Surreptitious Gifts

Funerals are sad family reunions with splashes of happy, bittersweet, grateful, etc. thrown in as stories are shared. This one has been exceptional in that regard.

After the viewing today as we gathered at the house, my foster sisters told the story of how my foster brother, who was married with young children while attending dental school, told my foster dad that something was wrong with the gas gauge in his car and he needed him to look at it, as it always read full and he was afraid of being stranded somewhere when the car ran out of gas because of a faulty gauge.

Turns out his dad was going over to his place at 3AM on his way in to work at the airport and taking the car and filling it up. That was quintessential Gene...charity performed circumspectly (with a dash of humor thrown in.)

On the way to the viewing, my foster mom unveiled a similarly surreptitious act that benefitted me, one that went way beyond free gas.

"You were never our foster child," she told me.

I figured she was speaking metaphorically. She wasn't.

Turns out when the social worker visited for the home inspection as part of the foster home licensing process, they were informed they couldn't be licensed because they had too many children in the home for the number of bedrooms. So they had a judge sign guardianship papers instead.

I continued to live with them, thinking they were pretty special because they'd become foster parents just for me. I had no idea how special.

I knew they were experiencing financial hardship at the time because Flying Tigers, the freight airline he worked for, had recently cut all wages to the 10 years previous pay level as part of a desperate bid to avoid bankruptcy. (It didn't work.) He was supporting a wife and 10 children on $26K/year. But I felt good that they were at least receiving ~$236/month for me from the county.

Well, no they weren't.

Guardianship didn't come with compensation from the county.

"I keep telling you that we considered you one of ours," my foster mom said.

Make that "my mom said."

Feeling awed, and speechless. These two truly are Latter-Day Saints!

A Sky Full of Stars

Listening to Coldplay's "A Sky Full of Stars" as I gazed out the airplane window at Cassiopeia and the North Star above the cloud layer covering the Carolinas as I approached Charlotte in the pre-dawn hours, with many more brilliant accompanying stars than I normally can view even from northern Idaho, it struck me that this was yet one more unexpected gift from my foster dad...I never would have been seeing this incredible celestial view if I weren't on this journey prompted by his loving presence in my life. 

Thanks, Dad, for the stars, and for keeping me calm during the turbulence by imagining you had signed off on the maintenance log yourself. : )

A Servant's Heart

My foster dad passed away in his sleep on Monday at age 75. I'm catching the red-eye out of Lewiston to Louisville, KY tonight to pay my respects to someone I only lived with for 18 months, but who helped fill a very empty hole in my heart when I came to his family at age 16 with nowhere left to go. He and his wife became foster parents just for me. If that doesn't make you feel special when you're a foster kid who's been told by her social worker that there are no families who want to take you in, I don't know what else would.

He was an amazingly gifted mechanic who fixed airplanes and taught others to do the same. He worked for Flying Tigers and UPS, and they would sometimes fly him half-way around the world to fix an airplane that nobody else could. He had the heart of a servant; he commuted several hours a day in awful traffic to LAX and back, and still managed to fix my car or someone else's, not to mention leaky faucets and bikes and toys and anything else that needed fixing, before he'd get 5-6 hours of sleep and be ready to do it all over again.

He spent 60 years with his sweetheart, DeAnn, who mirrored his servant's heart perfectly. He was mischievous and a great tease; he had 50+ grandkids, and called them all "George." He taught me how to fix a flat and use a tire gauge and change the oil and check the fluid levels and clean the battery terminals in my car so I wouldn't be a helpless female. He was as honest and dependable as the day is long, and the world needs more like him.

I can't say as I'll ever be as patient or kind or giving, but I'm grateful to have had his influence in my life. Here he is at my wedding with his wife DeAnn (who looks as young as I did at age 22, even after having 10 kids!) and the youngest 8 of his 10 kids.

Tomorrow at this time I'll be en route from Seattle to Charlotte, NC, where I connect with my flight to Louisville. I'd like to think he trained at least one of the mechanics who worked on the planes I'll be aboard. I'm looking forward to seeing the dozens of family members who will be there, even though I wish I was seeing him at the end of the month for a family wedding in Seattle as planned instead of saying farewell to him...our father, who art in heaven... in Louisville.

