The Fog

I process pen to paper, I tell you that all the time.

This is the stretch of foster care we call the fog. 

It is murky and difficult to explain. There are certain aspects of it that flash out clear as a flare but other parts that you don't see until after you've crashed into them. The fog is a confusing place to be.

It can easily train wreck a whole family.

You take a family like mine, where everyone has a quirk or two, add in the stress of the fog and it all but collapses.

Of course because it is foster care, I can't tell you much.

I can tell you this.

The fog makes you lose your horizon. You can't find up. You can't see the sky.

The fog makes quirks bigger and more pronounced.

The fog takes big issues and makes them dramatic beyond words.

The fog is a place that makes you jealous of normal tantrums, normal bad behavior, average family arguments and everyone elses bad days.

This is a place that leaves you doing things you never thought of before.

Tonight, for example, I will figure out how to stay in the legal boundaries of required confidentiality and yet explain to the other parents on my child's pee wee team why and how and what, all without saying anything. I will find a way to explain my behavior isn't helicopter mom, it's making sure my child doesn't hurt yours. I will find the way to say, my child may be difficult, may have come from a world you can't even begin to imagine, may be nothing like any other child you meet for the rest of your life, but still deserves a chance to be a child just like yours. My child, this broken, damaged, bruised, hurting little child, should get to at least have a turn trying to be a child and get to try to figure out what it's like to play and have fun.

This child should get a chance.