Balance

It’s 3:16, I’m up, and mulling. The dog woke me up, but I’ve been waking her up early so much I can’t really blame her. I was having a dream about being in a car rolling down our street with the emergency brake not working. (Do people even use emergency brakes anymore? Do they come in cars at all? Probably not.) At the same time, I was talking to some shadowy figure in the neighborhood about his/her pediatrician, and this person was telling me everyone in the neighborhood used Pediatrician X.

This dream seems to be possibly related to yesterday, when Kennedy-Krieger responded to my email about therapeutic foster care and invited us to an informational seminar in mid-July on Zoom. I gave our names and the spokesperson said she would send us a link. No commitment on our part, just an informational meeting about what it means to be foster parents to kids receiving care at Kennedy-Krieger, like Sarah did almost all her life.

But nevertheless Max and I were almost immediately anxious. “You haven’t actually signed up for the program or anything, have you?” Max asked me. “Sure, there are conjoined twins arriving by medical taxi in the next fifteen minutes” I said. Both of us are scared of moving forward, scared of change. Scared to be ourselves.

It seems like I keep returning to the Grief Group as a metaphor for rejection, exclusion, for some fundamental hurt. The feeling that once I relax and am myself, and express some real feelings, I am immediately rejected and ejected.

I remember when we were actually members of the group, during one meeting I was talking about Sarah, and crying a bit. One woman in the Group responded to me “You look very pretty when you cry. That’s unusual. Most people don’t look pretty when they cry. I just wanted you to know that.” I immediately said “Oh thank you, what a nice compliment.” But I remember thinking, “Is that the point, for me to look pretty right now?” Because I felt, and feel, ugly, ashamed, horrible, raw, flayed, toxic, and falling apart.

I can’t look pretty or be pretty for people right now. I just can’t do it. Part of me is thinking it’s a really bad idea for me to be a foster mother, or to be around people at all right now. But another part of me wants it so badly. I don’t know what the balance is.