Author: R

The Break Up, Part 5

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Here is the final installment on my series about leaving social media and time wasting apps. If you’ve made it through them all, thank you so much for giving your time up to read these. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here! For Part 3, click here!  For Part 4, click here!

Since breaking up with socials and time wasting apps, my life looks a little more analog than it used to. I wish it looked even moreso, but each time I threaten to abandon all technology and my iPhone, I remember how much I love having audiobooks, streaming music, and GPS and I have to content myself with the progress I have made. 

Just like the most strict of dieters will have a slice of cake at a birthday, or munch on candy at a Christmas party, I have slip ups back into the internet spiral. While I am joyfully disinterested in using social media as it has been reinvented (perhaps more on this another day), I have been known to reinstall YouTube on my phone when sick or recovering from a medical issue. Granted, a lot of what I watch is on education and journaling, but eventually that algorithm drops me into “You can buy WHAT from a Japanese vending machine??” And after a day or two of finding myself swept down the stream of those polluted waters, I gasp up from the surface and delete the app again, and reserve another library book. 

I find myself enjoying catching up with friends when we meet up in person and being able to ask “what’s new with you?” And everything they tell me is actually new. I didn’t get to watch the live version, but I’ll happily get the replay over a glass of sparkling water and an appetizer. This is one of the most delightful perks of not being on Instagram– actually being able to discuss life events with no “Oh yeah, I saw that on your stories!”

It is also interesting to have to relay the same information about a family issue, fun vacation, or health crisis to different people in person multiple times, instead of it being blasted via a one-and-done post on Facebook. I’ve begun to work on the art of summarizing concisely for the right audience. This will be a life long lesson, for as you can tell I do not excel at brevity.  

I’d like to say I would never return to social media. I have kept my accounts open thus far as a way to buy used curriculum or furniture on Facebook and as a way to get addresses from people with whom I am connected on Instagram. But while I have not been tempted to head to the timeline time-warp yet, I don’t know if it’s all bets off for life. I’ve been humbled one too many times to say never. I just hope that if I do, I don’t use it as often or in the same way I used to. 

That being said, I am thankful for what this nearly 2 year breakup has done in my life. I am thankful that while I have not attained some arbitrary level of perfection, I am growing. I’m learning hard lessons on my way. I am challenging myself and being challenged. I am loving being a rebel and breaking the mold by simply refusing to play the game everyone else is. (Those that know me in person know especially well how much I enjoy being rebellious in really weird ways. It’s why I don’t color my gray hair, why there is one ride at Disneyland which I have never ridden despite having gone hundreds of times, and why I refuse to spend more than $15 on a pair of jeans.)

If you’ve read thus far and thought, “This broad sure is a stuck up stick in the mud and shouldn’t tell us what to do.” I want to say a few things: 

You don’t have to do anything I am doing. If I inspire some people to rethink how they spend their time, then all the better. But if that’s not for you, then please find what it is that makes you a more complete, whole, and cultured person and do that. I also am not judging anyone but myself here. (Okay with one exception, I never reposted those weird self-deprecation but also self aggrandizing memes that I talked about, I am totally judging that, because it shows a real lack of self-awareness.) But to my point, I was the one with the social media addiction. I was the one spending my time unwisely. I was the one falling into group-think. I was the one being lazy. I was the one putting off a good book for a bad scroll. I share these thoughts not to bash you, but to show here’s how far I fell into those traps, and how I made the change to get myself out.

My husband, one of my sisters, and good friends use social media. They are content to do so. They derive some measure of pleasure from it and find positive things to glean from it. I love those people, and I do not judge them. I don’t love you personally, because I don’t know you. I love you in that you are my neighbor, and I do not judge you— because I do not know you!

I do see the irony in using the internet to share these thoughts, but I do not expect anyone to read them should they choose not to, and frankly as I’m not reposting this on socials, I’m not sure anyone will find it, unless someone else chooses to share there. Our internet used to be big, but another frustration of social media is that it has become very small, and we only  consume those things which are placed in our feeds. Ah, a topic for another day. 

Instead of telling you to get off social media or dumb down your phone, I would love to encourage you to pick one area of life you want to better yourself in. Pick some small and attainable action items to get yourself toward that goal. Stick with it, run with it. And you just never know what the end result will be. For me? It was removing the distraction of social media so I could think my own thoughts. What it became? Progress on the path to becoming more cultured, bettering my mind, and my soul. A one woman revolution.

The Break Up: Part 4

Published on by R1 Comment

This is Part 4 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here! For Part 3, click here! One more week to go after this, and this series will be done for now!

As I began to commonplace and focus on the things I could glean from books, the types of books I read began to change. This was not something I thought would come as a result of backing away from social media, but a result it became nonetheless.

I was not a reader as a child, so if you have a reluctant reader, fear not! The reading bug bit me around Junior High when middle aged women from church started sharing their Christian romance fiction books with me (you know I rode that Amish romance train all the way through high school!) I moved to YA at some point, and then got sick of love triangles and opted out forever. I read lots of Dean Koontz, and scary books. 

When I was pregnant with my first child, I would trek to the library every weekend and tell my husband that I had to read as much as I could since I wouldn’t be reading much after having a baby. How right I was! I gave up on it all after he was born after blazing through historical fiction, memoirs, mysteries, horror, and a few classics thrown in during his pregnancy. It wasn’t until I lost my 3rd child, Ezra, that I picked up books again. I needed to escape as I mourned his loss and I found myself crawling into bed with my two little ones every day at nap time and a book. There wasn’t one particular genre. It just had to be different from real life in America because I was hiding from reality in books.

From there I discovered the joy of free audiobooks from library apps and I couldn’t be stopped. Like all nice housewives in happy marriages, I turned to murder mysteries. When you’re already living your fairy tale, romance books just don’t cut it, you gotta go full murdery books. And so for many years, that’s almost all I read. Mystery after thriller after murder, en masse. Fun, intriguing, escapist, but generally not very challenging. 

