feelings emotions sanc

How are you feeling?

We ask this question a lot in our house.

In fact, this question gets begged to be asked. It’s kind of funny to have kids throwing their hands up, wanting to be the first one to ask this question, but it happens. Almost daily.

When we’re all sitting down to dinner together–which happens about four- five times a week during the school year–we have a tradition of starting “community.” Now, I didn’t come up with this by any means. This is part of the Sanctuary model of trauma-informed care. But my kids embrace it, at least most days. And they love to be the one who gets picked to start the circle of community around our table.

The kids know the drill, too. They ask three questions.

As the kids get older, certain answers become off limits, too, and we encourage them to be more creative. Our four-year-old can be “happy!” with a goal of having time to play video games and ask mommy for help…but our eleven-year-old cannot answer simple “happy” or “good” or “fine.” We explore other, more specific words to help kids convey their feelings. Instead of happy, one might feel content, or ecstatic, or joyful, or mellow. Instead of sad, one might express feelings of disappointment, jealousy, aggravation, or discouragement.

This time at dinner when we sit down and talk about how we feel is often rather shallow. We don’t usually get into deep discussions of why someone is feeling down or how we can help our friend who is feeling disappointed. Perhaps after dinner, as the evening winds down, I will catch up with the kid who felt frustrated at dinner. This community time, instead, is used to create a habit, to create normalcy around discussing how we feel. Alan and I participate, too. We talk about how we feel and we try to set examples of specific feelings and targeted goals.

I’ve seen this discussion make a difference.

I’ve had kids come to me after getting in a fight with a friend, tears in their eyes, and use words to tell me–not what happened or how much of a jerk their friend is or anything like–but tell me how they feel. This isn’t something they’ve always been good at. It’s not something they always do.

But they’ve heard me cry, too.

They’ve listened to me answer community questions shortly, with answers like:

They’ve seen me discuss these feelings with them, deal with them, and wake up the next morning in a better mood. They’ve seen that it’s okay to talk about feelings, feel like you’re out of control of your feelings, and still make good choices.

Because of course it’s important to teach kids to talk about how they feel. It’s important to teach them the right words. But it’s equally important to show them how we feel. It’s vital that they see adults struggling, praying, asking for help, and dealing with feelings in healthy ways.

Our kids have often seen things done the wrong way. Either too much emotion displayed in verbal abuse, fighting, yelling, leaving…. or too little emotion, as part of a neglectful upbringing. Part of our daily goal is to ride emotional roller coasters along with the kids helping them ultimately stay grounded and reach a place of peace, while also letting them ride along with us from time to time.

Hands full

I am told all the time that I must have my hands full. It’s kind of cliche at this point, but I think sometimes people just don’t know what to say when faced with my strange life decisions.

Honestly, my hands never feel that full. I mean, I guess sometimes they do when I’m holding a squirming baby and also need to make dinner or answer the phone or clean up a mess. But that’s not the fault of 98% of my life. That’s literally just because I’m holding a squirmy baby.

My hands aren’t that full. But my brain….holy cow. My brain is exploding with fullness. At any given moment, I have a to-do list, or a checklist, running through my mind that is no shorter than 30-50 things. All the time. It’s exhausting.

First of all, I’m a control freak. I like to have my say in every little bit of what goes on in my house. In a house of 8-13 people, that’s a lot of things. That’s a lot of places for my mind to be at any given moment. I should let go of some of my control tendencies, but that isn’t likely to happen any time soon. I’d much rather drown myself in stress and know what’s happening than float blissfully away in ignorance, the stress of not-knowing eating me away inside.

Second of all, when you have as many kids as we do, the check lists of what needs to be done on a normal day is just long. No matter what you do. Pile the SYSTEM on top of a normal life with seven kids and you’re bound to get lost in the forests of what needs to be done.

Right now, we’re pretty lucky. We have three bio kids and four kids in care. And honestly, they’re four pretty easy kids. But even easy kids have multiple regular appointments. They see counselors. They have parent-teacher conferences. They are involved in various sports. They have visits with their bio families. They CPS workers and CASA workers and attorneys and sponsors who like to drop in to visit.

