There are rules when it comes to raising children from hard places. It has taken me some time to understand them, and so I thought I would share what I have learned from my son and his spoons. I once heard of a spoon analogy with chronic illness, but it wasn’t until Israel, that I realized parts of it related… Read More
I know you. You began with such big hopes and a dash of hesitation. You knew the risks and had heard the stories. You waded through the advice from friends and strangers; and read all the books and all the blogs. You added words like attachment theory, trauma-informed parenting, reunification. You also found yourself using new acronyms like TDM (team… Read More
She sat in my lap and screamed and sobbed. Her denim jumper was damp; a mix of sweat and tears. My husband had just called me because she would not stop screaming. I met him outside the bank beside his truck and I took my raging and screaming child into the quiet confines of my car. Her shrieks echoed loudly… Read More
I always start the class out with introductions. As my eyes swept the room, I took in all the men wearing orange jumpsuits and I prepared mentally to scale a huge mountain. Each class always starts with emotional walls and barriers that I must figure out how to breach. Today, the mountain came tumbling down because of one spoken sentence from… Read More
There are things that I wish you understood about my kid. I realize that he is one of 29 other children in your classroom and you really don’t need one more thing on your plate. But, the more I understand about trauma, the more I realize how much it affected my entire classroom. The extent of my training for childhood… Read More
She sat across from me, a walking contradiction of motherhood, the embodiment of everything I had spent the last 10 years trying to repair. She represented the mother each of my children had lost when they entered the foster care system. The woman who I feared when we took the foster care training classes. This woman was the unseen spectre… Read More