A few years ago I challenged myself to read several non-murdery books in between the thrillers, and I also joined a book club. These got me reading a little more widely and I began to enjoy other books. My horizons broadened when I didn’t get to just sit in my happy little niche, and was “required” to read another person’s choice of book. 

So what does this brief history on my reading habits have to do with moving away from socials and time wasting apps? The more I moved away from those things, the more capacity I had to read harder things. The more I read harder things, the more quotes I had to place in my commonplace. I had to chew through my books and their worldviews and themes with no one to tell me what to think about them. I had to do the thinking on my own. 

I realized I was averaging 52 books a year, and if I lived to 80, I only had about 2,000 books I could read before I left this world. I realized the books I read needed to be worth it. And so I went from a 90% thriller book diet to a 5% one. I have read books I loved, books that I have suffered through, and many books in between. 

I now start every day in my comfy, used brown tweed reading chair with a stack of religious books, and end each day reading something easy in bed. I’ve taken Steinbeck and Churchill to the gym, Brontë on car trips, and essays on classical education to waiting rooms. Hugo helped me remodel a bathroom, and Neil Postman and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kept me company while painting baseboards. 

Freeing up my mental space and precious time from scrolling got me through the longest book I’ve ever read (Les Miserables), one of the most emotional books I’ve read (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and finding one of my favorite books of all time (East of Eden). 

It may sound crazy that giving up Instagram led me to read the classics, but it actually happened! The domino effect was bigger than I imagined it would be!

The Break Up: Part 3

Published on by R2 Comments

This is Part 3 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here!

I had even more time to fill. Of course I say this somewhat tongue in cheek. As a homeschooling mother of 6, deeply involved in her local community church life, always hosting or attending something, I was always busy. But instead of stuffing funny videos in the cracks of my day like rags in a leaky boat, I looked for better things. 

I used to journal as a young woman, but it was a discipline I had given up with motherhood. I also had Facebook to scream every thought I had the moment I had it. I realized I had “journaled” my children’s firsts, funny sayings, sweet moments, and lives, not on paper for my family to appreciate in posterity one day, but on social media.  Now that it was gone, how would I ever remember these events? I began to write. Like write write. First with my trusty Ink Joy gel pens, on whatever weight paper came in a notebook, then I moved to the appreciation of good heavy fountain pens, some with inky thick nibs and others with satisfyingly scratchy fine ones. I began to buy journals based on how nice the paper was. Some I carried them with me, others stayed hidden away in my room. I started to appreciate the sensory act of writing and the joy of writing something I actually cared about enough to leave my kids to read when they are grown. I also realized that not everything needs to be remembered or written down for posterity. Facebook was my baby book. It frankly doesn’t matter that the second time my child ate solid food it was bananas, and the third it was rice and the fourth it was strawberries. I didn’t need to remember that the quality of Target diapers in 2020 had really gone down since 2016. I didn’t even need to hold on tightly to every, single funny thing my child ever said. 

In a day and age of nearly endless storage, we have documented our lives to an unhealthy extent. I don’t think we were meant to always remember every dish we cooked, every walk we embarked upon, every coffee we sipped. It is good to forget some things, and it is good to find those things which are of value and treasure them as the special memories they are. Not everything needs to be placed in an acid free sleeve and mounted on the wall for all to see. 

I’ve begun to mark deeper looks into each child’s personality, their struggles, their strengths. What does it matter that I marked what my child was wearing when we got hot cocoa together? But it does matter to carefully observe and note that child is struggling with reading and the things I am doing to help them, so I can remember what I did and look back in the future to see if we made progress or stalled out. I can readjust and learn alongside them. It does matter to remember not just something nice they did (though that is lovely), but to write about the child’s character and how she is regularly helpful or kind or courageous. Those things do not make for good scrolling and liking fodder. Those things give you actionable items to hold yourself accountable to in 3 months to see how you’ve helped them. My children’s milestones, memories, and metrics do not belong to your infinite scroll. They don’t even belong to mine. They are ours— our family’s— to be studied, observed, and treasured. 

Apart from having broken away from the social media as a baby book trap, I turned to a new form of writing. Instead of resharing pithy and ridiculously banal quotes in meme format, to my timeline, I kept a Commonplace book. I would write down meaningful quotes, things that made me think, and respond to those things. I collected new words, Latin sayings, and wrote down prayers. I have since filled 3 entire Commonplace books and am on my 4th. I still have a lot to say, but I no longer have to care what other people on Facebook think about it. Whether they find me too conservative or too liberal, whether they think my quotes juvenile or pretentious, whether they are impressed with what I’m reading or look down on me for not reading something more difficult. 

What is most remarkable is that without the lazy convenience of a reshare button, I alone decide what is worthy of noting. I started this process thinking about the lack of fresh ideas people have because we’ve all fallen into the group-think, echo chamber pit. I would read a 2-6 sentence screenshot or meme formatted item that caused me all of 12.6 seconds to read and ponder before I hit that re-share button. Sometimes with such impressive commentary of my own like “THIS.” Or “LOUDER.” Or “Jussayin’” I cringe thinking back on all of the banal pith I shared because I found it edgy or profound. I was just sharing the same stuff 50% of the people around me were thinking and pissing the other 50% off. If it was funny, about 50% of the people in my list of friends also found it funny, because it was another one of those “just like us” moments. How noble to find only those things that are “just like us” attractive, humorous, or poignant. 

In reading widely (I’m working on the deeply thing, speed reading dies hard, and I can’t seem to slow it down) from good books, I began to find nuggets of wisdom and truth. And some of those were deeply offensive and hard to swallow because they pointed out my own faults. To be sure, I don’t mean those terrible reshares that people use for pity. You know the ones: “you may call my ability to love weak, but if giving of myself makes me weak, then I’ll gladly wear the title.” That trivial swill is meant only for the deeply shallow who cannot think past their own false eyelashes. When I say I wrote things down in my commonplace that cut me, it was finding conviction in things about myself that needed to change. I also did find joy in a beautifully worded sentence, the perfectly placed response in the middle of a novel (very un-shareable without context), a lovely line of poetry, or sometimes not even a direct quote, but a rewriting of a portion in the book I was reading which fired my long-cold memory skills into action. 

