7 days ago we were in Tampa, cleaning up the remains from my daughter's 4th birthday party and loading up our car to make the 4.5 hour drive back to Tallahassee. My daughter was crying, as she didn't want to leave Nana, Papa, Mimi, Bapa, and all of our other family and friends in Tampa for an indefinite amount of time. I told her I was so sorry her heart was sad. We had had a good week celebrating her life with our family and friends, and felt prepared to go back to our house full of chaos, but still, deep inside, something was 'off.' Something was not right.
The night we got back, we received a text from our supervisor, asking us to come into the office first thing Monday morning. This gave me some discomfort, so I called her to ask what it was regarding. She simply stated "the incident we discussed before you went on vacation. Goodbye." I attempted to contact our consultant, who had worked very closely with us our career at Boys Town and had kind of become a friend. However, he had already been instructed not to have communication with us, as we'd later learned after "Monday."
Now, this story wouldn't make sense if I didn't take some time to explain "the incident" that was treated so much more seriously than it actually was. We had a girl in our house who absolutely resented US personally and her placement at Boys Town, from day 1. She had no sense of boundaries and had constantly asked us to adopt her, not in a curious way, but in almost an accusatory way, as if we'd done something wrong by being her Family Teachers and not her prospective foster parents. Though I understood how uncomfortable she must be in her situation, and sympathized with her lack of security, there was something about her complete lack of boundaries that made my skin crawl. Per our supervisors instructions, and my womans' intuition, we decided to put our foot down and set some serious boundaries. On her 3rd day we had to tell her multiple times that she may not discuss adoption with us or refer to us as "Mom and Dad" or our children as "Brother and Sister." This was contrary to every single one of my maternal instincts and felt extremely cold, however, it was exactly what was necessary. Upon hearing that she would no longer be allowed to engage in inappropriate behavior, she engaged in a power struggle that would continue on until the day that we left or she left, whichever came first. Whatever she could do to sabotage our household or make everyone around her freakishly uncomfortable, she did it - anything from screaming fits that went on for hours, to destroying our common area in the home (multiple times), to threatening to kill herself in order to get us all fired. She absolutely could not handle any type of "no" answer, even if it was just a "not right now, wait 20 minutes to use the phone..." or anything. She would have a dramatic reaction every. single. time. Everyone around her was utterly miserable, to the point that the other girls in the home had started lashing out at her more and more, either with words or with physical violence. I can honestly say our household would have functioned 100% more happily and productively without her in it. But it is what it is. She was put there for a reason, whatever that reason may be.
One of the last things she decided to sabotage was church on Sunday Mornings. She thoroughly enjoyed manipulating me, so she would normally throw a fit before church so I had to stay home with her (if a youth is considered non-compliant, we are required to have the FT of the same sex stay home with her, so as to avoid any allegations of sexual abuse, since most of the females in the program have serious boundary issues with men). For the last 5 weeks, Ben had been taking the girls to church by himself because of her behavior. All of this had been reported to our supervisors and consultant, every single time she threw a fit it was recorded, reported and addressed. However, every person that we spoke to about her behavior shrugged it off as attention-seeking and not to be taken seriously or even paid attention to at all. Most of the time, if she was having a screaming fit, our instruction was to take the other kids out of the house and go sit in the yard or do anything we could do, within reason, to remove her audience and not feed the negative attention seeking behavior. So on our last Sunday (the Sunday after Thanksgiving), I instructed her to go make her bed before church (a well known, daily expectation of all the girls). She became furious when I gave her the instruction, and told her she was not allowed to argue with me, as she was beginning to do. As expected, she walked into her room, sat down on her bed, yelled "fine, I'm not going" and slammed the door. She proceeded to fall back asleep. We were about fed-up, and since she wasn't technically considered non-compliant, we figured it would be OK for her to be home with Ben. We attempted to contact our supervisor to let her know what was going on, but as usual, she didn't answer her phone. We said OK in response to her defiance, and we all walked out the door and got in the van for church. Ben stuck his head in and said "you have an opportunity right now to make a good decision and join us," but she just laid there and didn't answer. So Ben drove us to church, 3 minutes down the road, and came home to sit with her. While we were at church, he went over the basic teaching you do when someone refuses to follow instructions, and gave her the option to start earning some of her points back and have a better day. She didn't want to cooperate, so she refused. When it was time to come pick us up, he asked her to join him. She didn't want to, so he told her she could sit on the porch until he got back. There really wasn't another option, since the rest of campus was at church, and we couldn't pick her up and sit her in the van, so she sat on the porch for another 5 minutes while he came to get us.
