Dear Annie

dear Annie,

I wish you could understand how much we love you and worry about you.  Are you warm?  Are you safe?  

I know you think you don't have many choices so you run to what looks like freedom.  But if you have nothing, not even hope, you are not really free.  We want to see you gain the skills to be able to take care of yourself, you are not going to learn job skills and financial management and good mental health out on the street.  

You are so much danger, without your meds you will have seizures and no one will take you for medical care.  Without your meds you will begin to experience increasing periods of psychosis and your tentative grip on reality will become even more stretched.  The folks around you will not have the patience, expertise, or even empathy to help you.  Also, the choices of mixing drugs and alcohol with your medical issues is so scary.

I wish you would let us help you.  Since you won't, know that I am praying for you and think of you often.  You can always come back.

With so much love, Mom

AWOL and maybe really gone this time

Well Annie is AWOL again and this time the rehabilitation center will not take her back if she comes back.  She took no meds (has a seizure disorder not to mention major mental health issues) and has basically ditched the long term waiver we worked so hard to get for her.  She didn't finish her SSI application and she has no health insurance.  The 36 year old man she left with, apparently she has had a 2 year relationship with him, is indigent and also brain damaged.  But because she is still her own guardian the police will do nothing.  

We worry, we wait to hear and we struggle with feelings of rage, inadequacy, and helplessness.  Although she is 19 she only functions at about an 8 year old age in terms of her understanding of reality, her ability to handle money or make important decisions.  We were in the process of trying to get emergency guardianship but this has also thrown that all out of whack.

I don't know what to say.  I can't even cry or scream.  I am numb.

Catching Up

Oh, I have been a bad blogger.  So sorry.  Work has been absolutely crazy, a lot of stress and tension over budgets and thus over whether we have jobs.  Plus I have a new class of prospective foster and adoptive parents beginning their journey, so that has been and will be intense.  We have an awesome class, 15 families are starting out, I am hoping that about 12 will finish and become certified homes.  That would be great, being able to place 12 kids in the first quarter of the year!!

At home things continue apace.  Doug went down to court with Brooke and full guardianship was granted to the state.  We will petition to take over guardianship, at least of the personal not financial aspects, in 6 months.  It has been a long road with her but things are looking a lot brighter.

Annie, on the other hand is a hot mess.  Doug and I traveled to see her over the New Year's weekend and she is not doing well.  Her seizures have increased.  Her weight is ballooning, she gained 11 pounds in a one week period, and it is all from overeating and not moving around.  Her placement is in total jeopardy, her Medicaid was cut off on Dec. 31 and no placement in at all interested in taking her on the long-term Acquired Brain Injury Waiver that we were so es tactic about receiving.  The main reason for their reluctance is how much of a flight risk she is.  So we go around and around, calling this state agency and that ombudsman office and never do the right hands know what the left hands are doing. Frustration, fear, anger, hopelessness, determination and exhaustion would about describe my feelings about all this.

I had one adult son get to experience jail time for his poor choices about what to do before one drives.  I am hoping it was an educational experience and may serve as a wake-up call.  Some folks are terribly hard-headed.

Douglass is off to Texas to see his girlfriend again.  That relationship really worries Doug and myself as the girlfriend is extremely manipulative and uses a lot of emotional blackmail.  Douglass does not really have the capability to handle that well at all.  We also are concerned about how immature and self-centered she is.  But he is what passes for an adult these days so we try to remain supportive and carefully point out issues in ways that hopefully will not alienate him.

More on Kendra and Dancing Baby Girl and anything else interesting later as I must get Kendra off to a dance competition.

What a Christmas Present!!!

I haven't posted much about our funding problems with Annie because it has just been too life sucking.  Suffice it to say that we have been doing the Medicaid denial of funds and subsequent appeal dance for the last few months.  We have called in favors from our network of social service folk, and we have talked with our State Senator and Representative (or at least their minions).  But we were really scared.  We cannot let Annie come back home because she is too dangerous to the other people in the home, particularly Kendra as she has intense jealousy towards her and has physically attacked her many times in the past.  But there didn't seem to be anywhere for her to go, I am not sure even homeless shelters would take her.

Well today the official sounding knock came at the front door and I was required to sign a certified letter for Annie.  We opened it and to our surprise discovered that Annie has qualified for the Acquired Brain Injury Waiver.  This is a new funding program and there were only 50 spots funded for this year and Annie got one!!  Some one is looking out for her, her guardian angel pulled some major strings.

With this funding stream we can now seek a residential/group home style facility for her much closer to home and one that will meet her needs for brain injury rehabilitation.  This funding stream was created to fill the hole between children's services which end at 18 and adult services which don't start until 21.  It is totally amazing that Annie got funded.  I mean, I am not saying that she isn't in desperate need but so are so many others.

