Noise from the Silence

OK, so I admit that I have neglected this blog for a while.   Mostly it has been that we have been incredibly busy.   Late spring headed into summer brought with it a whole host of activities and events that took up a lot of our time.   Lisa had her Senior Prom and she was radiant and beautiful and it was like a dream for us and for her.   She wore a Wisteria colored satin gown and I made her a bracelet of Swarovski crystals.

Not long after, we celebrated Lisa's 18th birthday with a party in our home.  It was magical to watch her at the party, knowing that all those people had come to celebrate her because they loved her and believed in her.  She was joyous in ways we had not seen before and the party was fantastic.   I baked her a lemon buttermilk cake with strawberry filling and Nicole decorated it with a fondant owl and flowers in some of Lisa's favorite colors.

The next two weeks were the last days of school.  Lisa had struggled so much during her senior year.   Not only did she start a new and very different school several weeks into the first quarter of her senior year, but she had not been prepared in her previous schooling to have enough credits to graduate at the end of a typical senior year.   She had been passed along, year after year, by "teachers" who didn't really care if she learned anything or not.  And since she was a foster child, no one took responsibility for what would happen to her if she didn't meet the requirements and graduate high school.  Everyone knew that when Lisa reached the end of her senior year and turned 18, they could wash their hands of her, turn her loose on her own, wish her good luck and walk away.   We had spent the entire year trying to make sure that none of that happened.  She was carrying a full load of classes during the school day and then working on courses on the computer at home after school to get all of her requirements in so she could graduate with her classes.

 It got close.....VERY close.   In the last few weeks of school, Lisa was on virtual shut down in the house, not allowed to do any other activities until her school work was completed.   She was skating a very thin line between completing the work and pulling off the GPA required by the state to receive a diploma.

Let me say this about Lisa, so you don't get the wrong impression about her.    She didn't have a low GPA because there is anything wrong with her intellect.   She is a smart and capable student.   Lisa struggled with depression for years and was told over and over that she would never amount to anything.  She spent time daydreaming; not an uncommon thing with kids in foster care.  She was unmotivated because no one was invested in her enough for her to want to perform for them and she didn't consider herself worthy of the effort.   She was passed from basic to intermediate courses without a thorough knowledge of the basic materials.   You get the picture.

Literally, the day before Lisa was scheduled to walk with her class in the graduation ceremony we got the phone call from her counselor that she had fulfilled all of her requirements and she was clear to receive her diploma.   We were elated. Lisa cried when she got the news.   She said she never thought it would happen.    Everyone had told her she would never make it.

Let me tell you that kid STRUTTED down the aisle in her cap and gown and then FLOATED across the stage to get her diploma.   We were so proud, so overcome with joy and relief!  Just a few days later, Lisa told us that she had contacted the local community college and made an appointment to take her college placement test.   WHAT??? OUR LITTLE LISA?   ALL ON HER OWN??????   All of the sudden she possessed this air of confidence and a drive we had never seen in her before.

She took her test, got her results, selected a course of study in elementary education, came home and set up an appointment to go to orientation.   She came home from orientation registered for school and scheduled for all of her classes.   We wondered to ourselves, "Who is THIS child, where did she come from and what has she done with Lisa?"

A few days later, Lisa was scheduled for an interview to start a volunteer position at a local nursing home and then she was off working that position.   She was riding the bus home from her "job" every day.  She was making a life for herself and learning independent skills.

Our baby was growing up!

Mid June brings my birthday, and this year we took a mini vacation at a bed and breakfast a couple of hours from our home.   The B&B was a stone's throw from one of the only foster parents Lisa had ever had that was kind and loving to her.   Perrie had to relinquish care of Lisa when she found herself having to move out of county for work, but she had kept in touch with Lisa over the internet for years.   She and Lisa had not seen each other in about six years, so they were very anxious to catch back up.   We were thrilled to be able to reconnect Lisa with one of the few happy parts of her childhood.  

Lisa approached us cautiously and asked us if would bother us if she called Perrie "mom".   She had always referred to her that way.   We had no objection whatsoever.   We were just glad that someone had been there to fill that place for her at some point in her childhood and we felt nothing less than sincere gratitude to Perrie for the part she played in Lisa's life.

Meeting her (and her daughter, who Lisa had always considered a little sister), was fantastic.    Perrie is very much like us and we all got along famously.   The little vacation was nice and very refreshing and it was hard to come back home to our work a day lives.