Aside from kid-specific visits, as a residential care facility, we have regular visits in our home from Licensing, Contracting, Health Department, Fire Marshal…not to mention just the maintenance workers and such who might walk through our home when something needs fixing or replacing. We living in a pretty old facility and things need a lot of tending to.

When anyone could walk through your home at any time…keeping it looking clean and orderly is a high priority. And believe it or not, but having seven or more kiddos running around being kids means keeping things clean and tidy is a HUGE CHALLENGE. You can hang up signs that say, “Excuse the mess, my kids are making memories” all day long, but when people are walking through analyzing your housekeeping skills, those signs won’t do anything for you.

Last year, I decided to up and have a baby just because there wasn’t enough exciting challenges in my life. So little baby Jo helps keep things nice a chaotic.

If you had asked me three years ago, before I started down this path, if all of this sounded feasible, I would have laughed you out of the house. I think over all of the things I just wrote down and wonder who in their right mind would sign up for this life. People tell me all the time that they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t put up with system. They couldn’t say goodbye to the kids they love. They couldn’t handle the stress….

I can’t either. I can’t handle it. Not alone. I rely so heavily on God (and on my husband, and on my supervisor) that sometimes I wonder how much of my abilities are actually me at all. I spend a lot of days feeling completely incompetent and overwhelmed. But at the end of every day, I send seven kids to bed. Most nights, those seven kids have smiles on their faces. Most nights, those kids give me hugs and tell me they love me. A lot of nights, I sing to them or pray with them and find myself holding back tears because of how much I love them. Some of those kids are going to leave me eventually. And when that day comes, I’m going to have my heart broken again. But I will be sending them on to someone else, knowing that I loved them as best I could while they lived with me.

That’s how I manage.

A couple weeks ago I felt especially overwhelmed. Alan and I were on, we were with all the kids and something–I don’t even remember what now–broke the camel’s back. My exhausted, overwhelmed-self sobbed and cried and apologized. I don’t like when I cry in front of all the kids, but it happens sometimes and I’d rather be real with them than try to act like I totally have it all together all the time. So I sat on the couch and cried while they sort of shuffled away awkwardly. Alan took them to the store to give me some space. He left one of the girls behind because she didn’t want to go.

She could have played outside. She could have watched TV. She could have stuck her headphones in and played on her tablet. Instead, she asked if she could hold the baby for me. She and my boys played with the baby. She said she wanted me to have a little time to myself, so I could go make some coffee or something if I wanted (what can I say? My kids know me). I laid on the couch and prayed, sipping at some coffee while my sweet girl played with the baby. When Alan got back with the others, they brought me a real-sugar Dr. Pepper (the only soda I’ll drink), and some fancy chocolate. They also had bought a giant poster-sized greeting card and all signed it. They knew I was stressed and they wanted to make me smile.

One of the sweetest cards I’ve ever been given.

They all went to bed like little angels that night–which definitely does NOT always happen. After they were all in bed, Alan said, “I know things are difficult, but your kids love you. You’re an awesome mom.”

Then I was crying, but they were happy tears.

I couldn’t manage alone, for sure. But I also wouldn’t be willing to try managing this life if it weren’t for the lives of the kids we’re touching. Changing. Loving. They make it all worth it.

An open window

I’ve wanted to start this blog for a really long time. We started houseparenting almost three years ago and from the very beginning I thought it would be a good outlet for me. I’m a writer, and with a rotating door of 6-11 kids at any given time, I knew that I wouldn’t have the ability to focus on writing like I once had. The last three years have shown that to be entirely true. I haven’t had much time (much less, energy) to sit down and ooze creativity onto a page.

I want that to change. So now I’m finally sitting down and starting this blog. I want to give all you wonderful people who help support us, financially, emotionally…in every conceivable way….I want to give you all a small look into what this life is really like. This messy, chaotic, wonderful life. I hope I can share a bit about our life and maybe even answer some lingering questions you have about us.

So hang on. Subscribe. Enjoy.

But most importantly, be educated. Find out how you can help, too.