Bad News

Less than 24 hours after his return, P is gone again. I was too stunned to write about it last night.

Friday morning I drove him to school and we checked in with the registrar to get his class schedule. We were on time and everything seemed fine. Then, on my way home from work, I received an automated call from the school attendance office saying P had missed every class that day. How could that be?

When I got home P wasn’t there. All his stuff was still there, though. So, like the many other times this happened, I called his cell phone and every other number I knew trying to find out where he was. Around 9pm he finally answered my calls. He said that he couldn’t do it; couldn’t go to that school again and had to be with his family. He said he wasn’t coming back.

My emotions are still unsettled over this, but life has to go on.

Will He Stay?

Just when I had all but given up on P, he calls me and says that he wants to come home – for real, this time. A couple of hours later P and his stuff were back in his room at Dave’s Home.

On the ride home I suggested to P that we forget about past mess ups and concentrate on the future. Pretend like we first met. So we exchanged greetings and shook hands. P seemed to like this idea. It bothers him when people use his past behavior to judge his future.

Too bad that’s how the real world works. But maybe I can stave off part of the real world just long enough for P to get back on track. If he stays, that is. Only time will tell.

Blue About P

I spoke with several social workers today about P, but they didn’t have any good news or ideas. So I’ve been looking through old photos of him and thinking about his present unsettled situation. It makes me sad.

It’s hard for me to comprehend how the kid in these photos got to where he is now. Here are some of those photos.

Burney Falls

11th birthday.

His first at Dave's Home

Rainie Falls on the Rogue River in Oregon

Top of Nevada Falls in Yosemite

12th or 13th birthday...

I can't remember now.

Santa Cruz

Back and Forth

As you may have noticed, P hasn’t been with us for the last week and a half or so. P was my eighth foster child. He came to me when he was ten, and now he’s seventeen and a half. He has been living with various family members for the better part of last year.

Without going into detail, around Christmas time P said that he wanted to move back into Dave’s Home, and in fact we did move his belongings. But over the course of a few weeks he spent less and less time here, opting instead to be with his family members after school and on weekends. Last week I confronted him about his living arrangements and he basically said that he had changed his mind.

I don’t think P is making a wise decision, and I have tried many times now to convince him of this. I am troubled and very frustrated by this turn of events, but all I feel that I can do is keep the lines of communication open and hope for P’s wellbeing.

P around the time that he first moved into Dave’s Home.

My Fourth Foster Child

Some kids come and go in the middle of another kid’s stay at Dave’s Home. Such was the case with my fourth foster child. He was placed with me in December of 1995, about nine months after my third child, and he stayed for about three months. (My third foster child stayed for seven years.)

I remember these two kids bickering with each other all the time. Back then I was living in a much smaller home with only one bedroom for the kids to share. Night after night there were accusations of stealing or one breaking the other's possessions. Some kids are like oil and water – they just don’t mix.

My memories of shorter term kids from long ago, like #4, have faded quite a bit, but I have a vague recollection of him being personable when one-on-one with me. The only other clear memory I have of him is that he had a lot of trouble in school. His teacher and I arranged to exchange progress reports daily. Yes, every day his teacher would write one covering his class time and send it home to me, and I would write one covering his evenings and send it back to school. I still have a big file folder filled with these reports. I guess we were going for a kind of unified discipline in an effort to convince this child that he couldn’t get away with his shenanigans any more.

What kind of shenanigans, you ask? Well, some of it was the normal kind, like always forgetting to bring home a book or paper needed for homework. And some of it was a bit more. Just before he was placed with me he was suspended for five days for taking a pocket knife to school.

Checking out the limousine I rented

for his foster brother's 13th birthday.

Sometimes They Come Back

It looks like P, my eighth foster kid, may be moving back into Dave’s Home. Just like biological kids that leave home to go to college, or get a job and move into an apartment, sometimes things don’t work out and a kid has to move back in with his parents.

Even though P has been living with his biological family for the last six months or so, the court still considers me his legal guardian. Apparently it takes another court hearing to undo the guardianship of a minor.