July came and we found ourselves suddenly able to move on some projects we had been planning around the house for some time.   We re-floored, painted and redecorated our living room and den, did major yard renovations and planted almost 100 new plants in 5 planting beds and several planters.    We lay down four truck-fulls of mulch and 120 feet of edging. We resurfaced our kitchen counters and installed a new sink and faucet set and a new kitchen light fixture.   Let's just say that July was a busy, sweaty and very fulfilling month and that it came and went so fast we could hardly keep up!

August brought a visit from our daughter Tara who lives in Michigan.   She and her boyfriend came to stay for a few days and we grilled and swam and shopped and went to the zoo and had family portraits taken.   In the meantime, Lisa got a part time, temporary job at the bookstore at the college she will attend.   She has loved having a job and the experience has been good for her.   She has had to learn to manage her schedule and her transportation.   She has learned to ride the bus in all kinds of weather and to get up VERY early in the morning so she can catch the bus to work.

Next Monday she starts college.   How did THAT happen?

A few days ago, she looked at me and said, "Mom, do you realize that in four years you are going to watch me graduate from COLLEGE?"

From your lips to God's ears, my love.  I believe in you!

Riding the Whirlwind

Beginning a new family with a child who has suffered abuse of any kind is a real workout! As I mentioned in my previous post, Lisa was very focused in the beginning on not doing anything to disappoint us. I can only imagine the stress that living under that kind of pressure must bring about. We tried to convey to her that we loved her because she was our daughter and that mistakes or misbehaviors were not going to separate her from us, and she would smile and nod, but her life experiences had taught her different and she wasn't even close to accepting that things could be different.

So, we brought Lisa home to live with us on October 16th. (Ironically, this is my biological son's birthday.) Lisa was completely overwhelmed by the school and had great difficulty adjusting. She didn't know anyone. At that time, we were the complete focus of her world.

On October 28th, I came home from work and ran slap into a very difficult morning. Typically, I try to go to bed shortly after I get home at 9AM, but on this morning I did not climb into bed until after 12:30. I sent Lisa a text message to let her know that I was just going to bed and would not be getting up when she got home from school and to please let me sleep until 5:30 or so. My phone rang shortly after 2 PM, which is when Lisa is due home from school. She was on the other end of the phone, sobbing hysterically. She was outside the door, locked out because she had left her key at school. I went to the door immediately and let her in and she practically fell into my arms. She was near hysterics and would not even look at me. It was not just that she had done something "wrong", it was something far more significant than that. Remember in a previous post when I mentioned that Lisa had had a failed adoption before? The day that adoption blew up and Lisa was removed, she had lost her house key. Her adoptive mother had blown a gasket over the lost key and locked Lisa out of the house. The situation escalated from there until eventually, police were called and Lisa was removed, her adoptive mother was taken away and, several days later, the adoption was terminated.

For twenty minutes, Lisa cried and I held her and comforted her and told her how much we loved her. She has always been so completely disconnected from her past and the trauma she suffered that she was unaware that in those moments, she was 10 year old Lisa, lost in despair and anguish and fear and desperately needing for a better outcome than the one she got when the original episode happened. I knew she was not connecting the dots on that yet, but for her to be able to be in such a horrendous place and to come out of it intact was really significant.

It was months later when we would learn the details of that whole afternoon; how Lisa was locked out of the home, how she begged to be let inside, how she lost her temper and yelled through the door that she didn't want to live with her adoptive mom anymore and how that statement was answered with the clicking shut of a deadbolt lock; how Lisa, as a young and frightened child, wrote a note to her adoptive mother saying she was sorry and she didn't mean it and signed it with a smiley face, then held it up to the window so it could be seen only to have her "mother" shut the blinds in her face. When Lisa was eventually let in the house, she was told to find the key. She was hit every five minutes that she failed to find the key until she was sobbing uncontrollably. She was hit in the head with a broom stick and sent to her room and told she would be given good reason to cry, and then she was punched in the face and left alone. A short time later, the police arrived, carried her mother away and she was taken by DCF to live somewhere else, believing all the while that she was to blame for the whole thing because she lost her key.