I began to find my own thoughts again, and since I was spending less time on the internet as a whole by this point, if someone else had already had the same thoughts, I was blissfully unaware, enjoying using my own mind to work through and find the solutions on my own. 

We are not impressed with the young mathematician because he has copied all of the correct answers. Anyone with a teacher’s manual can do the same. We are impressed with the young mathematician who has done the hard work necessary to get to those answers. For the first time in a long time, I was grappling and fighting to come to conclusions that were not the result of what I was told I should observe or believe or think, rather, I was seeking them out. Are they all right? Are they all wrong? Some are surely right and some definitely wrong, but I now have the space to find those footholds and places to grab onto while I climb the mountain of information that I intake.

(Tune in next week on the same Bat Channel at the same Bat Time for Part 4!)

The Break Up: Part 2

Published on by R3 Comments

This is Part 2 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here!

My friends weren’t waiting for me now that I’d left social media… so who was? My children were there waiting. They didn’t need to be told that it was good for mom to put the phone down, they just knew it. I immersed myself in their education with greater vigor and interest. I took their schooling far more seriously. Granted, that was in part that this break up with social media coincided with the beginning of Junior High, which was just going to require more careful planning and attention. But, nevertheless, I embraced it. I started to take more seriously the planning that went into the long term goals of education I had for my children. Getting my head out of the shallow waters of this week of this month of this grade, and popping up to see the ocean in front of me that had to be crossed to get to the high school finish line. My teaching became more elevated. My leading by example became more important than ever. I was going to tackle those difficult literature selections with my older kids, I was going to do those science experiments (so help me, on my best day, I am a garbage Science teacher, but I’m trying, darnit!), I was going to research those artists so I could present a solid picture of them and their works, I was going to reeducate myself in history and read greater works surrounding those historical events. I was going to be present for each question, not making them wait for me to finish responding to a post or watching some stranger’s hack on how to properly shoe a horse (don’t even pretend you haven’t come across a farrier video on socials. Sometimes the algorithm really gets you watching strange and far off things).  

And what about my little ones? I realized that I am in a strange era of life. One in which I am juggling puberty, but also nursing a baby and changing diapers. One where I am teaching one child how to apply makeup, and watching another child twirl in Disney princess dresses. While the Junior Highers and baby were getting a lot of attention, the middle littles were missing out on conscientious and intentional attention. I swapped notifications for nature walks, Reels for read alouds, and cleaning videos for cuddling. I responded to the little ones with greater interest because I had less to distract me. I had time to look at rolly polies, count stepping stones, and go on rabbit trails when studying mammals to find how whales nurse their young. (Did you know that a whale’s milk is the consistency of toothpaste?!)  When nursing my own baby, I had more time to eye gaze.

One unexpected and strange thing that occurred when I broke away from socials was how I interacted with my camera in regards to my children. This feels shameful and embarrassing to admit, but I’m already this far, so I’m just going to confess. I realized, without doing it intentionally, that many of the times I took pictures of my children, I was doing it with the filter of what I could show of them to other people. This may sound strange, and if I hadn’t discussed this strange phenomena with a couple of other people who also had this experience leaving social media, I might have thought it was just a me problem. It turned out it wasn’t. I stopped trying to get the perfect angle, the perfect lighting, the mess out of the background. I stopped taking pictures of literally EVERYTHING (more on that later), and started living in the moment a bit more. Sometimes I would go to grab my phone to take a picture and then consciously put it down to just live that moment with them “for real life”, as my 5 year old would say. The pictures in my camera roll now held only what I needed to enjoy for myself, with a sprinkling of things the grandparents would enjoy. This was freeing. 

I need to be accurate. Some of these things have been a gradual progression. Some of these things were overnight changes. And all of these things? All of these things have been done imperfectly. I can’t pretend that I always put my phone, my book, my kindle, or my dishwashing down to immediately respond and create a bonding moment with every child. I can’t pretend that I have turned into some Charlotte Mason, earth mother who has abolished all technology in favor of frolicking through the flowers with my gaggle of children. Oh, that I was that mother!

But since breaking up with the time sucking apps, I suddenly had more mental space for my children. I had less to distract me and keep me from the fleeting years of childhood that slip away like starchy pasta water through a colander. Gone in an instant leaving behind only a cloud of steam to remind us of the liquid that once was. 

So what else was there to fill my time now that I abandoned the feed and the people on the feed abandoned me?

(Stay tuned next week for Part 3!)

The Break Up: Part 1

Published on by R4 Comments

This is part one of a (hopefully?) five part series I’ve written on my break-up with social media. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that if you don’t enjoy it, you can make up that lost time with something better in the future.

When I was young, I remember wondering if a song I hummed or a poem I had written had ever been hummed or written before. I made up little stories, wondering if I was the first girl to have thought up that plot line. As I grew up, and gained more opinions and on deeper topics. In high school and college, I wrote papers and had new and fresh thoughts, I felt that again, that feeling of “I wonder if I’m the first to state these opinions in this way!” Then I aged more still, and the internet grew into a place for all people to share all their thoughts— constantly. I would read a blog, I would view a post, I would watch a video, and two things happened:

  1. I began to feel there was nothing original. Nothing new under the sun. My friend and I who always made that weird face at each other across a crowded room? That wasn’t unique to us. The interesting thoughts I had on politics? Other people had them, too. The cute thing my toddler said that I thought was something special? Yeah, you guessed it, a ton of other toddlers did the same thing.  
  2. I began to think my own thoughts a little less often. If my thoughts are not unique and we are all in the same globalist mush pot, what does thinking your own thoughts matter? A slow boil of others’ viewpoints surrounded me until I had marinated in those thoughts so much, so long, and so often, that they became my own.