Foster Kid #3

My third foster child was placed with me in March of 1995. He was 12 years old and in middle school. Things started out pretty typically with everyone expecting reunification with his mother. However, about nine months later we suddenly lost contact with his mom. No one heard from her for several months, and then we received the terrible news that she had died. We later found out that she had been murdered in what turned out to be a drug deal gone bad. Obviously this had a profound impact on this child.

With reunification with his mother no longer possible, we explored the remaining long term options. His father was not in the picture. He had a great grandfather living further north in California, but he was too elderly to provide the needed care. He also had a grandmother in Washington state who was very interested in his well-being and had kept in constant contact. Moving in with her seemed like the best option, but this boy chose instead to stay with me. He claimed that this was because he didn’t want to leave his school and friends. So, I became his legal guardian and he lived with me until he was 19 years old.

Here are friends and family posing in front of a limousine

I rented for his 13th birthday.

Learning to ski.

Helicopter ride

Yosemite

Rogue River whitewater rafting trip

We took karate classes together.

Hiking with friends and... who is that?

Yes, it's Tioga-George back before Ms. Tioga.

His first car

My Second Full Time Foster Child

My second full-time foster child was 9 years old and, by coincidence, in the same special elementary school class as my first foster child. I used to hear a lot about this kid because the two reportedly fought so much.

He was taken by CPS when the family dog bit him in the stomach. Apparently this dog had attacked others before, and authorities had warned the parents several times to do something about it. They ignored the warnings, and when the dog bit the boy they deemed the parents negligent.

While he stayed with me I had to tend to his stomach wound, which was pretty deep, applying an antibiotic cream supplied by the emergency room. Within several weeks the parents got rid of the dog and their child was returned home.

My Kids (Part 2) – Robert & Eric

(This is a continuation of a thread of posts about the kids I’ve cared for over the years. Click HERE to view the previous post.)

One day in 1994 while driving home from playing tennis I saw a woman holding a sign begging for work. With her were her two young children, maybe seven and ten years old. I don’t normally do this – in fact I have never done it before or since – but I stopped and offered them a job helping me strip old wallpaper from the bathrooms in my home. (I just happened to be in the middle of a bathroom remodeling project.)  They accepted and I took them to my house where all three of them, even the youngest, really worked hard. Then I let the kids go swimming (I lived in a town home complex back then, with a pool in the common area) and fixed them dinner. From these beginnings a relationship formed.

Over the next few years I helped this family with odd jobs and, a number of times when things got really bad, I let the kids stay in my home, fed them and took them to school in the mornings. They were really nice kids living a tough, uncertain life.  In the photo above, Eric is on the left and Robert is on the right.  I was providing respite care for the boy in the middle.

Since then the kids and I spoke on the phone or exchanged letters occasionally. In 2002 the eldest child, Robert, invited me to his high school graduation in Virginia. I flew out there and watched him graduate with honors. I’ve lost touch with them since, but I am confident they’re doing well.

My First Full Time Kid

Forgive me, but I’m going to jump around in my past to my first full time foster placement. Nine year old Mike was placed with me in late 1994. He was only supposed to stay with me until a space opened up in a special group home. You see, Mike was a bit of a trouble maker. He would get into unusual trouble at school, like running away, or climbing up on the roof and banging on classroom windows with sticks. He was on three different kinds of medication; Ritalin, Tegretol and Clonidine. The Ritalin was supposed to calm him and allow him to focus. The others, as I understood it, were mostly to deal with side effects.

As it turned out, the prescribed dosages weren’t relayed from doctor to doctor correctly as he was moved through the system. Poor Mike was overdosed on one medication and underdosed on another for the first few weeks. It was a real mess. Yes, Mike was one of the most challenging kids I have had so far, and he was my first. And still I grew closer to him faster than just about any other kid since. I think it was because he was such a challenge, and also because underneath all his antics, he was a really neat kid.

(This post is the first in a thread about all the kids I've given care to.  Click HERE to view the next post in sequence.)