Parenting Strangers, Grand Final - State Owned

They live in my house, but they're not my kids.  They are owned by the State of Texas.

My wife and I are 'Professional Parents.'  The state hires us to raise their kids.

We wanted a second or third grader.  You know...young, cute, malleable, easy, sweet.  We wanted a child without parents, a true orphan.  Instead they gave us a really angry thirteen year old on heavy medication with a psycho-mother.

And we fell in love.

When a child first comes into your house, you have a couple of days to make sure its a fit.  We knew almost immediately when this young lady entered our house that it was a fit.  It was like we took one sniff and recognized that this was one of our own children who had been lost to us at birth.  Maybe it was just because she was our first.  We've never had this experience with any of the other young ladies that have come into our home.


We always come to love the kids in our home.  We knew we would.  It's just how we're built.

She's been with us for three years and will probably be with us until she graduates high school.  Other young ladies have come and gone.  Some for short periods, some for long.  Some successful - in college.  Some failures - handcuffs.

Right now, we have a young lady preparing to graduate high school and go on to college as well as our sixteen year old.

When you take a young person into your house as foster parents, they come with a lot of baggage.  And not just the suit case and boxes and bags of stuff.  Our lives are filled with judges and lawyers and case managers and case workers and therapists and mothers and siblings.  We are inspected twice a month by the state to see that their children are all right.  We get inspected by our case manager quarterly to make sure we are conforming to the law.  We see two judges at least twice a year.  They each visit their mothers semi-regularly.  They both see a therapist at least twice a month.  It can be a regular three ring circus.

And then there's the medications.  Many places that take these kids use medication to control their behavior.  Some need it.  Many don't.  And there's no one to help you figure it out.

It is the best thing we have ever done.

Parenting Strangers, part 2 - Thugs & Gangsters

First, a fact - better than 30% of the kids that enter high school do not graduate.  It's been that way for a long time.

In the early 90's, I took a job with the City in a youth program that didn't yet exist.  The idea was simple.  Hire kids who had dropped out, were on probation or parole, and give them a job and teach them primary job skills.

Primary job skills are the stuff most of us understand without being taught; how to show up, how to show up on time, how to dress appropriately, how to take instruction from a supervisor, etc.  Stuff we learned because our parents cared enough to send us to school everyday, on time, looking nice, and then asked us in the evening how school went and whether or not we had any homework.  Stuff we learned because our parents had jobs.

We hired four kids and we were lucky.  The first four were bright and wanted a chance to do something with their lives.  They all had rap-sheets as long as your arm and had spent considerable time in juvenile detention.  One of them was arrested and sent to prison along with a couple of his buddies for carjacking and killing an old man after he'd been with us for about six months.  The other three had jobs, one was married, and they were doing well last time I checked.

My job was to take out a work crew and mow all the Fire Department properties in the city.  It's a big city.  There are a lot of Fire Stations ranging in size from half an acre to twenty acres.  That first year was a challenge.  I lead by example.

The program was a success.  After a year, we hired more leaders and more kids and took on new jobs.

The City Management was confused.  We were successful, i.e., our kids stayed out of jail when they were with us and for long afterwords and organization from all over the country were surprised and envious of our success.  But the liability of having large numbers of thugs and gangsters on the city payroll was a strain on their tolerance.

I loved the kids.  But the City Management was horrible.  So bad, I finally quit in the year 2000.

There were other factors; personal issues and a desire to write.

Parenting Strangers, part 1 - The Early Years

I began working with children shortly after my 10-month old son died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 1982.  I was attending the University of Texas after 4 years in the Air Force.  I came home one afternoon and got a phone call that my son was in the hospital.  By the time I got there, he was pronounced dead.

A few months later, a friend at the Episcopalian/Anglican church we were attending asked if I wanted to teach a Sunday School Class of second graders.  I don't know why I said yes.  I had volunteered in Headstart during college and the experience was wonderful, and I loved being a Sunday School teacher.

Normally, I am a shy and reclusive person, but in front of a group of children, I am transformed into an outgoing, silly person.  I loved that me.

After several years of teaching Sunday School, a voice inside me (I think it was God) began to nudge me toward working with teenagers.  I was frightened, but I gave it a try as a volunteer with the youth group at my church.  I love the earnestness of teenagers.  I love the struggle they have to become individuals, to discover their own unique identity.  I love their passion.

And I discovered an honesty in myself that was lacking.  To reach teenagers, I had to dig deep into myself.  Some of what I found, I didn't like and it took me years to dredge that filth up into the light and let go of it.

I also discovered a wacky sense of humor to which teenagers responded.  A line from W.C. Fields always runs through my head.  "You take life too seriously.  I was only trying to guess your weight."  Because teenagers are earnest in the extreme.  So many teens think that every little thing in life has great depth and meaning.  Life does have depth and meaning, but if I don't laugh, that only leaves crying and I don't cope well when I'm crying.

Vote

"The country does need politicians." - 'Advice to Constructive Workers' (G.), Biharni Komi Agman, pp. 346-7 (from The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi edited by Raghavan Iyer)

I vote.  I think it is a citizen's duty to vote.

Many in my country who voted for Barack Obama have been disappointed.  I am not one of those.  I voted for Obama and he is exactly what I expected, a politician.  I hoped he would be something different, but I did not expect it, and so I am not disappointed.

Rarely in history has voting changed anything.  And when voting has changed things, more often than not, it has been a change for the worse.

Sounds cynical, I know, and perhaps it is, but reliance on someone else to change things, rather than being the change I want to see, doesn't seem sensible.

I was familiar with civil disobedience and non-cooperation from the civil rights protests in my country in the sixties, but it was Gandhi's ideas about the Constructive Programme that struck me as truly revolutionary.  It is the part of Gandhi's vision that my country does not really know or understand, and for me it is what can make real change a reality, right here and right now.