The weight that has been lifted from our shoulders is immense.  I feel like we can be happy at Christmas now.

There is still a lot to do, we have to find a case management agency and then start investigating programs.  There is one we have in mind but we don't know if they have an opening or if they would consider Annie given her issues.  But it so much more hopeful to know that now we can start looking for a home for Annie rather than worrying about her being homeless.

Our prayers have been answered and now there are just the ton of details to deal with, but I am not  complaining.

Happy Pie Day

Happy Thanksgiving!

At our house we celebrate pie day, every one has their own pie. We share but there is always at least one pie per person. The turkey and dressings are all extras as far as the limelight at our house. The spotlight is on the pumpkin, apple, pecan, mince and berry pies.

We have just finished the first round of pies. I expect to see them out again a little later. Then we all have pie for breakfast, a true tradition for our family.

Hope your days were as successful as ours. We had a mellow, calm, enjoyable time. It helped that we did not have two of the most volatile at home. While I missed all 3 of my missing kids it was so much more pleasant without 2 of them.

A countdown of the missing: James, 22 is in his senior year at college in California, so he went to a friend's parents' house to avoid the travel and airport madness.

Annie, 19 is in a Brain injury rehab center about 5 and a half hours away and not doing well so not invited home.

Douglass, 18 went to Texas to visit with his girlfriend and he won't be back for two weeks a nice little respite for all of us at home.

Well, now the clean up begins.

Catching Up

Of course our pumpkins would be ballet dancers!

Lots of catching up, it has been busy, busy!

First the good stuff, we had a Dancing Baby Girl Weekend and had a good mellow time of it. hoped to meet up with Spidey but he had a strep throat. Couldn't have done the full sibling picture we wanted to anyway as Imiki was home with bacterial pneumonia. Lani can't wait for his heart surgery as she hopes his overall health will improve.

My banner got finished, or at least finished enough to hang in the sanctuary for the baptism on Sunday. I will get a picture of it up here soon. So that is a load of responsibility off my shoulders.

Now for the stressful stuff.

Kendra: She has been feeling very exhausted, looking very pale and complaining of dizziness, so I took her to the peds on Friday and we wound up with an emergency cardiology consult. She is experiencing vasoconstriction to a severe enough degree that they were concerned about seizures!! Anyway they sent her home to bed and started her on some meds to alleviate the vein constriction and collapse. She couldn't dance in her school Dance program's semester dance on Friday night (don't know how she is going to get a grade now) and she couldn't go to the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night.

She spent most of the weekend asleep or lying on the couch but pushed herself to study for a big AP test today and insisted on going to school to take it. The meds do seem to be helping, she no longer looks like a Cullen (vampire for you non-Twilight fans). And she made it through the school day. So I am hopeful. We still have a gazillion specialist appointments to go to. I am glad it wasn't an emergency or anything as the earliest possible appointments with the neurologist and endocrinologist are not until January.

Kendra's biggest fear is that the doctors are going to tell her she can't dance any more. That would be a hard, hard test for her as dancing is her life right now.

Annie: Well the saga continues. the reconsideration letter has been sent to the Medicaid people, a long term waiver has been sought and we are still in limbo. Then tonight Annie calls and she has spoken with her case manager and she is going to go live with this guy that she has talked to a lot on the phone, see he is a really good friend of hers (they have never met face to face), because she has to leave the rehab program because of no funding. Anyway we were pissed that the case manager talked with her about all that and dismayed with the end result that Annie has cooked up. She really didn't follow most of what the case manager was telling her, all she heard is that she has to leave and so she is going to go live with this guy. I swear she is packing her bags as we speak, I know how Annie's mind works.

I am praying that she does not go all impulsive on us and sign herself out of the program. If she can just wait a little bit we think it will all get straightened out and she will be able to move to a post-acute facility here in our city. But Annie is not one for waiting once she has gotten a bee in her bonnet.

DH's work: or lack thereof. The prospects remain dim, he is actively searching for a job, has sent in his resume, etc. but the word is that folks aren't hiring even for previously posted jobs. I saw that happen at my job, one day there were four job postings on the board, the next day they were all gone and an announcement of a hiring freeze was made. It is a scary time. All I want to do is to be able to pay for the house and buy some food. Survival mode is grim but it may not be enough. I try to avoid thinking of the what ifs.

Anyway DH is going out to California this next week and he will have two "interviews" which are not really interviews but at least discussions with those people who might possibly hire him if they are hiring anybody. He has gone back to school and gotten himself certified in two other systems so that he can solicit work on those computer platforms as well. He is trying hard, the economy is just not cooperating.