But, then things got worse.  Eventually, I came into to descend into the lowest level of mindless consumption the internet had to offer: short form video content. Though I never joined the platform that started it all, TikTok, I gladly ate up Reels and Shorts: The junk food of the internet. I could consume, and consume, glut and bloat on hundreds of videos where everyone was like me. I would sit in bed, next to my husband. He with his Instagram Reels and a headphone in, me with my Reels and an earbud, and I would occasionally emit a blast of air through my nose that couldn’t even be called a full laugh, hit “share,” and send it to his Instagram with 3 laugh crying emojis  and the message “omg this is totally us” and so we would volley back and forth, back and forth. Sitting in bed next to each other, in the dark, letting out horse snorts, laughing when things were “just like us”.

And when I got to that lowest level of Dante’s Internetferno, where I had effectively taught the algorithm to give me countless mirrors of my own marriage, politics, parenting, friends, and life, I realized it was true: I had far less of a unique life and far less original thoughts than I thought I did. My life was just like everyone else’s (except those people have bigger houses and nicer cars). There was no point in sharing what I thought with anyone, because we were all the same. I felt I had probably not had an original thought in a long time. My brain was monotony.

And so? I decided to revolt. I couldn’t shut the internet down, I couldn’t run around like a mad woman telling everyone else to do so, so I did what I could for me. I rebelled and cut myself off. I would no longer participate in the mindless funnel I had been spiraling down. I would replace that time spent in an endless scroll of videos with better things. And frankly? It’s not hard to find something better, because nearly anything legal (and some things illegal) would still be better than the mindless scroll to which I had become addicted. 

I deleted my social apps. I deleted the time sucking apps. I stepped away and was ready to be my own person! I was an adult! I could refuse to be a part of the newsfeed! How hard could it be?

It is embarrassing to recall how many times I unlocked my phone to search for Facebook or Instagram. My fingers were like blind kittens looking for their mother’s milk. I was looking for that sweet little blast of dopamine. I would search the neat little grids on my phone, and remember I had deleted the apps and there was nothing for me there.

To what could I turn that would be as easily satisfying and gratifying as a new notification of a like, a message, someone sending me another video that was “just like us”? Nothing. What meal is as easily prepared as it would be to open a bag of Doritos? What dessert can be made as easily as ripping open a package of M&Ms? I realized, I couldn’t replace those “just like me” moments with something of equal low effort. 

I was no longer able to watch the hour by hour updates of my friends. I comforted myself: At least I had the numbers of many of those friends! And I had kept messenger as a way to keep in touch with friends without being bogged down by the scroll. Social media is about being social, we can be social apart from that! These people liked me, I liked them. They could no longer see my daily life, nor I theirs, but that didn’t mean we would lose touch! With no memes or videos to send, I checked in with friends and had to say something more in depth than a laughing emoji and “this is so us”.

Have you ever moved away and had friends promise to keep in touch with you or visit you, and then years later, no one has made the trek and most of them forget about you? That’s what happened. I moved away from socials, and all the people whose kids I have watched grow up, the acquaintances whom I had liked and hearted everything from their first sourdough to their 3rd marathon, the people who dropped comments on things I posted and sent me latent likes? They just disappeared into the ether.

I was actually shocked. Oh, sweet, naive Rachel. I had felt that I had more to bond myself with these social media friends! I thought we were closer than we were, because we interacted every day. Reading each other’s thoughts, looking at each other’s pictures, and finding our “just like me” similarities. It turns out, when you move away from socials, you are out of sight, and therefore out of mind. I can’t tell you how many friends I texted or messaged to let them know I was thinking of them or to ask for a life update and got either nothing or something that shut down the ability or need for further dialogue in response. I’ll admit it. I’m a total nostalgic sap and I really love people, so it actually hurt at first. But then I realized: this, too, was good for me! I needed to be broken of the “my friend on Facebook” way of thinking. Not everyone on social media was my actual friend. We were placed in the same social media soup at the same time, and that murky broth was the only thing binding us in the same bowl. We really had nothing of substance between us, and I needed to get it through my clingy, little homeschool kid soul, that being in the same soup does not a friend make. It takes hard work, love, accountability, care, concern, conflict, aggravation, frustration, and reconciliation to build true bonds. I still think about these people. Some of them were friends from childhood, some my adolescent years, others from mom groups with whom I had become “close”. These were once in person friends and these were always internet friends, and once I was no longer playing by the rules of Millennial online over sharing? I no longer existed. My phone grew quieter still.

(Stay tuned next week(ish?) for part 2!)

Imprinted

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I found a picture from 2017 of me holding our 4th foster child while he slept. A flood of emotions and senses bowled me over. I remembered the weight of him. I remembered how his thick curly hair smelled, and I could feel its texture under my chin. I could feel the deep warm breaths that whispered on my shoulder as he slept. I remembered the drool on my neck, and the sticky fingers on my arm, holding me tightly.

These all hit at once, and so visceral was my response to this picture that I audibly gasped, held my breath, and then the tears began to pour.

It has been 5 and a half years since I held this child in my arms. 5 and a half years since I laid an eye on him. 5 and a half years since I knew he was safe.

I shared with some friends who didn’t know me during that time, who never knew our sweet boy, and one of them said that she missed those moments with her own children when they were babies, but at least she could go give them a hug now, because they are still with her. And I sat with that and marinated in it and I realized, that’s what makes these memories so much harder. I cannot kiss the top of his almost 7 year old head, I cannot wipe his knee when he gets hurt, I cannot hold him in an embrace before bed. I don’t know if he is safe, I don’t know what he looks like now, and I wouldn’t even recognize him in a crowd. The loss is so severe and so complete that you can’t find comfort as you would with a child who stayed and who you can still see and hold.