The Impossible Girl

For fans of Dr. Who, you will know that "The Impossible Girl" refers to one of his companions, Clara Oswald, who seems to be rather typical but turns out to have quite a surprising life story. That, in a nutshell, describes Anandi. 

Last week, we took Anandi to Spokane for a sedated ABR, which tests the function of the auditory nerve. She'd recentlly failed an electronic test of her cochlea in both ears in the frequency range that would correspond with a quieter speaking voice and below, which explained why she had started saying, "What you say?" and "I can't hear you!" at times. She had never been able to reliably complete a standard hearing screening that involved raising a hand in response to a tone administered through headphones, as her responses were too random. But over the years, speech therapists and others had reassured us that she seemed to have normal hearing, as she was able to imitate all the phonemes correctly, even though she needed a lot of coaching to pronounce things correctly on a consistent basis. She also had had a normal tympanogram (functional test of the middle ear/eardrum.)

Nevertheless, David and I too often experienced her as functionally deaf, and our gut instincts said we needed to follow up with further testing. We were also growing increasingly concerned by her expressive language delay, as her speech gains were no longer tracking her chronological gains.

The results of the ABR were unequivocal, and the doctor gave us a diagnosis of Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD), formerly known as Auditory Neuropathy/Auditory Dyssynchrony (AN/AD). Functionally, this means that while Anandi can hear (although even that is impaired in the lower frequency ranges), her auditory nerve doesn't properly synchronize the incoming sounds so that they're intelligible to her. The analogy we were given is listening to static between two radio stations. You can hear words being spoken, but you have to struggle extremely hard to decode the words being transmitted. It tends to worsen throughout the day as the auditory nerve becomes fatigued, which correlates with our observation that after school and in the evenings she would become increasingly withdrawn, irritable, irrational, etc. It also makes it extremely difficult to impossible to distinguish speech when background noise is present. Hence, she has used her cleverness to follow cues and imitate what others are doing when she hasn't been able to understand in classroom settings, etc., and thus has managed to fly under the radar for having a severe hearing disorder diagnosis.

The amazing thing about this diagnosis is that it's normally given to much younger children, as their lack of language development would lead to this testing much earlier on. Only recently has she begun to verbalize not being able to hear/understand at times, but this isn't a progressive condition; she's most likely had it since birth. It's a very rare condition to begin with, but fewer than 1 in 14 diagnosed with it will ever develop normal speech and language. The fact that Anandi has coped and adapted to the distorted sounds she has been hearing and managed to develop the level of understandable expressive language she has (currently about a 4-year old level at age 7-1/2) without any interventions whatsoever is bordering on the...well, impossible. She has had to struggle with a very uncomfortable sensation for years without her parents and teachers being aware so that accommodations and interventions could be made. She has, in fact, been quite a trooper! I feel both humbled by her miraculous accomplishments despite our missing this staggering piece of information, and ashamed in retrospect for how impatient I've been with her at times for her "not listening" to me.

We will be following up with an audiologist to try both FM transmitters and hearing aids; the former is useful in classroom situations to boost the signal when there is background noise, and hearing aids to boost it in general. But sometimes the hearing aids merely amplify the static. Cochlear implants have sometimes had dramatic effects, seeming to synchronize the auditory nerve transmissions and clear up the static, but other times they have had no discernible effect, and we are by no means ready to consider such a drastic intervention. So we will be moving forward with prayer and hope that we will be able to find a way to improve her hearing, and that our "impossible girl" will have an easier time of things moving forward.

2400

My 11-year old and I figured out a short time ago that there are approximately 2400 days left until June of her senior year. It might not be the day she graduates or moves out, but it was a good marker of how many days of her childhood we have left to spend together. And her "childhood" is certainly going to pass by long before then. It gave me pause to put a hard number to those days.

"2400" is now a mantra for my daily interactions with her, as I know it's so easy for me to focus on her exasperating habits or annoying shortcomings, especially since she has entered puberty and is approaching teen-dom. This numeric reminder now serves to help me put those annoyances into perspective. "2400" I think as she rolls her eyes at me when I ask her to pick her clothes up off the bathroom floor or unearth her desk and bed from the mound of random belongings piled on top of them. "2400" I think as she grumbles about bedtime or TV limits.