So now you are caught up. I have to go pick Kendra up from her teaching, ballet of course, I hope she has enough energy left to do her homework or she will get even further behind. On that happy note....

No real changes

Nothing much has changed in our situation. We are working with the state level politicos to try to get some traction on the Medicaid people. But mostly today has been spent with no news, no call backs, no progress.

I am feeling a little better, I made it through work today, got some chores done and even had enough energy to make scalloped potatoes for dinner. So hopefully tonight will be better. I am actually afraid of the 3 AM wake up (involuntary but habitual) but I am hoping I can tamp the anxiety down enough to make it through.

I still feel like we are running around in the maze with no exit and no cheese reward either! But the shock has worn off enough that I am not quaking.

Thank you everyone for your wonderful and sincere responses. One of the only thing that helps is knowing that there are people out there who understand and who are not judging me or my parenting. Thanks for the support, I am sure not getting any from the real live helping professions people who are all about making her mental illness my fault. Even though she came to my home at 19 months, she was already a victim of Shaken Baby (thus the Acquired Brain Injury), a victim of maternal alcohol and drug abuse while in utero, a genetic carrier of bi-polar, ADD and schizophrenia, and one of the most severely abused children the state had seen in a long time. We tried hard, but that damage can not be loved away no matter how hard we tried. And yet my parenting is the only cause of her issues as far as the SWs, psychiatrists, therapists, crisis interventionists, and residential treatment center staff are concerned. They only reinforce Annie's view that none of this is her responsibility and justify her extreme targeted anger at me.

Trapped in Post Traumatic Stress Hell

The very thought of having Annie come home, even for a short time, has triggered all sorts of post traumatic stress issues for me. I spent last night in hell, reliving the last few years that she was in the home, beating myself up for "allowing" all the things to happen that did, second guessing myself, playing the evil "what if" game.

I am exhausted, I have a migraine and I am scared as hell.

There are no services out there for her. Can we really turn our backs and make a homeless shelter her only option? The program she is now in has announced that since Medicaid stopped paying for her on the 8th of October that we are now responsible for the thousands of dollars of her care. Of course the fact that they didn't tell us until the 20th that there was any kind of problem is irrelevant.

My stress levels are through the roof. They have been extremely high before this because the financial bottom dropped out of our lives when the contracts my husband's business was planning on all dried up in the space of a week 2 weeks ago.

All the memories keep haunting me, the fact that the younger children were hurt by her in so many ways and I didn't, couldn't stop it. The number of times we were really convinced that she had turned a corner only to be completely blindsided by another out break of completely harmful and inappropriate behaviors. I cannot go back to that crazy making environment. It has been almost two years and I am only now starting to trust my own judgement and experiences again.

Depression has zoomed back to overwhelm me. All I want to do is curl up and cry. I don't even have the energy to rant and rave about the unfairness of the world.

one of the calls we have been dreading

Well, today is the day, Annie's funding for her placement in the brain injury rehabilitation program has been denied and she needs to go somewhere else. Her case manager helpfully suggested our house. That is not an option at all, those bridges were burned long ago. Now if her behavior had in any way changed while she was in rehab, maybe we might consider it, but she is still doing all the things that we cannot tolerate in our home. The main one being verbally and physically aggressive to peers and staff. We will not put the younger kids at risk again, been there done that, not going there again.

I know some of my readers might not be able to relate to that harsh a stance, but I also know that there are a number of adoptive parents with mentally ill young adults who completely understand the bind we are being put in. Everyone would just like to assume that of course she could come live at home again, but she is 19, she knows she is an adult and in her clouded thinking she knows that she does not have to follow any rules or be responsible or respectful to anyone at all. Some of our young adults have moved home for awhile or stayed a little longer after high school, but always with the agreement that they would follow house rules and we did not have to worry about #1, #2 or #5 being a physical danger to anyone in the house.

So what options are there besides a homeless shelter? I don't know if she would consider Job Corps or even if they would consider her. I don't know of a lower level of care that would also include residential treatment. Basically Medicaid is saying she is capable of living on her own, but she has no job, no skills to find one, no way to manage her money, no sense of how normal people live (by normal I mean the act of paying bills on time, not buying what you can't afford, not trashing the apartment or house you are living in, not letting others come to live with you who are not on the lease, not having continual wild parties to which the police are called, etc, not having days' long highs so that you don't remember to go to work or anything else, not physically assaulting people that you think have dissed you, not verbally threatening anyone who tries to redirect or help you including police officers)

I love my daughter, I especially love my memories of my daughter when she was younger, I worry about her, I try to smooth her path when I am able by researching services, helping her apply for SSI, etc. But right now I really can't stand to be around her because she is either druggged up or boozed out, sober but manipulative as hell, or angrily blaming me for her life to the point of physically assaulting me.