In those 5 and a half years, I have been a mother to 7 children since, biologically and through fostering, and not a day goes by where I don’t miss that little man. My husband and I can scarcely speak of him without getting choked up. My days of fostering may be over, but the imprint of those 8 souls we had the privilege to care for, whether for a short time or long, will mark me til my dying day. They have changed me, and the way I view the world.

If you’re considering opening your home, I want to encourage you with this: You don’t have to foster forever. You don’t have to commit your whole life to it. But even saying yes once could change that child’s life, and it WILL change your own.

Marie

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Our fostering journey has come to an end, now that we have 6 permanent children in our home, but I have been asked many times what influenced me to become a foster parent. There are actually several stories from my life that pushed me toward becoming a foster parent. I thought I’d share one of the many…

16 year old Marie showed up on our family’s doorstep a week before Christmas in 1994. She had on a faded blue backpack with a wooden color guard rifle sticking out of it. There were two young men with her. She told my parents she needed a place to stay. I was 8 years old.

My dad asked Marie if her mother knew she had come to our home and she said she did. It was evening, and so they said she could stay for the night. The two guys who had driven her left. She settled in on the family room couch that night. I remember being in my bed, too excited about the new guest to sleep. I had no clue how our lives would change over the next 2 years.

This Christmas sticks out to me for a few reasons. One being that it was the last Christmas with my parental grandmother, Grace. She was dying from breast cancer. Her last Christmas, she gifted my mother with a poinsettia afghan. I “borrowed” it from my mother 2 weeks later, wanting comfort at night. I have slept with it every night to this day, and it’s attended every hospital stay, been across the country, and to 2 other countries with me. This was also to be the last normal Christmas of my childhood, made special by family traditions that all vanished when my Grandma Grace died. But, normal it did not turn out to be.

We knew Marie. She had dated a boy from our church the previous year and had come to youth group on and off before moving an hour and a half away. She was a few months younger than my oldest sister Sarah, and so Sarah probably knew her best. She came from a troubled home, fraught with instability and substance abuse. She was a standout from her loud laugh and what I now assume was a smoker’s cough. Marie was often like a big kid. She acted younger and more impetuously than her peers. She was also somewhat of a chameleon, and had a strong desire to fit in with those around her.

At some point in that first week, my parents followed up with Marie’s mom to make sure she wasn’t a runaway. When my parents asked if Marie could stay, she seemed ambivalent and didn’t care, so Marie stayed. Having random people in our home didn’t surprise me. My parents always seemed to be opening our home to people.

Being a pastor’s family, my parents felt strongly about practicing what they preached. There was the pregnant and single woman sent to us from a crisis pregnancy center when I was a preschooler, the strange lady who picked almonds from the chicken salad off my plate with her bare hands and pulled my sister Beky’s hair, and there was family who burned their house down for insurance money, but needed a place to stay. There were also countless missionaries who slept in our home, exposing me to cultures from around the globe from a young age. My parents’ home is 1300 sqft on a small lot, but this never kept them from extending hospitality to people who needed a safe place to stay. My sisters and I recently asked my parents if they were concerned about our safety when strangers were staying in our home. My mom said she prayed faithfully each night for God to protect us, and He did.

Of course, Marie wasn’t a total stranger to my parents, but they didn’t know her well. I don’t even know how she knew where we lived. But when things turned for the worse with her family, she remembered my parents and that’s where she fled to.

A few days after she showed up at our home, I was moved out of my bedroom and into my middle sister Beky’s room. Marie took over my pink and flower bordered little girl’s room with her few belongings. People from church sent toiletries, and gifted clothing and treats. I recall my parents making a mad dash to buy her presents so she would feel included with us 3 girls as we opened gifts on Christmas morning. My parents lived below the poverty line on a very meager salary from our church, and in hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if they were wondering how to pull it all off— but they did.

Looking back at the home videos of that Christmas, you can hear Marie talking loudly in a silly falsetto voice, joking about the underwear she unwrapped. Something I didn’t find strange then, but did later— she was already referring to my parents as “Mom and Dad”. She was like a magnet to metal looking for stability, and she forced herself onto it with gusto.

At the beginning of the new year my parents started gathering paperwork to become Marie’s legal guardians. She had a host of dental issues and some medical needs, so my parents asked her mother if she would sign over parental rights so my folks too could tend to Marie’s needs. Her mother signed her over without a fight.

Marie had been in and out of various public schools with all of her family’s moving around. But we 3 girls were homeschooled, and so my mother set out to homeschool Marie, too. She was at a 5th grade level, and I remember my mother explaining over and over the definition of an adjective to her around our kitchen table. Between trying to get her caught up academically, carting her to countless dental appointments from her extensive dental needs, doctors visits, and whatever hushed about things were happening with her family, all while my grandmother was starting hospice and not long for this world, I got lost in the mix.

I remember learning to be self taught in my homeschool studies as much as I could, also leaning on my sister Beky for help. I went back and forth a couple of times sharing a room with Beky while Marie had my room and then at times Beky and Marie sharing a room when Beky and I were fighting too much. (Once was for reading Beky’s journal where she confessed her crush on a boy in our church, and me telling my friends and teasing her endlessly for it— yes I was the stereotypical annoying little sister!) My mother was stressed, handling the brunt of Marie’s needs. My father was tender hearted toward Marie and didn’t seem to share most of my mother’s frustrations and concerns, because he was at work much of the time that Marie was being carted off from appointment to appointment. My oldest sister Sarah was already off to cosmetology school and working most days, so Beky and I probably felt the pinch of the day to day change more noticeably, though I do remember all 3 of us murmuring at times feeling the stretch of our parents’ attention.

Looking back, I know that the extra mouth to feed, the extra needs, the behaviors, and the uncertainties mixed with their usual flood of responsibilities with the church and mourning the death of my maternal grandmother followed one year later by the death of my maternal Grandfather must have been horribly overwhelming. But despite all of that, they did their best. I know they weren’t perfect, but they tried. They threw Marie a big 17th birthday pool party at a friend’s house since she hadn’t had a Sweet 16. Her teeth did get fixed and replaced. She eventually was able to enroll in the local adult school. She got her GED. She got her license and bought her first car. She got a job. And after 2 years of high highs and low lows, my parents helped Marie find a room to rent 5 minutes away.