"2400" also serves as a gratitude counter, filling me with joy that I have that many more days still to enjoy her unique and funny and unpredictable presence. "2400" I think as she rushes blurting mid-sentence into the kitchen, her cockatiel perched on her shoulder, pointe shoes on her feet, as she answers my beckon to unload the dishwasher. "2400" I think as I watch her perform ballet and Celtic dance on stage, draw in her sketchbook, or ride her horse into a herd of cattle to separate out a steer with a blue ear tag. "2400" I think as we snuggle together and watch a gripping episode of "Agents of SHIELD" or "Dr. Who." "2400" I think as I tuck her in and read a chapter of Redwall aloud to her, grateful that she still appreciates and cherishes our bedtime routine.

Of course, 2400 is no guarantee, either. It could be 1400, or 400, or one. Tragedies befall even those who are cognizant of the clock ticking.

I remember snippets of song lyrics: "Life is just another terminal disease"..."Live just like you're dying"..."I want to live like there's no tomorrow." There is wisdom in those words, to be sure. But for me, "2400" has proven to be the most potent reenforcement of the idea they contain. And the sad thing is, I know that number is now in the 2300's, as we calculated this a few weeks back. My hope is that our good days will outweigh our bad, and that the days we spend enjoying each other's company will have the effect of multiplying those days. Sometimes I think the feeling we get of time passing too quickly is a result of time spent unsatisfactorily, that unhappy days seem to subtract more than their actual total from our allotment of time with our loved ones.

So here's to multiplying today by two...or three, or more!

Chaosing

slog (verb): to keep doing something even though it is difficult or boring : to work at something in a steady, determined way

September felt like one long chaotic slog.

"Slog" sounds like such a negative word; perhaps I can invent one that describes the intense activity level without being pejorative, as I truly enjoyed a lot of it. But "to keep doing something even though it is difficult" surely applies. How about "chaosing through September." I haven't seen "chaos" used as a verb before, but that seems like an oversight.

The transition from summer chaos to school year chaos included: helping my previously homeschooled daughter to hit the ground running in public school, where she is playing clarinet in band and singing in the choir (which meets before school two mornings a week); my husband and I stepping up big time as booster parents at our daughters' dance studio, including creating a float for the rodeo parade and an online registration/billing system for the studio; participating in the county fair as a 4-H parent and helping my daughter participate as a 4-H kid (including cleaning poop off a hen's feet with a toothbrush at 7:30 AM); adjusting to the extracurricular activities schedule (Celtic dance, ballet, and horse events for our oldest daughter; ballet/tap dance and therapy for our youngest daughter; play dates for both); starting Knowledge Bowl practice sessions at our house with my daughter's classmate; and catching up on weeks/months/years of deferred projects around home while the kids are at school.

I also traveled to Missoula to help a friend move her elderly mother out of the home she'd lived in for 47 years, and then helped her in her seamstress shop when she returned and was buried in bridesmaid dresses and wedding gowns. (I'm not sure how much help I was; sewing beadwork and ripping out seams on intricately layered formal gowns isn't my forte!)

Several people have asked me what I do now that the girls are both in school full time. I should have created a time-lapse video of September's activities to hand out in reply. It's just too hard to explain how "all that free time" hasn't really been all that free yet!

This morning I awoke at 3:53 AM and couldn't get back to sleep, I was so filled with careening emotions. I think I'd been dreaming about something upsetting. At one point I even snuggled up with my oldest daughter for a bit just to feel close. I miss our time together from our homeschooling days. I have some regrets about the decision, but I knew that was inevitable. I want to connect with her meaningfully in our limited time together, but it's so hard to find the time now. I rejoice in her happiness with her new friends, as she's a social butterfly who hadn't had much luck finding bosom buddies in the homeschool community. But it pains me when she describes the boredom and frustration she experiences because of the inanity of the school curriculum. It's exactly as I predicted. Social gain, academic loss. I'm trying to get her into the gifted/talented program, but I've been told "it's a process", and it sounds as if she'll be lucky to be admitted to it before the semester ends. Too bad, too, as they're focusing on writing this semester.