This will give you a pretty good insight into the kind of tension Lisa lives with all the time. She wants to believe that the world is better now and that people are trustworthy and she is safe. She WANTS to believe that in her heart, she TRIES to believe that in her head, but seventeen years of experiencing love as pain and betrayal causes a huge disconnect for her that she is finding difficult to overcome.

We have made some more significant progress in this area, which will come in future posts, but we still have a very long way to go.

Doing it scared - Part Two

Karen here.

What I want to talk about today is how Nicole and I perceived Lisa's fears during the first three months we knew her. I am not sure that even Lisa could speak directly about those fears. She had been in foster care for so long; had lived through a failed adoption and several potential adoptions that didn't materialize. All of that does damage and sometimes even when you are the one who lived through the damage, you can't see the full extent of it. So in this post, I am going to talk about the things that we COULD see, understanding that this is probably much like an iceberg and the vast majority of it lies unseen in the murky depths of Lisa's emotion ocean.

When we met Lisa, we felt an instant bond with her, and she felt the same thing with us. We know for sure that this phenomenon was happening on both ends. For our parts, we could experience it directly. For Lisa's part, we knew it was happening because this normally shut down child who wouldn't give most folks the time of day was opening up to us in ways that shocked the people who knew her best. We wondered a bit if she was just grabbing for what she felt might be her last chance at finding a family so she didn't age out of the system, but there was something we couldn't put our fingers on that told us it was more than that.

In the beginning, Lisa was very careful to be pleasing. She agreed with EVERYTHING! She called us both "Mom" from the very beginning. She was always happy, upbeat and easy going. She had been living in a group home on a "Ranch" that contained several group homes for six years. It was a religiously based organization and church attendance was compulsory. Lisa had a great deal of conflicted emotion regarding religion and had been required at various times in her life to conform to religious doctrines and practices that she was not comfortable with, so this six year placement for her was particularly difficult. To make matters worse, Lisa and the "house mother" for the home in which she lived did not get along. They were just like oil and water and the contempt between them was on most days only barely concealed and sometimes not concealed at all. For Lisa, the chance to live outside of that type of environment was almost a dream come true. What it would cost her to do so, however, was a nightmare.

Lisa was going to have to leave behind everything and everyone she knew. Where the first two thirds of her life had been filled with constant uncertainty and change, the last six years had given her some stability. She had come to know the people around her fairly well. She had attended the same schools for six years and had developed long standing friendships. The school she attended was small....everybody knew everybody. There might have been many things about her living circumstances that were not entirely pleasant, but at least they were very familiar. For a child who comes from a chaotic and unpredictable life, familiarity is like a warm blanket.

So, as long as she was there in her familiar surroundings AND she also had the assurance that a family was coming to be, Lisa was in a pretty OK place. She was unaware of what was going to happen to her emotionally when she left her familiar home. As much as she wanted to live "in the 'burbs"; as much as she wanted away from the "Ranch" and it's dogmatic requirements; as much as she wanted to be away from ALL THOSE KIDS and have the spotlight of an only child; Lisa had no clue what it was going to feel like to be all alone in unfamiliar surroundings with no one to confide in. She was leaving a small school to attend a school with 3,300 students bustling through the hallways. She was leaving a home with the background din of nearly a dozen kids under one roof and where there was always someone to talk to or play with for the quiet of a home where there were no other children. She would sit alone at the lunch table at school. She would sit alone in her room or in the living room after school until one one of us arrived home or until I woke up from my bat-like schedule. She would come to find the noise of school overwhelming and the quiet at home deafening. She would feel equally claustrophobic in the over crowded halls of school, getting bumped and jostled as she would at home where she could walk/sit/stand anywhere she wanted without competition.

Imagine being in completely unfamiliar surroundings like that, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and not having any idea when or IF things will ever feel comfortable again. Now imagine feeling that way and knowing that if you do something "wrong", all of THIS will disappear and you will be hurled into....who knows? Imagine giving up everything familiar for the hope of a dream and then feeling like if you didn't do everything JUST RIGHT, you would not only lose your dream, but you couldn't even get back what you left behind? THAT was the place that Lisa was having to function from when she moved in with us. We lived five hours north of where she had been living. It was in the same state, but it might as well have been a whole world away. Her old life was inaccessible; her place at the ranch, gone. This was where the rubber met the road and it was dance or die.