We haven't given up hope, there is a Brain Injury program in our city that might take her. It would mean she was a lot closer to us (not good from the safety side, but good from the point of view of trying to develop some sort of adult relationship with her) but also a lot closer to the places she used to run away to where she knows how to get the drugs and alcohol. Would she stay in the ABI program since it is not a locked facility? your guess is as good as mine. We could try. We just keep on trying, hoping that maybe something or someone will reach Annie and help her find a balance where she can live without endangering herself and others.

Boy has this ratcheted up the all ready tense level of stress in our home.

Annie Called

Annie called last night. Hadn't spoken to her in at least a week when she hung up on me because I refused to take responsibility for all her problems. Had a pleasant enough talk, although there is little or nothing to talk about, her life is at a standstill until she gets her act together to earn a higher level so that she can get community access fora job, school, etc. She is in a residential program for folks with Acquired Brain Injury and she keeps doing really dangerous stuff like AWOLing to party, etc.

It is hard to stay connected to her. I love her, she is my daughter, but I can't do anything for her or help her, cheer leading on my part only seems to sabotage any progress. She is 19 and needs to figure some of this out for herself. She still doesn't accept that she cannot come home but due to the dangers to others in the home we will not allow it.

We just go around in circles, have been doing it for years. I wish there was a magic pill, therapy, anything that could help my darling. For a number of years Annie was my favorite child to hang out with doing errands, cleaning the house etc. We had some fun times, even with all of her severe mental health issues, but the teen years brought a different and more dangerous Annie, an Annie who was a danger to herself and to the others in the house. She went from rages to focused aggression, to sneaky plots to destroy the family with false allegations, with inviting her friends over to steal our computers, etc. when we weren't home, to threatening and attempting to severely injure her younger sister. She developed a revolving door association with our local psychiatric hospital and eventually it just got too dangerous for all of us to have her at home. So for the past 2 years she has been in this treatment program for folks with ABI, not sure how much good it has done her, but it sure has done the remnant a lot of good.

So here we are two years later, Annie is not significantly healthier, and she doesn't have a plan. Actually that is not true, we helped her devise a plan to get to a lower level of supervised living closer to our city and her friends. But, she has done nothing to achieve the plan. Nonetheless it is all our fault that she is still there and has not moved to a less restrictive setting. No amount of going over the plan, (no AWOL, no aggression, compliance with therapy), has helped her see that she has the responsibility to make the plan happen. Nope, I am the bad person, I am the one who put her into treatment and I am the one who is standing in the way of her getting to live a normal life. I wish I truly had that much power over her life, cause than maybe i could change things!

Oh well, at least she still wants to talk to us occasionally. But my new stance is that I will not mince my words. When she tries to throw the responsibility ball back into my court, I will smash it back into hers with no holds barred. She doesn't like to hear her past behaviors but when they are relevant to the arguments, threats, screaming fits she is having I will go there.

Tough times with Annie, an ongoing theme for about 5 years now.

Blogging sequence

I need to learn to write my blog each morning before I read every one else's. I love catching up and seeing how everyone is doing but by the time I am done reading I am overwhelmed, over stimulated and over thought filled about the life, times and tribulations of being a foster/adoptive family. So I really need to write first, read second.

That said, Annie's surgery went better than expected, they were able to do it lapascropically (sp?) so she will not have stitches to pull out! Although painful she seems to come out of it fine and was able to transition back to her residence. DH came home exhausted as he had to drive through intermittent torrential downpours for 5 hours, but Annie had apparently been very receptive to his being there and even seemed grateful that he was there to offer comfort and care.

I need to spend the day arguing with the adoption subsidy people over Douglas and Annie's medical cards. They are arguing that since they are not in high school any more they should not get the card. What they are refusing to recognize is that I am homeschooling them still, neither has a diploma or their GED and both are still working hard to achieve one or the other. But apparently homeschooling is not considered "real" school for the purposes of the medical card documentation. So I am off with my donkey and lance to fight the towering windmills, wish me luck.

Gallbladder Surgery

My DH left at 4:30 this AM to drive down to Illinois to see Annie before she has gallbladder surgery. This came up rather unexpectedly and he was able to clear his calendar more easily than I was. So he got the short straw.