The day we moved her out was a big one. She had accumulated so many things since she had shown up with only a backpack of possessions to her name. She now had clothes, jewelry, books, furniture, so many toiletries, keepsakes, stuffed animals, linens, and more. This was the part where my parents hoped she would make it on her own, and live a life as responsibly out of our home as she had in our home.

Within a week or so, we got a call from the woman whose room Marie was renting saying she hadn’t seen Marie. Not long after we got a call from her job asking why she hadn’t been to work. Marie had met a guy who pulled her back into the things from her old life. She hadn’t lasted a month in the real world before she lost everything. She never came to get her things. I remember us taking everything downstairs from her rented room into the van. I remember us sorting through it, my parents trying to get ahold of her to come get her things. I remember taking them all to a donation drop-off when she wouldn’t return calls.

My parents struggled for years after. It had all been for nothing, they thought. The wild girl that they had tamed and tried to make in the image of their own daughters had failed. Years later, we reconnected with Marie brieflyw, even visited her, her husband, and her baby in their apartment. She would have other ups and downs in life, but the last I saw, she was clean and sober, living in the other half of the state near her parents, who also had found sobriety. Still, my mother had regrets about how Marie’s stay in our lives had affected our lives. She had voiced it so many times as I grew up and even into adulthood, remembering how she wasn’t able to be as attentive as she wanted to be toward our needs and education, wishing the time hadn’t been wasted.

In 2019, I got a call from our FFA social worker saying “I know you don’t take teens, but this one has a baby, and if you don’t take this one, she’ll be separated from her baby.” The first thing I told her was “I’m not inclined to say no, but let me talk to my husband.” And when I called Noah, I said “I know we said we wouldn’t take teens til our children were grown, but…” and he replied “I’m not inclined to say no”, repeating my exact words to the social worker. We called the social worker back in half an hour and said yes.

That teenager would change Noah and I forever. We had over a year of ups and downs, ins and outs, but we love her and her babies with our whole hearts. I could have said no. I could have looked at my young years with a strange teenager living in our home, who took my parents’ time and attention from me and said, “I just don’t want that for my own kids.” But the thing is, I didn’t have a childhood of wealth and ease, and it came with its share of heartaches during that season of instability in my own little life, and I see how it shaped and molded me, and knew my kids would be okay.

And so, since meeting my daughter at 17, and since loving her with a ferocious and protective love, and through loving her babies the last 4.5 years and seeing her spread her wings and make it in the world, I have salved my mother’s wounded conscience. I have thanked her for taking in Marie. I have assured her, that time was not wasted. For leading by example. For showing me the importance of living out your faith and ideals, not just talking about it. If my parents hadn’t taken Marie, I might not have said yes to a teenager when we got the call. And life without our oldest girl and our grandbabies from her is a life that Noah I couldn’t fathom.

(Marie’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.)

Note: we never refer to our foster children as our own because they have their own parents. However, by her request, we call our oldest our daughter, and she calls us her parents. It is an honor we do not take lightly.

Celeste

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Our fostering journey has come to an end, now that we have 6 permanent children in our home, but I have been asked many times what convinced me to become a foster parent. There are actually several stories from my life that pushed me toward becoming a foster parent. I thought I’d share one of the many…

In 2005, I was 19, and found myself in a relationship with a guy about 10 years older than me. Bobby and I worked together at a hardware store. I was a manager and we worked in the same department one night and hit it off. I was very much into the Rockabilly scene at the time, and you could find me at car shows with my hair piled high, and wearing leopard pencil skirts. I listened to The Reverend Horton Heat and bought new issues of Rat Rod magazine every time it hit the rack. Bobby was very much my type. He also loved old cars and played guitar. His hair was a perfectly coiffed, high, black pompadour, built up with layers of Murray’s pomade. He wore 501s cuffed over his Chuck Taylor converse, and his deep brown skin glinted in the sunshine when he hung his arm out of the car window while smoking a Camel.

One night, I accidentally became his girlfriend. I say accidentally, because he, being much older than I, likely assumed it was a kiss and nothing more. But, having been raised in purity culture and also being quite naive, I thought that one kiss meant we had to be together. When he found out how much younger I was than he, I remember him becoming a little leery, but I was impetuous, and I have always been quite convincing, so he found himself in a relationship with me.

I was (and am) a Christian who had fiercely disagreed with people being in relationships when they came from different religions. However, young love makes you question all the things you’ve ever held to be true, and I decided instead to just hide my relationship from my family. Looking back, I realize that what transpired next was supposed to be Bobby’s way of nicely getting rid of me. He told me that we should come clean to my pastor father about our relationship. He assumed this would cause me to break it off. I didn’t want to tell my dad, but he pushed, and so we did tell my father, and I was given an ultimatum. Cease to date this much older guy, who did not share my faith, who was not a good fit for me, or go find somewhere else to live. I was given 3 days to make the decision. In hindsight, I am absolutely sure that during those 3 days, Bobby was thinking he was about to be rid of this very demanding, yet very young, naive girl. I know this because later I found out he had slept with my best friend for the first time during this deliberation period while I was at home, pining for him in my childhood bedroom.

When it was time to answer my father on leaving Bobby and abiding by the house rules or finding another place to live, I was frozen. I really didn’t think, when push came to shove, that my dad would make me answer. I had been on my way to work and tried to slip out without my dad knowing, but he stood in the door waiting for my answer. The first thing out of my mouth was, “I guess I’ll leave.”

I threw everything I could fit in my 1996 Chrysler Concorde and drove away from my childhood home, with no where to live.

