Thirteen years. Time does fly, but I fully understand why it has been 13 years since I last wrote here. I say here because I have written elsewhere. Little journal entries and sometimes just a slip of random paper - efforts to vent a bit just to keep my sanity or at least keep a record as to why I finally took a plunge off the deep end. Where do I start?
Lexi was in our lives for 18 months. I will sum up pretty quickly what went down because I don't know that I have the bandwidth (yet) to go into too much detail.
We found out what was wrong with Lexi by meeting her birth parents. I usually give all parents the benefit of a doubt. I am a birth parent, and I would die for my children in the blink of an eye. I tend to believe most other parents would as well. But there are some who live such a utterly self-centered existence they cannot give consideration to the needs of their children. It simply isn't possible to consider anything or anyone besides themselves because they are consumed with themselves. Lexi was born to two such people. Her father. Oh, my word. I don't know how to begin to describe this man. He was the most difficult person for me to be around. I was in physical agony any time I had to spend any time near him. He could. Not. Stop. Talking about himself. If anyone made a comment about his daughter, or anything else, he would turn it into something about himself. If a doctor said she was making progress in a certain area, he would instantly reply that HE was making progress in that same area. Any physical attribute that was brought up was a prompt for him to spout, "She gets that from me!" Once a doctor mentioned her constantly wet chin, neck, and shirt from spit and drool running down her face. He gave the knee-jerk response of, "She gets that from me!" I looked at him and said, "Oh really? Are you still teething?"
Lexi's mother was a different kind of different. She was disinterested in everything, including her child. She could have cared less if Lexi ever came home. She already had lost four other children to neglect and they had been adopted out. To the father, Lexi was another shot at gaining the attention he so desperately wanted the world to shower on him. The mother didn't want attention, or effort, or personal hygiene. Lexi looked like work to her. So, when Lexi wasn't bringing in attention for the dad, she was left to herself in a pack-n-play. She was never bathed, cuddled, played with, fed, or talked to. The mother once commented that doctors told her she had to speak to her daughter, but she retorted she doesn't speak to anyone, so why should she start now! That's as much effort as she was willing to put into her daughter. Lexi was given food, but not fed. I never thought those two things were different, but they are. She was given propped up bottles of whole milk until she could bring her hand to her mouth. Then she was given Cheetos (her favorite food, according to dad) and maybe a piece of bread, or whatever else fell to the floor. She had never had a utensil in her mouth until she came to live with us. She disliked being dressed because she rarely wore clothing. She lived in dirty diapers with open, painful, festering wounds. Her feet were deformed because she spent the majority of her life peering over the edge of a pack-n-play, high up on her toes. Her feet grew that way. This is the same reason she couldn't walk at 16 months old. She knew how to make steps, but she fell approximately every third step. She had never needed to walk more than two steps - the width of her portable jail. Some people might think how sad it is her parents weren't getting the support they needed to care for their child. This couple was expert at "getting support." They even had someone coming into their home on a weekly basis to teach them how to clean their filthy home. I often wondered how two people could suck up so much benevolence and good will, not to mention resources, and still be utter failures at life. Do I sound cynical? Sorry. It gets worse.
For the time Lexi was with us, we loved her. Truly deeply loved her. We took her to every kind of therapy we could get her into. We played with her, snuggled her stiff, resistant body until it softened, looked into her crystal-blue vacant eyes until she looked back. She began to talk. She wasn't deaf after all. She began to smile and eventually laugh. She was diagnosed with something called Environmental Retardation. Maybe there is a more politically correct term for it now. But that diagnosis term sticks out in my memory because it is so heartbreaking. It means she was born full of hope and potential, but not given the stimulation or tools to develop during that critical window of time that every child has. She could progress and learn, but she would never be what she could have been.
Lexi was the first child my husband and I seriously discussed adoption over. We did not begin our fostering journey with the intention of adopting. But when we came to Lexi - the innocent and utterly vulnerable child victim, we began to talk about what raising her would look like. Ultimately we wouldn't have to be concerned about adopting Lexi. After almost a year and a half, she was returned to that house of horrors. Yes, returned. It was so unbelievable and crushing to us, we gave up on foster parenting. We thought, what does it matter? You pour yourself out in an effort to give hope to a child and that hope is snatched away in an instant. WE were the bad guys all of a sudden for wanting to break up a family and the people who did the absolute bare minimum to check the boxes for the county are the heroes. The thing about those boxes, they don't insure any kind of human dignity for the child. They are just boxes to be checked.
There was a brief flicker of hope, however, when we got a call two weeks later. Lexi had been found in nothing but a dirty diaper wandering the trailer park during the day while her parents slept inside their filthy single-wide. She wouldn't speak and couldn't be returned home, so the police were called. We had to be in court that day for an emergency placement hearing. Of course, I cancelled everything and raced to court just for a glimpse of the sweet girl that I loved so much. A glimpse is all I got because she was right back to her feral, robotic self. But this time she could not only walk, she could run. She outran every attempt her mother made to corral her. I stood outside the courtroom as she dodged and squirmed and flailed to avoid any human touch. Her eye contact and smiles were long gone. Her mother looked even more disheveled and tired than usual. I believe the mom would have been happy to turn her back and walk away. However, the overly-eager, hyper-talking dad was there explaining and explaining how she had escaped and how they were putting measures into place that it would never happen again. Without consideration, the Judge returned that helpless child to their clutches and we dispersed. The greedy father snatched Lexi up with a look of triumph and marched out of the courthouse, followed by the sluggish and depressed-looking mother. They packed up whatever they could manage to fit into their nearly broken-down vehicle that night and moved out of state. I am not exaggerating. That night.
For us, that was the absolute end of our foster parenting as far as we were concerned. It was Spring, 2013. Our license ran out in July and we would not renew. Until...
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