Annie seems to be okay with it all, telling me about what the nurse described as her surgical procedure, etc. But we know Annie, she will fight the doctors and the nurses, inflicting self harm if the pain is at all intense. So DH went down to do what little he can to help. See Annie is 19 and considered an adult, we have been trying to get guardianship of her because with the FASD and the Acquired Brain Injury, and all the other alphabet soup after her name, she does not make safe choices for herself. But we have been hampered by the fact that the disability courts look at her IQ which somehow tests out at 89. That seems to mean that she is not disabled enough so we are having to gather all sorts of documentation from all sorts of professionals to make our case. In the meantime she is considered a functional adult. (yikes)

Just to give you an example of our concern. Annie is highly allergic to fish, we have known this since she was allergy tested at age 3. Well at 16 Annie decided that she was not allergic to fish, that the doctors were wrong and she knew better. So she had some fish at her friends' house. She started feeling ill almost immediately and came home where she promptly started to vomit multiple times. She was so agitated though that she was walking all over the house and must have projectile vomited in about 6 different rooms, all the time screaming at me, "my head hurts, I don't feel well" I of course did not know that she had eaten fish, so didn't know what was wrong. Then her face started to swell and her eyes started to swell shut, so I knew it was an allergic reaction and got her Epipen into her and called 911. She then started screaming at me, cursing me out the whole time, "I ate some fish, you stupid b***, I hate you".

She was wildly out of control, and despite our best efforts to calm her and put cooling cloths on her swollen eyes, she was rampaging. She gouged at her eyes, trying to make them stop hurting/itching, leaving huge open wounds on her face and eyelids. She began banging her head on the wall and door frame, hard. We called off the ambulance run as the Epipen had done its job, but I almost considered an ambulance run to the psych hospital.

Eventually the benadryl and the exertion slowed her down and she was able to settle for the night. But the wounds on her face and eyes were horrible, luckily they didn't get infected.

Now can you see my concerns for surgery. In a worst case scenario I envision her trying to rip out her stitches, IV, etc as she comes out of the anesthesia. I certainly hope that she won't but we don't have such a good track record to go on. So I will be thinking about my DH and Annie all day hoping for the best.

Not sure how to handle this

Got a frantic phone call from Annie's placement the other night. They wanted to know what they should do now that her sister had died. I was like What?!?!?! (which if you have read here before you will know is my usual response to Annie's antics)

She had convinced them for several days that her sister was in the hospital with severe seizures and then at 2:20 that afternoon she had gotten a call that her sister had died at the hospital. They wanted to know how to support Annie through this and what the funeral arrangements were going to be.

Well it took a little bit, but I set them straight and reassured them that no one in our family had died, at least that I was aware of and I assumed I would be one of the first to know. Also let them know that although Annie did have a sister Brooke who had some issues, none of them were life threatening and she was not in the hospital.

So, how do I handle this? I am not sure what Annie thought she was accomplishing by this, we haven't seen such obvious lying in awhile. This was something she set up over several days, laying the groundwork of being worried about her sister, than pretending to get more phone calls with even worse news until her sister "died". How did she think she was going to explain that to us? Her treatment team thinks that she was trying to set up a possible AWOL, but she has never had to be so clever in the past, she has just slipped out when no one was watching.

I have not called her and she has not called me. I can't just let something this big lay there untouched. So I will have to deal with it but I don't know what to say. Should I use humor, should I be angry, should I make it clear that we will catch these things and that she is not making life easier for herself with these lies? I don't know. And then part of me is worried that she has had a psychotic break again and that she really thought this was true, which would be a whole 'nother kettle of worms.

Not a G or PG post, a bit raw sorry

I apologize ahead of time if this is a bit much reality, but it is what we are living with so here goes.

It's Annie, again, could you have guessed? She just called from her placement, first the good news, she made her level 3 which means she can be outside the house without staff, and I am supposed to feel good about this given her extensive history of really, really poor decision making, including repeatedly getting into cars with strangers who stop by and ask her if she wants to go party with them! Sorry, that was supposed to be the good news. And I am glad that she is working to gain more privileges, do I think she will choose well this time?, nooooooo..... But I am hoping and praying.

Then she tells me she got a job, had an interview and everything. Why isn't this the good news, you ask? Well, it is because she has a history of being inappropriate with younger children, not one who was charged with anything, because we intervened and got her sent to a specialized treatment program for young girls. I am beginning to think that we did not do anyone a favor by intervening so quickly and taking responsibility for our child so quickly as here she is an adult (well by the birth date anyway) without a record who is going to be working at the *&**( group care for elementary children). Now, she assures me she is not working directly with the children as she would have had to pass a drug screen and a criminal check for that, but is rather cleaning up. Still I worry because she will be where there are a lot of children and I do not trust that she will always act appropriately in relation to them, it is a huge temptation that she is putting in front of herself. I warned you it was raw!*

Third piece of "good" news, she doesn't have cancer. I was like what?!?!?! Apparently she had to be taken for a biopsy of her cervix as she had such bad genital warts and other STDS (again with the raw, sorry, sorry) that they were sure she had cancer. The blood tests indicated possibly cancerous conditions, but it was just a really bad bladder infection, and the biopsy was benign. Now I am glad that she doesn't have cancer, yes, I truly am, but I didn't even know about the biopsy so I am in such a state of shock I haven't gotten to the good news part of the story yet. I am still absorbing the STDs part.