Throughout the next several weeks I lived out of my car, crashing at my best friend’s house (yes, the same one he had spent the night with, unbeknownst to me at the time), crappy motels, and wherever I could lay my head. A couple of weeks after my 20th birthday, Bobby took pity on his young, homeless girlfriend, and I moved into his parents’ home with him.

Now at this point, I’m sure you are wondering a lot of things, like “what does this have to do with fostering?” Or “why was an almost 30 year old man still living with his parents?” Or “why am I still reading this?” I’ll answer the first question and let you ponder the second, but only you can answer the third.

One evening, while I was living with Bobby and his parents, there was a knock at the door, and it was Bobby’s older sister, her boyfriend, a giant dog, and a most adorable, round faced 4 year old girl. The little girl turned out to be Bobby’s niece, Celeste. To this day, I do not know the ins and outs of what the situation was, but soon, Bobby’s mom and I were cleaning out the spare bedroom and making it ready for Celeste. I remember that we were preparing the house for a social worker to approve the living situation. I remember scrubbing the bathroom, cleaning the carpet in the living room, and dusting little trinkets. I also remember hushed talks about Celeste’s mother and boyfriend needing to find another place to live in order for Celeste to stay with her grandmother.

And then Celeste was there living with us. All I had ever wanted in life was to be a wife and mother, and I suddenly had this chance to test it out. Bobby and I took Celeste to the park, and the beach. I picked her up from preschool, and cooked her breakfast. I read books to her before bed, and memorized the words to Fox in Socks from reading it so many times over. I cleaned up her vomit in the middle of the night, styled her hair, and gave her snuggles. There came a point when I was becoming disillusioned with Bobby, but I loved Celeste so much, that I couldn’t fathom a life apart from her.

But of course I was not a wife, nor a mother. I was just a rudderless 20 year old in love with a dream. I could pretend I was a mother, but I never would be her mother. Her grandmother was her legal caretaker, and she had a mother, even if we didn’t see much of her. I was playing house and there would be no happily ever after for me. Bobby cheated on me with my best friend while I was nannying in Scotland for a couple of my preschool students, and this time, I found out shortly after. I tried to stick around, and force him to love me, but we were cursed from the start. The dramatic story of my homecoming after leaving him is one for another day.

One of the hardest parts of breaking up for me was leaving Celeste. I knew leaving Bobby meant losing Celeste. I kept in contact for a while, even attending her 5th birthday, but sitting across from my ex and former best friend at Chuck E. Cheese was awkward for everyone. Bobby’s mom was incredibly sweet and arranged for me to see Celeste a few more times after that throughout the following year, but understandably, that didn’t last.

I think about Celeste often. I still have her Kindergarten school picture stowed in my jewelry box. She’s now a young adult woman, living where and with whom and doing what, I may never know. I think about how when I left Bobby, it broke my heart to leave her, and yet I was just one more unstable adult in her life to vanish. Just one more person to come and go with no explanation. There were people and situations that came before Celeste, and after her that also led me to become a foster parent, but learning that I could love a child as much as my own flesh and blood, who started out as a stranger to me was eye opening. Knowing that there were children in the world living in unstable situations and needed a safe place to land stuck with me.

Our first foster placements would come into our life 10 years after I left Celeste. One of whom was a 4 year old girl with the same smile, eye shape, and round face as Celeste. Her mom was also having a tough time and she and her little sister needed a safe place to land.

20 year old Rachel was lost and confused about why God would let her make so many stupid choices that led to some serious heartbreak. 30 year old Rachel saw that all things worked together for good, and that a foolish, young relationship may have just been a catalyst used to prepare her 10 years later to love and care for children from hard places— not for pretend with a boyfriend who was bad for her, but for real with a husband who shared her vision.

(Bobby and Celeste’s names have been changed to respect “Celeste’s” privacy.)

Just Okay

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I do not like to be good enough. I do not like to be just okay. Last summer, my family rented an AirBnB. It was wonderful, truly the best vacation we had ever had. I privately messaged the owner with a list of minor issues with the home so she knew to repair them, because the home had been booked solid for months, I assumed she just didn’t know about them. Really simple things like burnt out lightbulbs, or peeled off wallpaper or missing towels and cutlery. I assured her that the house was wonderful, it wouldn’t affect our rating of her home, and we hoped to come back, it was just an FYI. When it came time to rate the home, I gave a detailed review, praised the home endlessly, and gave it 5 stars. Her review of me came up, where she criticized me for being too wordy in emails (guilty as charged, look at me now, I can already tell this post is going to be too long) and said I was “just okay.” JUST okay? Just OKAY?! JUST OKAY?!?! I wiped all the surfaces with bleach wipes, stripped all the beds, washed all the towels, left a thank you note, cleaned everything, swept, wiped down the fridge. Just okay?!

I tend to be a perfectionist in some aspects (not all). I like things to be done a certain way. I have high standards for myself and my children. I like my fitted sheets folded in perfect rectangles, I like my toilet scrubbed a specific way, I like my scrambled eggs cooked on a screaming hot cast iron in 40 seconds and removed immediately and topped with the perfect amount of coarse salt. When it comes to baby and kid stuff, don’t get me started on car seat safety, and I am probably the only person I know who is sanitizing bottles post-first birthday. I don’t offer solid foods before 6 months, I nurse all my bios to natural weaning age, I use rigid formula preparing protocol for our fosterlings, and I document the heck out of everything I do.

So a few years ago when we were fostering our 4th kiddo and the social worker said “Rachel, I’m not looking for his mom to be perfect. I’m not looking for her to be you. I’m looking for her to be just safe enough. Just good enough. Just okay enough to keep him alive.” I was of course flabbergasted. How could you take a child out of a home with everyone’s underwear was folded in perfect envelope shapes, and stacked like files in their little drawers and move him somewhere where the bare minimum is “just good enough to stay alive”?!

