Thoughts on Belonging

My soul hungers for an ocean and to pull up close to a shoreline, or to wander in the tranquility of a forest draped in kaleidoscopic canopies of sky, leaf, and light.  I knew this instinctively even when, and maybe especially because I was once a city child, living for awhile with a foster family in a downtown suburban house in central San Jose, under the looming shadow of a freeway overpass. Like every place before it, this was a place of transition, but still I loved it there.  I was living with the Beede family, falling in line in the new regime as the 3rd child of four. It was the first time I remember truly feeling at home and part of a cohesive family. Even now, whenever I reflect back upon pivotal eras of my life, that place and time and family dynamic still remain vibrantly alive to me, and I visit those memories reverently, and with great self-compassion.

As a foster child, mine was not a world of many constants. My possessions consisted of a rag-tag assortment of clothing and shoes, a few random toys, a red envelope containing a Christmas card from my father, a dark blue tri-fold penny keeper, a doll named 'Pumpkin', and a book about sea shells that my grandmother had sent to me in the mail just after my 9th birthday.

Added to these, I had an older brother named Tony.  He was taller than me and had considerably more freckles. Outwardly I regarded him with feigned aloof detachment, but inwardly I knew that having a 'real' brother gave my nomadic lifestyle a vague sense of stability; I was glad to have him around in the same way that some people are glad to have a faithful old spotted dog.

Life for us was happy enough, for it was alive with the splendor of childhood playhouses and costume parties, and all the typical laziness of growing up; but it was also crowded by experiences pulsating with the electrocuting sensations inherent in being foster children. We were spinning, and dizzy from the spin, and this court appointed status, when I allowed myself to think about it, fell into my consciousness rather miserably, for its demands were heavy and exacting, especially when it meant moving, and moving, and moving. 

Moving can trigger feelings of loss to anyone, but to a foster child, even moving across town can feel like moving to another country where the customs are usually no longer the same.  The household traditions and expectations are a mystery, the cooking is foreign, the way of resolving conflict, celebrating birthdays, and acknowledging compliments, all these things change, sometimes dramatically. Such changes are often difficult for adults, but to be a child sent out to manage them all alone and all at once, with nobody but an older brother (who is, himself, still in elementary school), and with the help of a distant, but vaguely familiar social worker (who is essentially only going to be there long enough to make the drop off and introductions), well, all of these things are enough to make a little child's head spin.

A foster child simply wants to set down roots and belong like anyone else. It's a strange sensation for a child to be envious of a family dog, and to covet the spot that they have worn down on the living room carpet from years of curling up in the same place over and over again. For the most part, a dog's life, for all it's reported drawbacks, seems to me to be a lot more secure than a foster child's.

One of the greatest feats my young girl's imagination ever tried to pull off was to pretend that I really belonged to my foster family in San Jose. I was eight years old when my brother and I moved in with them. Sometime after the customary ten-day grace period ended and the Beede's still seemed agreeable to having us living with them, I became acutely aware that there was something oddly 'functional' about them. For one thing, we nearly always ate dinner together as a family. There was no consistent vacancy in the father's chair night after night after night; nor was there the need to scurry around and recreate an alternate brighter reality within the home and amongst the family members just before the social worker was scheduled to pop by for a monthly visit. Instead, we simply went about the business of regular ordinary family life. We worked together in the yard and rode bikes when chores were done. We went camping in the summer, and for the most part got along fairly well, with a few exceptions when somebody used up the last of the peanut butter and put it back empty, or when we were all heading out for a long drive in the car, with our bony elbows and knees bumping into each other on the turns. We went to school, did homework, watched cartoons, swept porches, planted flowers, visited all the same relatives, and shared the very same tiny little bathroom for two whole years, until finally, in my mind at least, all the lines between 'Beedes' and 'Bishops' had blurred, and we were one.

It is a time of extraordinary vulnerability for a foster child when she believes that she has been assimilated into family, but hasn't.

