Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Adventure Begins

So this is the year we take on two 17 year old female foreign exchange students from different countries, and I start  the second nursing job in  six months. September brandishes the starting gate; and truth be told, am I not just superimposing a waning bandage over a persistent case of empty nest syndrome? Mind you, the sixteen year-old is only in eleventh grade and  already I muffle rising panic.  The twenty-four year old is gone, the twenty-one year old rows away his senior year of college whilst polishing off  Arabic and eyeing Egypt with fervor... them's horses  are out 'o the bahn.

My year perrenials (a new verb I just coined) in September, even before I was an educator. For someone who attended no less than seven institutions of higher learning on her way to earning three degrees, the school calendar is hard-wired in. We won't count the half-finished technical writing masters at University of North Texas or the paralegal certificate, those educational u-turns... nay, verily  I proclaim with a straight face that every single learning experience continues to be utilized and applied to this very day.

As far as the premature case of empty nest, it may well be the result of  attempting to adopt a total of seven older children over six years and retaining just one. Have the other six been adopted by anyone? No, but  most would have if  the state Department of Children Youth and Families would just listen to their parents in the trenches. The photo above was taken three  kids ago. Do you think in the old days, when many offspring died, that parents marked the passage of time by using the deaths of their children? Instead of fall or spring or a number, that time would be known as "when Sandy left us" .... losing a child in a failed adoption is nearly as traumatizing as the death of a child. It has a way of stopping you in your tracks, putting life on hold.  This year alone, we'd  already lost two kids, following one last year...the most recent two I can't bear to talk about just yet.

They are not the reason we won't attempt to adopt again; that honor lies with the last, the final state social services caseworker who repeatedly lied and back-stabbed us over the course of 15 months. Lest you think I have it in for this class of person, I will say that my previous experiences with such workers had in fact been uniformly positive. Alas, this misguided woman was backed by her organization all the way to the very top. I was personally told by the head of the organization that the children would be taken away if I didn't toe the nonsensical party line,  and then, as they had repeatedly, the organization contradicted itself. They made up new rules that applied only to our family, and subsequently refused to honor those selfsame rules when the shoe was on the other foot. The subject defies sensibility; there's a book in it somewhere. Invariably, in my life when it's time  to move on and I still think this is something I need to be doing, it requires a whopping dose of something really nasty to turn me off. Finally I heeded the message, though I can't keep the kids out of my life just yet.

On a lighter note: our newfound international student exchange organization is dubiously blessed with an acronym that had to be penned by a non-English speaker. In all sincerity - phonetically, it is pronounced "Assy". Kevin and I run around the house making "assy" jokes and mimicking fake "assy" commercials, replete with butt shots, such as " Assy come home" which poses a nice double entendre on the international student side of things.  The poor girls haven't arrived yet, but when they do, it will be our special pleasure  to begin teaching them English slang.

1 comment:

  1. Keep this up! Looking forward to hearing about all the triumphs and challenges of having the girls. I'm sure there will be plenty of both.

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