We just celebrated 6 years of fostering a few weeks ago, and I’m finding that indeed, not everyone has to be me. They don’t have to face all their canned goods the same way and have spreadsheets for their Costco shopping. They just have to be able to care for the child at a safe level. They have to feed the child 3 times a day. And sometimes those parents are going to feed their kids apple juice and Cheetos, something this mother just doesn’t do. Sometimes they are going to let their kids sleep with the TV on, a travesty in my home. Some parents are going to let their children graduate to a booster before the maximum weight on their 5-point car seat, a thought which literally gives me palpitations.

I shouldn’t look at the family of the child who is placed in my home and say “if this baby is gonna go home, they need to be a carbon copy of me.” I have to say “will this child be safe— enough?” A lot of times the answer is yes, even if I really fight that answer. And if the answer is no, being that the goal of all foster care is, what my friends? Ding ding! Reunification, that’s right! Then I better do everything in my power to set them up and help them be good enough, safe enough, okay enough. That means I have to mentor, I have to co-parent, I have to celebrate their every achievement, I have to sit with them in court and show them I’m here to cheer them on, I have to write safety tips and schedules for them, I have to help them set up everything they need to make their home safer. And the hardest part? I have to be at peace with it if and when that child that I have loved, fed, clothed, kissed, cuddled, wept over, advocated for, driven all over the countryside for appointments, prayed over, and indeed written a book’s worth of notes, documentation, spreadsheets, charts, and schedules— goes home to a house where they might eat donuts and soda for breakfast.

At the end of the day, I have no legal or biological right to that child. Yes, they feel like my own. But they aren’t my own. So if the powers that be say the place they need to be is with their family, in their home, kept just safe enough, it’s not my job freak out in the corner that their parents aren’t AS safe as me. Or AS organized as I am. Or AS responsible as I am. (Let me just be real and add here that I WILL be rocking back and forth in the corner freaking out, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so I shouldn’t! 😂)

I lost my mind last year when I was rated as “just okay”. I actually cried about it. I vented to my sisters and my friends. I could not believe that someone had the audacity to rate me as “just okay”. I had to go to God and deal with my pride over how upset I was at being seen as mediocre. My incredibly talented and funny friend created this embroidery piece for me, and I have it hanging in my room to remind me that as highly as I might have viewed myself leaving that AirBnB, someone else thought my standards were just okay. Talk about humbling.

If the requirement for parenting was perfection, then none of us would be able to parent. Heck, some of you run way tighter ships that I do, and if you were the required standard, I would also surely fail, spreadsheets and all. My encouragement for you, if you’re like me, is to stop judging parents because they aren’t you. No one is you, except you. And that’s okay, and also? Sometimes being just okay, is actually okay.

(Note: I want to be clear that this is something I am working on. This is literally me preaching at me right now. Trying to tell myself these truths when I feel like every fiber in me is fighting it. This is not something I have attained, I am not some holier than thou perfect person who doesn’t judge people. I do a LOT. And so as I am writing this, my number one audience member is me. I really hope I can learn this lesson sooner than later!)

Good Works that Pinch

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Some Sunday thoughts for my Christian followers:

Do your good works ever sting? I’ve been pondering this lately as we’ve been in a particularly heavy patch of foster parenting— but this isn’t just about fostering, so read on even if you aren’t in the fostery world!

I remember hearing adults and teenagers after going on short term missions or serving underprivileged people at soup kitchens say things like “I really was the one who left blessed!” Or “helping those kids really filled my cup.” I want to ask you: is the goal of doing good works in the name of Jesus to bless you with good feelings, or is it to be obedient— even if you get nothing out of it?

You may ask, “Well, Rachel, can’t we have both?” And I’m not going to say a flat out no, but I am going to say that your motivation for doing good works actually matters, and if that motivation is just to feel good? Sorry, friend, it’s the wrong one.

After getting your motivation in the right place, it’s time to look at the question I first posed: is this gonna sting? Pinch? Heck, is it gonna punch?! When you’re in a comfortable spot financially, it isn’t going to sting to throw some cash to sponsor an orphan in Africa. When you’re driving your BMW SUV, it isn’t going pinch to buy a fast food meal for a homeless person. If you are inundated with material things, it isn’t going to make you wince to give some of those items to someone in need. Don’t get me wrong, those are all good things to do, because they benefit someone else, but as Christians, we are called to take up a cross, and if I read my Bible right, that doesn’t seem like a super easy peasy task that brings a lot of immediate joy and sparkle to our lives with little to no sacrifice.

We aren’t all blessed financially. If you are, give in that way, but check yourself if you’re only giving what doesn’t really affect you. However, what about a way that those with or without money can accomplish? Maybe it’s giving your time to help a less privileged family work on a house project. Maybe it’s giving up the idol of Instagram-worthy white carpet so you can host families in your home and practice true hospitality. Maybe it’s spending time being a true friend to someone that requires a lot of extra grace (yes, this could mean socially awkward, different from you, outside of your social circle, or even straight up annoying people). Maybe it’s realizing you have the space in your home to take in a foster child, a single parent and their child, or even your own aging parent when it would be easier to send them to a home.

As Christians, we aren’t supposed to be playing some Jesus flavored karma game where we do things for people to feel nice about ourselves and get good things in return. Listen, when it comes to fostering, co-parenting with drug addicts or violent people, being up all night with a feverish child who is not your own, and having 5,000 people in and out of your home at all hours does not fill my cup. It does not make me feel better about myself. It does not leave me more fulfilled than I was before. Plainly: sometimes it sucks, and I’m realizing that that’s okay. And I’m taking comfort in this. If I never see a single good thing in this journey while on earth, that’s alright. Jesus never promised me earthly ease and blessings. He never told me “you are gonna feel SO good about yourself if you do this.”

We may never see any tangible blessings this side of Heaven. We may never get any thanks, back pats, warm fuzzies, or accolades. In fact, we might even end up disappointed, drained, tired, exhausted, and depleted— but if our motivation is to give selflessly in Jesus’ name, for His glory (not our own), and to love others, that won’t really be a deterrent.

Give. Serve. Love. Even when it hurts—especially when it hurts.