as a very needy girl anyway, and I said she probably thinks they are bound together by some unbreakable communion of souls, now that she has given herself to him; whereas he is simply proud of himself that he persuaded her to give it up.  Actually, when he did speak, he blamed her for persuading him to have sex.  He didn’t want to, but she was insistent.

That right there tells you about the level of immaturity we were dealing with, all year.  There was no sense at all that he felt he was responsible for anything.

At the end of the talk, I felt old and useless.   I had stressed that we couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted, but that he was never to have sex in our house.  That was too much a violation of our home and sense of privacy.  I didn’t really care if that was kind of an non-sensical approach to the issue, banning them from having sex in the house (thus forcing them to have sex in the car or elsewhere).  But in the end, I don’t think the talk made any impression on him anyway.  I am pretty sure they had sex in our house anyway, since I found a used condom once more, after the initial incident.  And I am absolutely certain he regarded me as a fool who probably hasn’t had sex himself in ten or more years.  He knows everything he needs to know, and I can’t possibly know anything.

That is as good a summation as any about a year’s experience with fostering a teenage boy: he knows everything; we know nothing of relevance.

I know, families with teens of their own will say “Welcome to life with a teenager.”

However, it was a shock for me to realize that far from being cool and smart, I am old, worn-out, probably celibate, and foolish.  I don’t know shit about movies, music, art, or literature.  But I’ve got an open wallet and an obligation to provide for this over-indulged knothead, and so in his eyes, I will suffice until he can move out and truly be on his own.

All this would sound harsh to anyone who knew J. but never lived with him.  Everyone from his case worker to his school teachers regard him not as J. but as “poor J.”  “Poor J.,” he’s had such a hard life; he had kidney disease at a young age and was taken away from his mother for neglect.  “Poor J.,” he’s never had the opportunities other kids have had.

All I can say is, live with him for a year and a lot of the luster wears off the golden boy.  Fortunately or unfortunately, as my wife and I have told him, once outside our small town people’s pity won’t get him anywhere.  Professors won’t care about his kidney disease of his lack of a family; future employers won’t care; the police won’t care; nor will the state care, after he reaches the age at which they cut him loose from his status as a ward.

There is a cold awakening coming for this kid.  Fortunately, I don’t expect to be there to see it, or even know about it.