It wasn't long before the pressure of making such huge and sweeping changes came crashing in on Lisa and the challenges started. We had known all along that it wasn't going to be all sunshine and roses, but let me tell you, NOTHING can prepare you for the hurt and chaos of that first emotional explosion.

Doing it scared - Part One

I love my comfort zone. I mean seriously...I really LOVE my comfort zone. I am one of those people who likes to know what is about to happen. I read instructions; then I follow them. I google maps locations before I go to them and I print the directions. My clothes closet is divided into dresses and skirts, shirts, uniforms and pants and those divisions are further divided by color. I do things in order. I load the dishwasher the same way every time. You get the picture.

Now don't get me wrong, I can be spontaneous. As long as I am not doing something that could have life altering consequences, I can be spontaneous and happy at the same time! Knowing this about me, you can imagine that becoming a lesbian adoptive parent in a VERY conservative state was a bit un-nerving. Becoming an adoptive parent to an almost grown person who has spent almost her entire life so far in abusive or challenging environments and who has lived through experiences that she is not even able to voice...well, let's just say that there were times when I questioned my own sanity.

I had to commit myself to the idea of "doing it scared". I couldn't have done it without Nicole by my side; nor could she have done it without me. We spent months in anxiety over whether or not this child would accept us. We were so different from her. The very first question we asked the adoptions recruiter was whether or not she would accept lesbian parents. The answer came back pretty quickly that she had no issue with that. Not long after, Nicole asked me one day, "Do you think she will be OK with us being white?" I just laughed and said, "If she doesn't care that we are lesbian, I can hardly imagine that being white will throw her!" In the moment it was funny, but in my heart of hearts, I harbored serious worries over being rejected and hurt. So did Nicole. We tried our best not to leak worry into our daily lives, but it is difficult when you have such strong feelings about a child and you have no idea how things are really going to go when you meet.

Before we could meet her, we had to have an approved match. Typically the way this happens is that your local agency does a home study on you and forwards it to the child's agency, who gives it a once over and as long as they don't see any obvious conflicts or disqualifiers, they send you a packet of information about the child that gives you a cursory run down of their history, personality, medical/behavioral/educational issues, etc. You read through it and if there are no disqualifiers on your end, then a conference is scheduled between your agency representative and the child's agency and they all get together and talk about you behind your back. The point of it is to get down to real brass tacks and make sure that everyone believes that this is a good match and that it is in the best interests of the child to proceed with an adoption with this family. Typically, at the end of that conference, a determination has been made, yea or nay, and so we were VERY surprised when we got a phone call saying that they were just not sure and needed more information. A phone conference was scheduled between our daughter's agency and ourselves, so that we could answer the agency's questions directly.

Remember that thing I said about liking things to be predictable and orderly...ESPECIALLY if the results could be life altering?

I remember like it was ten minutes ago sitting in our car in the parking lot of Nicole's work talking on the cell phone connected to the car speakers to a room full of people we didn't know but who held our hopes and dreams in their hands. The car was awash in papers. I had brought every single document that had been generated during the previous nine months, just in case.... There was nothing left to do but to swallow hard, breathe through the fear, be absolutely honest and pray that things would go well. They asked some really hard questions. Remember, their job was to protect a child who had been through hell and who was emotionally shut down and could not take another hit. We sat in the car, holding each other's hands so tightly that it hurt, eyes locked together and answering questions that dug at our souls....."She is completely shut down. How will you reach her?" "What methods will you use to motivate a child that is completely unmotivated?" We talked and listened and then all of the sudden, there it was! "Well ladies, we have only one things left to say. Congratulations...It's a GIRL!"

A deeper look

Karen again. I will probably be the primary voice for this blog. (No surprise to those of you who know me.)

Nicole and I thought it might be helpful to give a little background information on each of us so that some of what we write about makes more sense. Sometimes it is easier to understand why we think/act the way we do or why certain things are important, etc, if you know a bit of the background story, so we will go a little deeper than the basic introduction from a few days ago.

I will start with me. I was born in 1963. I was raised in Atlanta by my biological parents until their divorce when I was about 8 or 9. My dad remarried and then passed away from cancer when I was 12. My mom remarried when I was 15 and the family moved to New Jersey. My childhood was marked by repeated episodes of sexual abuse at the hands of three different men. I medicated my anger and shame with food as a young girl and my weight fluctuated from mildly overweight to morbidly obese. In high school, I added alcohol to the arsenal and I struggled with bouts of depression. My mother's marriage was volatile and uncomfortable and alcohol featured prominently in everything in their lives. I did not feel loved, accepted or valuable and I was very confused and conflicted about love, sexuality and family.