Even though home isn't her primary "school" anymore, we can still definitely make it the primary center of learning. I think I'll encourage us both to sign up for NaNoWriMo in November, and that can more than take the place of a G/T writing class. My husband is thinking of more interesting ways to teach her the science of electricity and magnetism that they are covering in an excruciatingly dull way at school, and that can happen as a fun weekend or evening activity. And who knows...we might end up doing hybrid homeschooling, as some families do: 3 Rs and science/social studies at home, band/choir/theatre/sports at school. She'd still have the advantage of seeing friends at school, but wouldn't have to be there for so many hours a day, and she could get a better quality education on her core subjects at home. I'm appalled at how low the school standards have gotten. The kids don't even get to know if they've gotten the correct answers in math! "Correct" is apparently now an oppressive white male patriarchal construct that has been rightfully purged from the curriculum. Gack!

October feels filled with promise. The days are back within my preferred temperature range, and I feel a surge of optimism during this, my favorite season of the year. It feels like a season of preparation, preparing for good things. Perhaps I can come up with a verb for October. "Optimizing" seems like a good candidate. It sure beats "slogging"!

The Tempest

I've been preserving Internet pages by not writing unnecessary blog posts for the past three months.

Well, that's the most creative excuse I can come up with. I have no good excuse except a general feeling that I couldn't "allow" myself to spend time writing a blog post when I had so many undone things on my to-do list. That, and a general feeling of malaise that colored everything blah. Who wants to write about blah?

Shortly after my last entry, my daughters performed in their dance studio's production of "Mary Poppins", and grandma and grandpa made the long trek north from Sparks, NV to see it. My 11-year old took time off from homeschooling the week they were here. When they left, she was balky and argumentative with me as I tried to wrap up the school year. She seemed to think she should be done with school for the year, even though her friends at public school still had a week of school to go.

Things escalated one day as I was requesting her to read aloud to me while we were driving her sister to her therapy appointment, with the goal of finishing the book she'd been reading to me for months (at ever increasing intervals, even though it was one she likes and had picked herself.) She was refusing to do it, and I ended up grabbing her book and hurling it out the window, saying, "You're right. We're done. You're fired." Six years of homeschooling, wrapped up in one impulsive gesture. It had been building to this point for the past year and a half, but it still came as a shock when it happened. (I did go back and retrieve the book, but not before it had been run over. The tread marks on it make a nice commentary. I might put it in a shadowbox display at some point, but for now, it's sitting in obscurity on a shelf.)

Over the next few days, we discussed (in calmer tones) how it just didn't seem like we were enjoying homeschooling anymore, and how it was generating a lot of friction between us. I told her I valued our relationship more than I valued homeschooling, and I thought she might benefit from having someone else as her teacher. She agreed, although she still was shocked that I'd "fired" her as my student. (She admitted she'd fired me in her head several times as well. I'm sure I deserved it, too!) We've even laughed about the tread marks on the book.

Even though we'd left the confines of the K12 curriculum utilized by the Idaho Virtual Academy that she'd been enrolled in for grades K-3 and I'd tried to venture into the less formal lands of project-based homeschooling and unit-based homeschooling in grades 4-5, it had proven difficult to achieve the focus and consistency necessary to complete even the modest goals we set. It seemed she was having an incredibly difficult time focusing on anything for any length of time, and abandoned projects cluttered her room and spread out all over the house and even into the yard. I felt her pain, as I'm a squirrel-brained Golden Retriever myself most days, but it was reaching a level of disorganized thinking and action that went way beyond simple immaturity. It was actually getting worse as she got older, not better!

More troubling, her frustrated outbursts any time she couldn't instantly master new material were becoming more frequent and intense. (It reminded me of me doing algebra homework in 8th grade.) She pushed away offers to help like they were offers of cyanide. She interrupted constantly, and argued even minor points as if her life depended on the outcome. There was no filter between her brain and her mouth...if she thought it, she blurted it. I was reactive, and we were engaged in yelling matches far too frequently. I felt like I'd become the mother of a belligerent 16-year old, and I despaired. If it's this bad at age 11, what on earth would 16 look like? And it finally occurred to me, with my husband's input, that our beloved, creative, impulsive, talented, moody, brilliantly inconsistent and inconsistently brilliant girl might actually have Attention Deficit Disorder...along with her mother. It was a case of the blind leading the blind. No wonder we had been struggling to make homeschooling work for so long!