So when the social worker stopped by on an unexpected visit one day after school and explained to me that there was "a real nice family in another county who had just signed up for foster care and who hoped we would be able to live with them now", I just looked at the floor and listened in polite numb silence, mentally tracing the pattern of the roses out on the area rug. I nodded in all the right places, eyes open, mouth closed. I finally mentioned I didn't really want to go to the other family, but it came down to "reasons". Always there were reasons.

For the first time, I realized the fragility of my fostered world and the flimsy hinge upon which it swung.  Even when I was new and shy in the Beede family, I had still wanted to believe in the solidity of the bureau that held my clothes, and in the solidness of the box that held my toys, and in the promise of the bed by the window in the room where I slept at night. But all these things suddenly became like nondescript furniture pieces that decorate a hotel bedroom and make it look like home. Nobody ever fully unpacks their suitcases and settles down in a hotel. The management understands this from the start, but the foster child catches on only eventually.

When I think about that house now I still think of it in terms of sound and light and patterns. I knew the pattern on my bedroom wallpaper well enough to predict the repetition of the daisy; I knew the way the wind sounded when it made the tree limb scratch against the roof at night; I knew what the ceiling looked like before the decorator panels had been installed. I knew the pulse of the house and all the ways that it comforted and sheltered my family. All these things coaxed me into a belief that I belonged to the house, and by extension, to the Beede family. My spot on the couch, my place on the floor, my seat at the dinner table, my coat on the hook, my rainboots in the entry way - all these things were false anchors of belonging. But none of those things were real in times of inconvenience. "Reasons" were what was real, whether they were understood or not.

A foster child can easily become either overly alive or prematurely dead in her imaginations, especially when she doesn't remember that sometimes there are just simply "reasons for things". She may begin believing too much in the landscape of her daydreams, where her family life is solid and assured.  It is a blissful field of oblivion upon which feeds her sense of safety and well being. It feels to her as if even the cells in her body have changed and even her very DNA proclaims a family bond.  But when she is caught up short, reality and court papers proving her DNA wrong, she may abandon the art of dreaming altogether, and become protectively unable to envision anything beautiful lasting forever. It is a bitter resignation when a child defaults into an expectation of loss. Belief and disbelief are little life rafts that a foster child deploys to help her stay afloat in the turbulent sea that is her life; but the tendency to deploy a raft even when there is no water, nor any threat of drowning, nor any imminent disappointments looming anywhere on the horizon, can linger for years past the need for self-preservation, unless she can somehow learn a better way. It took me a long time to learn a better way.

Earlier, when we were living across town with a family unsuited for the responsibility of caring for us, it seemed to me that being a foster child was the lowest of things, and a fearsome life. But later, after having loved a foster family dearly and losing my place among them in spite of the fact that they seemed to love me, I realized there was always some sort of enormous burden attached to our presence in every situation, no matter where Tony and I went, or how 'wanted' it seemed we were. My connections to others began to suffer when I realized this. They felt to me to be as temporary as a sandcastle, which thing is always built up impressively, but so easily washed away with the rise of the tide, or kicked down in carelessness. My imaginations found me with many friends and admirers; but reality found me fairly quiet and even somewhat withdrawn. I rarely disclosed anything, especially if it might disturb the tender ecosystem of  life as I knew it. A foster child is often the keeper of many secrets, and has to be. Truth is a mechanism that cranks up the motors of moving again.

Though foster status can make a child feel apologetic about themselves from the start, any true repentance on my part for the dysfunction and illness in my own family that led to my life in foster care was in vain and a futile effort at best, for I lacked the sincerity that one can only demonstrate by abandoning the staining error and making restitution, which I was powerless to do. With six years in the system, I was on schedule to be a foster child for at least another decade until I timed out on my 18th birthday. The quest for belonging was something I had to resolve, both inwardly and outwardly. I was incubating an apology that I did not know where or how to deliver. I was developing a theory that belonging required having a family; to belong was to have inner peace; to have peace one had to belong; to belong, one had to have a family ~ sigh.  But life can teach us where to find peace anyway, even if we feel utterly alone in the world, if we listen deeply enough. It's hard to grow still enough sometimes, but I do try. Life gave me a recipe for trying.