In high school, I spent a summer in Japan as an exchange student. This experience really changed my perspective on what it meant to be a citizen of the world. It also changed how I respond to people who look, think, behave, worship, eat, speak, dress, etc, differently than I do. It taught me to love and embrace diversity, to meet people as individuals, to judge them by their characters, to look for what we share in common and to respect their right to live as they choose. It taught me that, although I think America is a wonderful country, it is not the ONLY wonderful country in the world and that in some areas, we have a LOT to learn.

After high school, I spent two years at the University of Georgia. The biggest lessons I learned there didn't come from the books or the professors. I learned a lot about being Karen and I learned that Karen was a lesbian and that being a lesbian was OK. I learned that a good therapist is a VERY valuable thing and that not all therapists are good. I learned that I had a LOT still to learn.

Trying to grow up in the midst of sexual abuse, divorce, the death of a parent, alcohol abuse, relocation.....your development becomes kind of chaotic. Pieces get missed. You are forced to develop beyond your years while at the same time missing developmental milestones that got lost along the rocky road. To say that I struggled as a young adult is an understatement.

I went through several bad relationships and in a strange twist of fate and a stunning betrayal, I became pregnant at 23. My mother had divorced her abusive husband and moved to Florida with my oldest sister and her children, so I moved to Florida as well. I needed the support, and as screwed up as my family was, it was still my family. I wanted to be a good mother more desperately than I had ever wanted anything in my whole life. I wanted to raise a child who NEVER felt a moment's doubt about how loved and wonderful they were. I put all of my feelings about my own sexuality and my own past on hold and concentrated on loving my child. I learned to live without medicating myself with alcohol. I did not manage to do that with food.

I raised my son in an environment that says everyday that you are good and valuable and cherished. I learned a lot about healing myself as I raised him. Most importantly, as I watched that beautiful, innocent child grow, I learned that no child ever deserves to be exploited or abused and that the abuses that happened to me as I was growing up were not my fault. I protected him fiercely and loved him even more fiercely. I made a lot of mistakes. He loved me anyway. I did a LOT of things right and in doing them, I began to re-write the internal monologue that told me who I was.

I spent a good number of years in a church that told me gay people go to hell and insisted that God would make me straight if I only asked him sincerely enough. After nine years of the most earnest prayer possible I realized that while God had spoken to my heart about a lot of things, He had never taken issue with my sexual orientation. I chose to believe the God I had built a relationship with over my pastor and I left the church. Today, I am a Unitarian Universalist and I enjoy a deep faith and rich spiritual life.

After I reconciled myself with God concerning my sexual orientation, I spent a number of years feeling that perhaps I was bisexual. Looking back, I think it was my attempt at trying to have a life that I could live openly in society, because while I had come to a comfortable place spiritually regarding being gay, socially it was a whole different thing. I live in a very conservative state. There are no protections in my area for LGBT people regarding discrimination in housing, employment, etc. It is very difficult to talk "around" your personal life. People want to know and if you are vague or cagey with them, they can be really crappy to you. SO, while I was still living in that space in my head, I met and married a man. Oddly enough, I told him the day I met him that I was lesbian. The marriage had many more problems than me trying to force my lesbian square peg self into the round hole of a heterosexual marriage, and the combined issues led us to divorce (amicably) four years later. Again, I learned a LOT about myself from that experience and I also gained a lovely daughter, Tara. There has been a tremendous investment in parenting her that has benefited us both in more ways than I can count. She was a teenager when we met and through her I learned how to respect the person she already was while still nurturing and teaching her the things she needed to learn. It was good for both of us. Still is!

I have been a nurse for 22 years. For the last 11 years I have worked as a private duty pediatric nurse. I work with kids who have complex medical needs and who require a nurse at night, so I am one of those graveyard shift nurses. The schedule plays hell with my personal life, but for now it solves more problems than it creates.