Oh and to top it off, her last comment before her minutes ran out on her phone was that since she doesn't have cancer she doesn't have to worry about quitting smoking anymore. And I was speechless and left with a dead phone into which I mumbled, "but, but, but". It is so scary to deal with Annie and the way her mind works. I am sure that she thinks that since she doesn't have cancer she won't ever get it and so unprotected sex will not hurt her. ARGHH!!


*She had to go out and buy some work appropriate clothing since none of her tee shirts could be worn around little children given the slogans and impossibly low cleavage, etc. This is one of the areas that she is so inappropriate with, her clothes all have really graphically sexual messages or have booze and drug slogans, etc. I really worry that she will talk about this kind of stuff around children and that she will not clean up her language which is worse than a sailors'.

Texting but not Communicating

Yup, it's Annie again, messing with my mind and driving me crazy. I just do not know how to communicate with her, every attempt descends into her misinterpreting some carefully crafted response (crafted in an attempt to be totally non-threatening, judgemental, etc) and her responding with anger spewed forth in hateful language.

Here is the text session from last night:

Annie: Mom we need to talk cos I don't think (the placement) is buying me another laptop. (Her laptop apparently got misplaced while staff was moving her into a lock down facility after her last AWOL and subsequent self-harm and aggressive episode, although there is a lot of speculation that Annie took it and sold it for drugs)

Me: I will talk with (case manager) in the morning during business hours about it. I know u r frustrated. Do u want 2 talk when u have free minutes? (about 10 mins. from this exchange?)

Annie: Thanks a lot! B%$#*

Me: Okay we r not communicating well, do u want me 2 call u?

Annie: This is why I hate u, why I never want to come home, I want to stay here where at least some one cares about me. (inappropriate language edited)

Me: I ll call u

She refuses to pick up the phone the rest of the evening.

This is my life with Annie. Every effort to meet her needs, to help her in any way even when she requests the help is rejected. She lives in a world where everyone is against her, where my non-threatening, non-judgemental responses are seen as negative. Rereading this I am not sure what happened. That is often how one feels when dealing with Annie.

The thing is the kid is smart, but she doesn't get really basic things. She can handle technology really well, she knows how to send pictures and exchange ring tones on her phone, but she doesn't seem to understand that these things cost extra on her prepaid plan and so she is constantly running out of minutes. And of course I am somehow to blame for this because I wouldn't sign her up for a contract phone. The fact that she has no job or money shouldn't stand in the way of her getting a contract phone now should it?

I spin in frustrated circles.

Everybody is in flux

Every last one of the kiddos is in the throes of change, angst, emotional upheaval of some kind, and desperately needing their parents at least to hate on them. DH and I are reeling from the demands.

Some of the change is good, and developmentally appropriate. Bart is moving into a house with a friend and he has needed advice, cleaning supplies and general moral support.

James is flying high as his Ultimate Frisbee team from UC Santa Cruz is going to the nationals this weekend in boulder Colorado. He is happy, excited and really wants some of his family to be there, so even though DH has just flown in this AM from Shreveport, LA and has to drive up to Lansing and Kalamazoo on Sunday evening, he is nonetheless flying out to Boulder tomorrow AM to see the Frisbee tournament. He flies back on Sun noon and leaves for Michigan Sunday at 5 or so. DH is physically exhausted, but James needs one of us there.

Brooke is not dealing well with the transition from school to summer break. She is having some issues in her Supported Community Living placement and as is her way as she becomes upset she is holding her bowels and they are talking about a hospitalization again. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it almost always goes all that way. At least she is kind of used to all the procedures now and she is less frightened of the whole experience. Nonetheless she is calling in tears or angry, demanding that we fix things, or change things or somehow make her life less hard than it is. It is very sad to deal with Brooke as she is just a 4 or 5 year old in a 21 year old body and there are so many things she doesn't understand or deal well with.

