That’s right, we’ve been parents for a year and we have a 10 year old. Magic, you ask? Not quite (but sort of). Foster parents.
It was actually 3 years in the making as we went through using a private agency, the agency floudering and folding, our case’s transfer to the state, looking into potential kiddo placements… Finally we landed on T. Last fall, it was a ball of emotions that came along, ballooned and vanished the day I layed down on the carpet with a 8 year old and built a lego vehicle. I don’t quite remember which lego item we built, just the tentative look on his face, concerned that I would be upset when he messed up, worried about the next step. But we built the thing and I’m sure it’s still around the house somewhere.
For those of you who are already parents, you’ll know this one: your relationship changes drastically with your partner when the actual stress and anxiety of the day-to-day actual child arrives. We discussed so much, took so many classes, read so many books, articles… But nothing really prepared us for dealing with parenting and what it would do to our relationship.
We are much stronger as a couple now than we were last year. That was a good result of all of this. However, diamonds are made under pressure, and as such, so we went through some immense pressure. We trust each other more now for the times where we took it on faith the other had control of the situation (especially when the we were burned out and needed to let go.) And when those occasions panned out and everything was fine, sometimes even better than powering through… that creates trust!
And of course, dealing with the mess-ups, the forgotten pickups, the missed appoitnments, the broken promises to the kiddo and to each other… And then to realize that even when those things happened we were able to deal with the resulting (bigger, more stressful) problems. That not only builds trust within the relationship, but trust and confidence in onesself.
Where do we go from here? We are still waiting on the adoption hearing which should be early next year and solidifying our little family. At that point I could actually use his first name (but I probably won’t. I don’t think any kiddo needs his dad’s blog out there for his classmates to read and use against him in the court of middle school…)
There’s definitely some mental health issues which have been popping up, both with the kiddo and myself, and I’ll go into those more in the next article. Suffice it to say that while pressure builds diamonds, it also squeezes out the impurities and they don’t always deal with themselves. That’s what therapists (and sometimes drugs) are for, right?
Thank you for reading. Speak soon!
JW