I re-use, re-purpose and recycle. I try to conserve resources. I take issue with how we treat meat animals in this country, but I am not vegetarian. I choose to buy meat from sources that practice humane and responsible animal husbandry. I think how we treat the planet and ALL of its inhabitants speaks to who we are as people. I root for the underdog. I shop mom and pop businesses and spend extra to buy things made from recycled materials or by local sources, etc. I am a liberal and a pacifist. I talk too much and am sometimes a bit of a know it all. I hate this about myself. I also struggle with control issues. I am uncomfortable when I don't know what to expect. Sometimes I am bossy. I have a lousy edit feature and struggle with what information to leave in and what to leave out, even in simple instructions.

Around the house, I love to cook. Nicole and I are cupcake and cake bakers/decorators and sometimes a LOT of our schedule happens around creating cakes/cupcakes for someone's event. When I have time, I create beautiful stone bead and precious metal jewelry.

So, that's me. Now on to Nicole. She had a much more stable life than I did, so her story is, accordingly, much shorter. (It's ok, you can say Thank GOD out loud. It wouldn't hurt my feelings even if I could hear you.)

Nicole was born in 1981 (the year I graduated high school, which has become the punch line to a lot of jokes in our lives.) She was raised here in north Florida by her biological parents, who are loving, nurturing and stable people. She was always taught, by both word and deed, that she was valuable and wonderful and loved. Her parents were childhood sweethearts who have remained completely in love with each other throughout their marriage and it was in this environment that Nicole learned about loving a partner and parenting children.

Nicole's mom has the most amazing ability to make someone feel welcome and wanted. She listens to and observes EVERYTHING without you even noticing it and then she delights in surprising people she loves with something that is just the right thing for them. Nicole's dad is quiet. He does not speak often...never engages in idle chit chat. But he is a generous natured and hard working man and if he ever suspects that you need help with something, he is right there to do whatever he can to help and he almost makes you feel like you are doing him a favor for letting him help you. They are wonderful people and they raised a wonderful daughter.

Nicole married her first serious boyfriend a couple of years after she graduated high school. She went straight from her parents' home to their shared home. Her husband was eight years her senior, but completely unable to care for himself. He struggled to remain steadily employed. The marriage was difficult and ended after eight years. During the time they were married, Nicole not only worked full time to support them, but also put herself through college and got a bachelor's degree.

Nicole is a talented artist, although she will deny that any time I mention it. She has a keen eye for design and rearranges the furniture with an almost maddening frequency. The only thing more maddening than the frequency of her redecorating is the fact that it always looks so nice that I can't complain about it!

She has her mother's talent for listening and observing and then surprising you with just the right thing at just the right moment. She has very strong ethics about how you do and do not treat people and she will not abide rudeness. She has a wicked sense of humor and is quick to find the humor in things and has a talent for making people laugh. She is not above doing something silly to make people laugh, because she knows who she is. She is tender hearted beyond words.

Then there is our Lisa. Lisa is brave, funny, complicated, sweet and MOODY! The first six years of Lisa's life were spent bouncing from birth mom to aunt to grandmother and back again. Her birth mother was unstable and frequently left her unattended, even as a VERY young child and Lisa was exposed to drug use and sexual activity. Lisa is the youngest of five children. Of the other four, three had been removed and were adopted as a group prior to Lisa's birth. The other child was back and forth between foster homes and extended family members' homes. The two of them never lived together and saw each only rarely.

At six, Lisa was removed by the state and went to live with extended family. Two years later, she was taken into foster care. It is unclear how many foster homes Lisa lived in prior to her first adoption. At the age of 8, Lisa was adopted by a single mother who was a member of a very stringent religion. Lisa was sent to bible study and church where she was taught that physical violence was wrong only to come home and be beaten. Lisa endured a very difficult 15 months before the adoption was terminated and she was again taken into foster care. There was another series of foster homes, one after the other, until Lisa was finally placed in a group home to try to gain some stability. The group home was stable, but it was a religiously based organization. Given her prior experiences of being forced to attend church and her confusion about God and religion, it was not a good match for Lisa. She felt unwanted and that feeling was reinforced by a cool and distant house mother. LIsa's grades plummeted and she became severely depressed. She refused to talk about her past and was emotionally completely shut down.

We were told when we went to meet Lisa that she would most likely not make eye contact with us. We were warned that it would take an extended amount of time to gain her trust and for her to speak to us without being prompted and even longer to get anything more than "yes, no, fine or I don't know" out of her. Happily, this was not the case. She felt the same feelings of "this is my family" about us that we felt about her. That is not to say that the moment we met she told us all about her life and her feelings and there has not been great difficulty, but the sense between all of us that we were meant to be together has certainly been a HUGE factor in helping Lisa to make strides towards over coming the effects of her childhood trauma.