Annie has been calling and texting me until I want to scream as she is trying to convince me that she is somehow miraculously cured of all her issues, Traumatic Brain Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. See if she has turned her life around and now understands everything she has done wrong and has broken up with her old boyfriend we should know that she is ready to live out on her own and she is going to go live with this new man she met on MySpace because he understands her in every way, unlike us or her therapeutic team. My head just spins when I deal with her and most conversations end with her screaming curses, threats and everything else at me. Thank God she hasn't been able to pull the wool over her new therapist eyes and no one is ready to let her out of the lock down facility just yet. Too often I let her circular thinking get me all wound up and spend way to much of MY time thinking about how to reach her.

Douglass was home this weekend and it was great to see him but he only went back reluctantly to his military school despite the fact that he only has 5 more weeks left. I was feeling very guilty that I had encouraged him to go to this program as he lost the chance to do the one thing that truly makes him happy, be a camp counselor this summer. His military school doesn't end until 2-3 weeks after camp starts and the camp was not willing to keep a counselor slot open for him. He is feeling really bad and rejected. And I am feeling really bad too. He deserves a better deal after working so hard to overcome his issues and get his life in a forward moving direction. I just hope he wont let his anger explode and undo all he has worked so hard to accomplish. It is hard to see your baby hurting and disappointed even when he is a hulking young man who is half a foot taller than you.

Kendra is finishing her freshman year at the magnet school and is feeling all sorts of pressure to get ready for exams, etc. She has been pretty demanding of our time to help her, using homework as an excuse to not help around the house and snappy and emotional. I feel all I do is walk on eggshells around her right now and that all I do is drive her to dance stuff. Typical teenage stuff, nothing bad or unusual, I am just not at the top of my game and it is telling in my dealing with her.

Finally, Dancing Baby Girl is involved in a situation in which I have to sit back and let the professionals do their thing and I have no trust for these particular professionals and I am scared for her, her family and for my continued relationship with her and her family. There are so many ways this could not end well and so few ways to see it go right that I lie awake at night and just shake.

Sometimes I really feel like there is just not enough of me (or DH) to go around at all. I surely don't see how families that are bigger than ours get through the inevitable tough times when everyone is crashing down or just needing parents.

What's the point of trying?

I am so frustrated and sad and hopeless and angry that I don't know whether to scream or cry. It's all about Annie, again, as usual. That's her in the red sweatshirt about 5 years ago at one of our church suppers. I like to find the older pictures of Annie because I prefer to remember her before I felt so frustrated...(see above).

It was Annie's 19th birthday at the end of April so Doug and I radically rearranged our schedules to both go down to her placement (5.5 hours away) to see her, spend some time with her and attend a staffing. As you may have read from some of my other posts Annie is not doing well in her placement and most of her staff and her attending therapeutic types all have compassion fatigue. Annie wears folks out.

However, our intention in going to see her was to make her birthday a positive event and try to give her a little boost. We went out to dinner the first night and had some good talks about the rest of the family and how everyone was doing, we were able to laugh and be a little lighthearted. Then we went shopping for her birthday presents and she really liked that. We actually got a smile or two out of her and a spontaneous hug.

The next morning we had her staffing and the first part was without her where the staff expressed a lot of their concerns and frustrations, then Annie joined us and it went downhill from there. We just went in circles until we were all dizzy and never did we move off of square one. Annie expressed that she really wanted to get enough independent living skills to move into a supervised apartment. So we went over what steps she needed to take. She needed to go to the job skills classes they had set up for her and work with her job coach, but Annie doesn't want to do that, she wants to get a job in the community right away. No amount of examples, explanations or stories from our own experiences could convince her that she needed in any way to change her attitudes, habits, and responses to redirection in order to succeed at a job. It was the most useless thing I have done in a long while. She can cognitively state what she needs to do in the abstract but resists putting even the most basic steps into practice in the real world.

But after that we regrouped as a family, had a good lunch together and she and I went shopping again for some of the things she needed that weren't birthday presents. After that we wanted to take a short hike in the beautiful state park they have but the weather had turned nasty and Annie was experiencing some bronchitis again (a chronic condition linked to her cigarette usage and her extreme obesity) so we didn't do that. When we took her back to her residence she seemed to be in a great space, was showing her peers her birthday presents and showed every evidence of being in good spirits.

However, looks can be deceiving, shortly after we left she up and AWOLed from the program. She was out more than 24 hours and they put out a missing persons alert on her. After about 36 hours she called a staff member and said she was lost and they picked her up. She has no reason she can express for going out and partying at the local crack houses, trading for her drugs and putting herself at such extreme risk.

I don't know, I don't see the point any more. We have poured so much effort into helping this kid, finding the best programs to help her address her needs, doing everything in our power to keep her safe, to teach her how to make better choices, and let her know that she is loved. We went to see her, gave her presents and the sum of it was she ran again. I told her she was teaching me that it was dangerous for me to go see her because she ran away when I did. I told her she was teaching me that maybe I should just send a card next time. Boy she didn't like hearing that.

