Mother to 13 children… 50 years old…traveling and speaking around the country… If anyone had even suggested that this would be my future reality 15 years ago I would have told them they were out of their ever-lovin’ mind. But that is exactly what my life is currently.
In 1987, after having a dating relationship for 5 years I married my husband, Lynn. This union blended our two families of three children each, giving us a family of six children. In 1990 we moved our family from Minnesota to the state of Washington where I became a house parent in a shelter for teenagers. In 1991 we became licensed foster parents to two teenage brothers with the disillusioned belief that since we had pretty successfully raised our own six children we could do this also. We believed that all you had to do was love them enough and provide them with all the opportunities that had been denied them in the past and these children would be eternally grateful and grow up to be upstanding citizens and contributing members to society. Man, were we naïve.
Within, two years our home had burned to the ground, I was being called to the school on an almost daily basis to intervene on behalf of the boys, my marriage was on the rocks, and my three biological daughters were threatening to run away. Nothing had prepared us for the challenges of raising two young men with histories of severe physical abuse, a totally different culture than ours, learning disabilities, and developmental delays….and no one had even thought of the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure. I was feeling like the most helpless, hopeless, and ineffectual parent alive. But at that point my daughter, Jessica, brought home a packet of information from her high school about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and so began our journey of education, diagnosis, appropriate interventions, and advocacy. That was truly the turning point in our lives. It offered us the reality of the reframing process and we went from seeing these boys willfully disobedient to being disabled. We finally understood that it wasn’t that they “wouldn’t” do things but rather that they “couldn’t” do them.
In 1993 our biological children were mostly on their own so we started to add to our family with more foster children. Over the course of the last almost 13 years we have fostered a total of 22 children with the joyful result of adopting four of them and having permanent guardianship of three others. It is those seven children who are currently in our home and who bring my legal total of children to thirteen. My stepchildren are Kelly 37, Tari deceased at 20 years of age but she would be 36 now, and Dan who is 33. My biological daughters are Faith 32, Jessica, 29, and Briana 26. They have given us 9 grandchildren so far. They have all openly and lovingly welcomed into their sibling ranks their four adopted siblings, Michael at 15 and his half-sister, Tessa who is 12. Then we have also adopted Brandan who is 9 and his first cousin, Cayenne who is 5. The three brothers that we have in guardianship are Theadore who is 20 and in guardianship as an incapacitated adult, Ricky who is 13, and Nickolas who is 9. All seven of these children have been diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or another Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
It was never our intent to do anything other than foster care. You know, the current and legal definition of “short-termed, goal oriented, temporary care.” And here I am at 50 (and my husband is 60) parenting children who will all need some kind of “cradle to grave” services. But neither my husband nor I can imagine us or our lives as anything different.
These last 13 years have been the most challenging, frustrating, difficult, painful, discouraging, heartbreaking, heart wrenching years of my life. But not because of the children but rather from the interactions with the systems of care and agencies whose lives my children touch. Our children have given us more joy, patience, laughter, healing, blessings, goals, education, understanding, learning opportunities, challenges for our personal growth and unconditional love than we have ever experienced in our lives. Out of need and necessity I have learned about Special Education, the IDEA, the ADA and 504 accommodation plans, adoption support, the state laws around foster care and adoption. I have also learned about tribal governments, the Indian Child Welfare Act, Special Olympics, the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, cultural sensitivity and relevancy, grief and loss, the essential connections of human beings, and the importance of self-esteem. My children have taught me about modifications of the environment, natural and logical consequences, reflective listening, I-messages, social communication, sensory integration, and effective questioning, and less about time outs. I have learned about termination of parental rights, open adoption, and the court process. I have seen the possibilities of birth families and adoptive families working together for the children and the blending and merging of those two units when safe and appropriate. We have experienced the death of birth parents and the subsequent questions of the children and the grief and loss that go with this life process. They also gave me the awareness, understanding, and courage to face the reality that my alcoholism may have affected my own birth daughter and so I was able to approach Faith and ask her if she was interested in being evaluated at the diagnostic clinic because I was a very heavy binge drinker during my pregnancy. Faith was diagnosed at the age of 25 with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and I had to accept the truth of being a birth Mom as well as a Foster/Adoptive Mom of children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders.
And I have formed a career. I have been the Family Advocate at the University of Washington for the Washington State Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Diagnostic and Prevention Network for almost 9 years. I train many disciplines of people throughout the United States and Canada on the subjects of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, Effective Advocacy and Self Care. And I have been given the opportunity to be part of the lives of these wonderful children who are upstanding citizens and contributing members to society and who fill my live with such joy. How can life be any better than to be the Mom of a child like Brandan, who says on a daily basis things like “you’re beautiful” to me, his Mom, or says, “This is just the most beautiful day”?
Because of these gifts of my children I am eternally grateful for the reality of my life.