You're only as old as your teenager thinks you are...

Karen here!

So, I used to have long hair. Really long hair. I had really long hair for a lot of years and I really loved it. It made me feel younger somehow. Silly, I guess, but it did. The closer I get to 50, the more often I find myself experiencing those wonderful "personal tropical vacations" that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with sipping some delicious frozen drink whilst swaying in a hammock strung between two palm tress and listening to the waves and EVERYTHING to do with sweating profusely whilst feeling like a kernel of popcorn just about to combust! So last October, with much trepidation and more than a little anxiety, I headed off to a salon to have my locks shorn to a length that might help prevent the near homicidal panics that accompany that kind of internal, infernal inferno. One VERY short hair cut later and I started feeling much more like my old self.

Things around our house have been a bit hectic lately. Nicole and I have been in a baking frenzy. We make cakes and cupcakes and this past month has been everyoneweknows birthday. On Saturday, we finished off a heavily decorated three layer 12" red velvet cake that weighed over 20 pounds and contained enough batter for 72 cupcakes! I haven't had a lot of time to worry about my hair and it had gotten a bit long. Lisa, our 17 year old, had started to make comments about the state of my hair, so this morning I made an appointment to get my hair cut. Lisa was spending the afternoon and evening with her Meimei and Poppy (Nicole's parents), so I was hoping to surprise her with a mom that looked a bit more put together when we went to pick her up after dinner.

When we arrived at the salon, Jaime, my stylist, and I had the same crazy idea. Let's damn near shave one side of my head and do this cute, piecey, layered thing on the other side. It's an asymmetrical cut that is fairly popular right now and it wears equally well on the very young and the somewhat more aged crowd. I was SO excited. I was sure that Lisa was going to be tickled that I had chosen a hairstyle that wouldn't make her need to walk 10 paces ahead of or behind me when we went someplace.

The cut is cute! Nicole LOVES it! I love it. Even Meimei really liked it and thought looked cute.

Lisa says, "Wow, Mom.....look at all that GRAY!"

The hair color is on the counter.......

Getting Started

I suppose the best way to get started is with an introduction and we will get to that in a minute, but before we do, there is something you should know. Our intent in this blog is to be as real and as transparent as we possibly can. You might, from time to time, encounter some language you don't use. It isn't our intention to offend, just to be real. We tell it like it is. If we come on here and try to portray our family, our struggles, our happy times, our goofiness, our frustrations and the like as anything other than what they really are, we might as well not even bother. We are far from perfect and sometimes we are a downright mess, but we are who we are and maybe something that we find our way through will be helpful to someone. We hope so. We feel passionately about our family and what it has taken to create it. There are many things we have gone through that shouldn't have been so hard. Maybe one day some of the stumbling blocks in the path will be removed, but in the meantime, if you are travelling along any of the paths we have walked, maybe we can help each other.

So, about that introduction; we are Karen and Nicole. We are a lesbian couple and we have three kids between us. We met in October of 2008 and were legally married in D.C. on our second anniversary, October 11, 2010. Karen is 48. Nicole is 31. Coming in to the relationship, Karen had an adult son, Clark, who she raised as a single mother and an adult daughter, Tara, (technically a step-daughter from a previous marriage to a man, but we don't feel or use the term "step".) Nicole had no children and the general consensus between us when we met and up until the time of our marriage is that we were not interested in having any more children. This was not a difficult position for us at the time, because at that time it was not legal for LGBT folks in the state of Florida to adopt. Additionally, neither of us was really interested in or even probably capable of carrying a pregnancy. And then there is always the sticky issue of where to get the other half of the genetic material we would need, so no kids it was!

In the months before we married, we had some discussions about the possibility of becoming foster parents. It was something we both felt was an important thing to do and that we had always felt kind of drawn towards, but neither of us had ever been in a position before where we felt emotionally supported enough to actually move forward with that. In the month directly before we married, a landmark court case here in Florida overturned the ban on lesbian, gay and bisexual adoptions. We were thrilled, but in that moment it was more of a celebratory feeling that our community had gained some much needed equality and that children who desperately needed parents would now have that chance. We were so caught up in the preparations for our upcoming weddings (one with family and friends here in Florida that was not legally recognized and one in D.C. with just a handful of people that was legal) that we couldn't foresee how deeply that court case would impact us in such a short time.