One of my main summer goals (besides trying to relax and enjoy ourselves) was to have both of us evaluated for ADD, and to act on the (probable) diagnosis with medication and behavioral modifications so that she could start out her public school career being the best her she could be and I could perhaps become more the mother I want to be, leaving some of the anger and irritability and chaos behind. We'd already planned to have our youngest daughter evaluated, as after a year in kindergarten it was apparent that she had an incredibly difficult time remaining focused enough to accomplish any work, and her boundary issues from lack of impulse control have begun to affect her social life. A pediatric neurologist she'd seen for an EEG consult in June suggested strongly that we have her evaluated for ADHD, as well. My husband also suffers from ADD, according to online assessment tools, but he has more of an anxiety component. In other words, we're a whole family of squirrel brains, but all with unique issues resulting from the same condition. Since he's dealing with a host of other health issues, we decided not to pursue his diagnosis/treatment at this time.

It was not surprising to confirm through evaluations by the behavioral health specialist that both daughters and myself score very highly in the ADD/ADHD spectrum. All three of us began prescription medication. We've had almost two months now to assess their efficacy, and have had to change medication for both daughters due to unacceptable side effects, but the good news is that my oldest daughter has started to exhibit some amazing ability to maintain focus, and her irritable outbursts are far fewer and less volatile. We are waiting until school starts to try a different medication for my youngest daughter, as the first one affected her normally cheerful personality to a very noticeable degree. She became very oppositional and unhappy. When all three therapists commented on it on the same day,  it confirmed our conviction that it was time to change medication. As for me, I started on a very low dose, and have noticed a mild improvement in my ability to focus, but am going to see about increasing the dosage, as it's awfully subtle. I still struggle mightily to stay focused. (It has taken me four days to write this post.)

We went by the school yesterday to see the classroom lists that were posted at 3 PM. (Not like we were counting the days, hours, and minutes or anything!) My daughter didn't get the teacher we'd requested, but she did get placed in the same class with a friend. That was probably more important, as the teacher is still supposed to be a good, nice teacher, and my daughter was mostly worried about making friends. She's been cleaning her room (usually looks like a tornado hit it), and two days ago spent hours sitting at her desk working on her 4H recordbook...the desk that had been buried under a mound of randomly tossed items for months. She's been researching kid-friendly school lunches that she can pack. The medication definitely seems to be reaping obvious and intended benefits.

Now of course I'm second guessing myself and thinking, "Gee, maybe if she'd been on medication last June I wouldn't have fired her as my student, and I'd be homeschooling my girl next week instead of sending her off to public school. What have I done???" I can't deny that I'm experiencing a sense of loss, and have been trying to fill these last days of summer with lots of quality time together, cognizant that our time together is going to be a much more rare, precious commodity once September 3rd rolls around. We have a salon appointment together on Wednesday, the day before school starts, and I'd like to think of something fun to do afterwards.

But a part of me believes I also need this time to blossom, to have some time to pursue the goals and dreams that weren't possible in the confines of the homeschooling life I was leading, and that she will blossom with new friendships and learning to navigate in the world more independently. Hopefully part of the benefit for her will also be seeing her mom become the writer she'd always dreamed of becoming, of pursuing her dreams and achieving them. I don't want her to grow up with an image of me as her "woulda-shoulda-coulda" mom.

There's a tempest outside as I prepare to post this...wind bursts up to 70 mph, I'd estimate. It matches my inner turmoil about my sense of adequacy as a wife, mother, and human being at this point in my life. I can only hope that when this storm passes, the rains will come and the heavy smoke from raging wildfires that's filled our valley for the past several weeks will be cleansed from our skies and homes, and we'll be able to enjoy the beauty of summer's end instead of hiding out indoors. Hopefully my internal weather forecast will follow suit.