When I was in grade school, I remember being sent to my room by my foster Mom because I mouthed off to her. Little did she know that being sent to my room was a gift to me, as it allowed me to escape the ills of life and enter my own little world as it was the place where I felt safe…
Not that my foster parents were bad people, on the contrary, they were good to me. They took me in when I was seven years old. They clothed me, they provided shelter for me, and they loved and cared for me...and most importantly, I was nurtured.
My foster situation was supposed to be temporary, while my biological mother dealt with the issues going on in her life. I didn't mind being with the people who I would later in life learn to call "Mom and Dad," because I knew them already. My biological mother and Mom Schon were friends at the time and I had spent a few summers with the Schon's in the past. But, I had no idea why my own mother had pulled me out of school that cold and wintry morning and taken me to Ohio, where she said I would be visiting, promising she would be back in two weeks to pick me up. And while my parents lives would later come crashing down in a messy divorce, I know I certainly viewed my move as temporary, because that's what my mother had told me. So, I have never faulted my foster parents for feeling like their world had been turned upside down as much as mine. There I was...a kid they weren't expecting to raise, arriving just as their own daughter had grown up and left for nursing school. I'm sure Mom and Dad Schon had expected that time in their lives to be the start of their "golden years;' a time for them to play...not the start of raising another person's child.
And what a handful of child I was! The first few weeks were our "honeymoon" weeks. Later, the proverbial ball dropped and I found out I wasn't going back "home." After an agonizing month of crying for my family: my brothers, my own mother and father, my own home, it finally sank in...Ohio, with my foster parents WAS my new home. My heart ached, and as unfair as it may have been, I hated my foster parents for it. In my young mind, they were the enemy and I let them know it. I managed to take every ounce of anger, frustration that I could muster from my 7 year old self and used it against them in any way possible. I was incorrigible. But they put up with it...still loving me, disciplining me as necessary, and maybe even wanting to give up on me at times. They didn’t though, even with all my bad behavior, they didn't give up on me. I suppose they saw me as their responsibility, but they also saw my emotional needs, and they tried to fulfill them.
Of course, it wasn't until I was much older that I realized they had done their job well as parents of this scared and lonely child, who later grew into a scared and lonely teenager, rebellious in nature and spirit. It's only now, after having raised my own 3 daughters (much of the time as a single parent), that I can say "thank you" with complete understanding. Thank you for making me eat my vegetables, thank you for not letting me wear those ridiculously short skirts that the some of the other girls wore, thank you for teaching me manners, thank you for making me enunciate my words so I wouldn't sound uneducated, thank you for making me practice my ballet and encouraging me to not quit, thank you for making me go to church, thank you for developing my love for music...and thank you for sending me to my room as a punishment when I needed it!
It was in my own room, where I found solace. It's where my creativity started, which made way for greater expression and for the creation of who I would later become. Sometimes, though, the messes I made got me into trouble. For instance, glue, newspaper and water messes later became paper Mache projects for which I won awards. Getting angry and piercing my new lampshade became my first "paper piercing" project, a technique I would later teach to others in a rehab hospital where I did some part time volunteer work. Messy finger painting on paper which mistakenly overflowed into hand prints on the floor prepared me for teaching painting classes to young children at Miss Barbara's Farm (day care) when my own kids were little. Finally, years of being an angry kid making poor choices and hiding within myself (and my room) led to therapy where I learned to journal my feelings and express myself in verse and rhyme through poetry.
So you can see all of my past experiences have had a tremendous impact on whom I have become. I am not special in that way, that's just life. Everything each of us has done and everything we have experienced up to now, makes us who we are today; and who I am today is exactly who God intended me to be :)