So we married. And then we married again! We came back home and went back to work and reveled in the amazing joy of being legally wed. October went and November came and with it the distraction and bustle of the upcoming holiday season. There was so much to do! Thanksgiving was on us before we knew it. It was different for us this time. We were a family, legally recognized (at least in several states and the District of Columbia, anyway), and it felt different to us. It is more than just a piece of paper and even when you live in a state where your marriage is not legally recognized, your friends and family DO view your relationship differently when you have taken that step. Something was happening inside us, inside how we defined ourselves as a couple and as a family, but we were not really consciously aware of it at the time.

We did what everyone else does at Thanksgiving. We tried to figure out how to celebrate with both sides of the family without making anybody mad. We ate WAY too much food. We laughed and we drank wine and we felt whole and happy and very lucky. December came. In mid December, Karen's niece and her husband had a baby girl. Nicole doesn't subscribe to the belief that all babies are beautiful, even to the point that she finds most babies a little odd looking, but this baby took her breath away. She really was the most beautiful and amazing little princess. We visited them at home shortly after the baby was born. Nicole sat in a recliner in the corner and watched and then something happened that would change the course of our lives in an instant. Someone handed that baby to Nicole and the entire room watched as Nicole just melted. In that instant, the thing that had been changing on the inside of us over the last few months was born. Nicole wanted to be a mother and she wanted to become a mother by adoption. Gone were the days of being trapped in a loveless, difficult marriage with a partner who couldn't be responsible even for his own self, much less a child. Gone was the struggle of coming out and living fully as who you truly are. Gone were the days of having to do everything for and by yourself with no support. And gone was the legal block to adoption by lesbians. Nicole sat there, holding that baby, transfixed...and in the quiet of that moment, everything changed.

In January, we began the process of adoption by doing an Internet search for available foster children in the state of Florida. It led us to a website, capbook.org, where pictures and bios of available kids from several states were listed. Like probably most other couples, we had thought that we would be looking for a young child; preschool age or maybe a toddler. A good friend of ours who had adopted a child already had told us that when we found "our child", we would just know, but we were skeptical. So, there we were one evening, Karen at work and Nicole at home, talking via Skype and going through the listings of kids on capbook.org. The kids were listed by age groups, so we started with the youngest kids and went from there. There were lots of interesting kids on the site, but nothing was really clicking. And then, all of the sudden, there she was. As soon as we saw her we knew that what our friend had told us was right. THIS was our child. We knew that we knew that we knew that this was OUR daughter, OUR Lisa. It was quite a shock to us, because this child was already 16 years old. It was certainly NOT what we had thought we were looking for, but it didn't matter. She was ours and whatever that meant, we were committed.

From that moment, it was about nine months of crazy before we were able to meet our daughter. On December 15, 2011, we all stood in court together and she became legally ours. Well, that is not entirely correct. She became legally Karen's, because although the court case in Sept 2010 cleared the way for gay persons to adopt, it did not change the fact that unmarried couples in the state are not allowed to adopt a child out of the foster system together, and since our marriage is not legally recognized here, only one of us was allowed to become our daughter's legally recognized parent at that time. We are pursuing a second parent adoption, but that will not be final for another few months and has to be done privately. Lisa was less than six months from turning 18 the day the adoption finalized. She will have already turned 18 before the second parent adoption finalizes. It's a bit of a crazy ride adopting a child that close to being an adult.

So, in a nutshell, this is what we will be blogging about: LGBT marriage equality issues; LGBT adoption, family and custody matters; older child adoptions; adopting a child who has been in foster care for a VERY long time; trans-racial adoptions; and over coming a history of abuse. (Both Lisa and Karen have experience with those issues.)

Sometimes Karen will write and sometimes it will be Nicole. We will try to remember to identify who is speaking in each post. Feel free to ask questions and we will try to answer as quickly and as honestly as we can, but please understand that in the interest of protecting our family and the emotional work we are doing, there may be some questions we can't answer publicly and some we may not be able to answer at all.

We hope this has some greater purpose than just recording history and providing some catharsis for us, but it will be whatever it will be. As Lisa so often says, "I know....right?"