My brother seemed to regard our fostered status as an insult and clung feverishly to the flimsy essence of belonging to a long established line of Bishops and Coles, who he assumed would come down out of the Gold Country to collect us one day, in spite of their persistent and well-alibied absence from our lives. But for me, being a foster child was all I could remember.  Even in my earliest memory my brother and I appear like nomads, toddling from suburb to suburb at the whim of court orders and the fickle on-again-off-again affections of strangers whom we called "Mom" and "Dad", at least until such time as our social worker, for whatever reason, would come to gather us up and take us to a new "Mom" and "Dad". 

Such were the constants of our young lives, and they ebbed and flowed around us like threatening tides whose rhythm we did not understand, except to know that we were ever at the mercy of some powerful lurking force which was capable of crashing through any perception of safe harbor and sweeping us away from our friends and teachers and school mates, and our pets, and our 'family', out to a troubled sea alone. Together, but alone.  Always life has it's paradoxes.

Our own mother was always on the peripheral of our lives, though our father never really was.  Looking back I can see that my mother's love for us was everywhere, but it was not tangible like boots on my feet that could make my young-girl self equal to the rugged emotional terrain in which I lived. I could not cling to it with either clutching arms nor reassured eyes, for her love was like a kind of apprentice-fairy dust that sparkled brightly, but could work no real immediate magic in our lives. Her interest and desire to parent us was overshadowed by her illness; and the courts, after reviewing the gray papers that spoke of her long history of depression, anxiety, haldol, and shock therapy, summarily declared her an 'unfit mother' in one stroke, and me and my brother 'dependents of the court' in another.

With all the day to day distance firmly established between us, it wasn't obvious to realize the positive impact my mother could and did still have on my life. Her life affected mine much like punctuation influences a book. It was everything, yet nothing. It did not seem to stand alone to tell a story of it's own then, the way it does now. But it added the dynamic of hope that always makes the impossible possible again, and looking back I have to say, I was loved with an extraordinarily resilient kind of love. I wonder sometimes, as I was so blind then to every stroke of goodness my mother brought into my life, if any child truly understands the depth of her mother's love until time slips away, like a wide angle lens that allows more of the landscape and setting to come into focus. Maybe only then can the evidence of it seep down into the quiet places of our adult lives. It is not always easy to separate being a foster child from being a regular child, when life often pokes us all with the same sharp stick.

It was only after the chapters of my childhood and my mother's life closed and the emotional impact of our story together remained that I could recognize the ever present influence of her love, even her adoration for her children.  It had been woven serendipitously into my life as she wrestled with the illness that separated us. When she could, she took us on picnics and open train rides through the forest of the Santa Cruz mountains. She pointed out the sensations of the breeze against our cheeks and the beauty of the way sunlight looks when it shatters against a forest floor.  She taught us to love any patch of open blue sky, to make pictures in clouds, and to respect wind with a sweater, but not to let it turn us away from a drive to the top of Coyote Pass, where we could watch the whole world roll away in undulating hillsides of brown or green, depending upon the season. All seasons held their magic, and there was within every winter, the never ending promise of a coming spring.

The beauty of the earth came to my awareness as a quiet bi-product of being my mother's daughter.  It came into my consciousness much like her love for me did, shyly, persistently, not unlike sunlight that reaches down past all the tree branches until it finally finds the forest floor.  It filtered through the expansive space and distance between us, until it reached the ground upon which we both stood.  There it made a holy place, and eventually it healed us. 

Healing was a place that I went back to when I was older.  I picked up a piece of it and carried it back into my life like a souvenir from the forest, like golden fairy dust scattered along the shore of an ocean; all it's magical attributes finally working!

Reflecting upon my mother and the depth and gentleness of her soul, and the quietness of her grace, and the patient love that she sent out into the world has given me my connection points. And the earth, with all her splendor, is triumphantly beautiful. Like everyone else, I am her child, which gift I owe to a benevolent God.

This is why my soul hungers for an ocean, and to pull up close to a shoreline, and to wander in the tranquility of a forest. You can see God's handiwork there, and His eternal interest in our lives. Such are the places of unrefutable belonging.