Later that day, we called our supervisor and explained that she had been sitting by herself at the house for a total of ten minutes that morning. We really did not think much of it, since we had seen Assistant Family Teachers on campus do the same thing before, and again, we had been urged by all who were supervising the house to ignore her manipulative behavior and not take it seriously. Our supervisor said OK, though she'd probably have to speak to some other people about it to make sure it wasn't serious. She granted our vacation request, and sent us on our way, happy and oblivious, to Tampa.
Fast-forward to the following Monday. We dropped our kids off at our friends house and arrived at the office promptly at 8 AM, per their request. The program director was there and explained to us how furious he was about our lapse in judgement, how our idiotic decision put the entire establishment at risk, and how we would no longer be working for Boys Town, nor having contact with any of the girls from our house. I'm not sure if they spoke with the girl in our house and got a much more dramatic version of what actually happened, or what, though it doesn't really matter. We typed, signed and submitted our resignations later that day, and began packing the apartment we had just settled into.
I can honestly say that Ben and I both had a lot of doubts about the particular division of Boys Town that we were working for. There were a few red flags leading up to this day that we had seen, but they all basically indicated that they were not running things according to the model established in Omaha, and they did not appreciate any employees questioning the system. That may sound dramatic, especially since I do not intend to get into details here for the world to see, but a lot of things were 'off.' However, our primary concern up until this point was that our kids were so obviously unhappy. The environment of that house was flat-out destructive to them, and if we had stayed, they would have been forced to grow up MUCH faster than "normal" young children. I was beginning to wonder what separated the trauma that our kids were undergoing (from all of the fits thrown by the girls, the drama, the yelling, and the toll it was taking on us as their parents) from the trauma the girls in the home had experienced. The majority of our girls had experienced verbal/emotional abuse and severe abandonment, and I was beginning to wonder if, in the eyes of a 2 and 4 year old, we weren't exposing them to the same things. Like I said before, something was not right in our souls.
The next five days were a whirlwind. I'm sure I will remember more details of those days later, but all I know right now, is we miraculously overcame how we felt about the situation in order to get our entire family packed up and moved back to Tampa. My MIL came up and got the kids on Thursday and took them back to Tampa to stay with my parents for a couple of days so we could finish tying up all the loose ends in Tallahassee. We drove our UHaul back to Tampa Friday night, collapsed, got up on Saturday and started looking for apartments who could take us immediately. By the extremely generous support of family, we are probably going to have a place to call home by the end of this week. Granted, we are still unemployed and without any income, but we will no longer be homeless. I can honestly say, with peace and confidence, that God has been ALL over this. He took us to Tallahassee gracefully and peacefully, and brought us back to Tampa gracefully and peacefully. We got a chance to see all of our girls, if only for a couple minutes, just to say goodbye and get a bit of closure. We got closure from a couple of coworkers. We were able to return quite a bit of unnecessary "stuff" we no longer needed for a full refund. Even the disappointment of not being able to get our puppy when we intended worked in our favor, as I couldn't imagine having a fifth mouth to feed in our current situation.
All of that being said, we are still in transition, and there are gobs of lessons coming out of this experience - too many to record all in one blog entry. I will say it again - God is all over this. I can now honestly say I'd rather be broke & homeless in the middle of God's will than rich and comfortable anywhere else. He has already brought healing to our family and to our children. We have a lot of things to figure out, and a lot of wounds to heal, but we are at peace.
If you have taken the time to read this or to follow our journey at all, please take a minute to lift us up in prayer. Pray for the healing of our kids, pray for us to find a job and steady income, for no one in our family to become seriously in need of healthcare while we are without insurance, and pray for the in-between time to be peaceful. I am praying that I would not become bitter towards the imperfect people who made an unfair call and unjustly put us out of our job and our home 2 weeks before Christmas. I am praying I learn a lesson in forgiveness from this and that we move forward together, as a family, with God before us.
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