So every since she came back she has been flooding us with phone calls all about how angry she is that the staff packed her stuff up without her being there (uh duh, she was still on the lam) and that they had not done a good job. And she doesn't like her new residence and especially doesn't like that the doors are locked (uh duh, you just went AWOL and engaged in dangerous behaviors while out). She also says her new room is smaller and she doesn't have enough dresser space. Not a word of contrition, not a word of reflection on her behavior, not a scrap of understanding or empathy for what she put us through again. And what makes me most angry is she doesn't care at all that some of her peers had to shift residences to accommodate her move. Her negative behavior gave someone else bad or at least not the best consequences and she doesn't care a stitch. Oh I want to shake her, no wait that is what her BM did when she was small and that's why we are on this merry go round, so skip the shaking, I want to make her see what she has done, but that's useless so what's the point?!?!

Despair is a dark and cold place to be, I think I liked denial better, at least we could pretend we were making progress and that things might get better in time. No despair is a pretty final place to be without hope, without goals, even without ideas, and that is where I am right now.

The Squeeze is On!

Well, we seem to have been hit on all sides. First of all the economy sucks and as an independent consultant my husband is really feeling the squeeze, folks don't want to invest in new technology updates when they aren't sure what the next business cycle is going to bring. Second, I just started a new job and that is making us all readjust our already tight schedules. Third we have had major issues and thus staffings on two of our kids that are in residential placements, one about 3 hours south of us and the other 2 states over and about 5.5 hours away. Fourth, to top it all off my dh's mother suffered another stroke and now we all have to decide long distance what the future holds in terms of staying in the home, etc. It's been a crazy week and a half, I will try to post details on all this later, but we'll see. Right now, after an emotional 3 hour staffing and then a 5.5 hour drive home I am exhausted and just want to sleep.

Shaken Baby, Aquired Brain Injury,

Annie is the middle child of my adopted sibling group. She struggles with Acquired Brain Injury, the result of her being shaken and beaten as an infant. Unlike some of the most severe cases of shaken baby much of her damage is invisible. She does have some vision loss and some quivering of her eyeballs but in the scheme of things she got off lightly, if you can say that about brain damage.



What Annie lives with is some frontal lobe impairment which impedes her judgement, her planning and some of the higher order thinking skills such as abstract reasoning. As she has gotten older these deficits have become more apparent and more of an impediment to living a full life. Her lack of judgement right now makes her quite a danger to herself, as she seeks stimulus and pleasure she is not making good decisions about keeping herself safe and is winding up placing herself in very dangerous situations.



To add to the mix Annie also struggles with severe Depression, ODD, ADD and RAD. For the last 17 months she has been in a rehabilitation center for folks with A(cquired) B(rain) I(njury). I blogged about some of my frustrations with her response to treatment. Since then she seems to have settled down a little, or we are just in a lull of negative behaviors. She is facing discharge soon from this program. We have to decide how we want to handle this. On the one hand she is turning 19 this month we could announce she is an adult and let her make her own way. Or we could seek guardianship and try to steer her to more treatment programs etc. The one thing we know for sure is that she is not welcome to come home right now. She is unwilling or unable to abide by the rules of the household and we are unwilling to have her with us unless she will. It is a standoff.


Today we went to a ABI treatment program to meet the Executive director and get some insights into what services they could provide. We were very pleasantly impressed. They have a relatively new program of long term residential services in group homes of 3 clients and 1 staff. Eventually Annie could be helped to move into an assisted living apartment. She would also be as integrated into the community as possible. The buildings were nice and open and airy. The staff all seemed friendly and very confident and outgoing. It has been the first bit of hope I have had on Annie's behalf in awhile.


Issues still to deal with, we would have to get guardianship of Annie, and we would have to figure out payer sources. She is still on the adoption subsidy which provides a medical card, but technically that expires on her 19th birthday. We would have to fight with Medicaid and the adoption subsidy people to see if we could get it extended until she turns 21 at which time she would eligible for the ABI waiver and that would cover her needs. I love this little hole in services that young adults fall into, where their child medical coverage ends at 18 and they are ineligible for the Medicare waiver programs until they are21. Exactly what they are supposed to do for 2-3 years is unclear.


So now we have to make a decision, how involved in Annie's life do we want to remain, because I have news for you any continued involvement on our part is not going to greeted with enthusiasm by Annie. Do we want to keep struggling with the black hole of Annie's needs or do we want to let her go and face the guilt of knowing she is incapable of taking care of herself. Either way we lose to some degree (at least our emotional health takes a hit), I guess the real question is which decision benefits Annie more? And from whose perspective?