Jacquelyn's Space

How did I get here? I was building a happy life but I took a wrong turn somewhere….

I hate to write it, I hate to think it but I think I took the wrong turn the minute I stopped being true to myself and tried to be the unselfish hero. It is a role I am not cut out for, at least not at this point in my life.

It is super hard taking care of kids that aren’t your own. Beyond hard…I don’t know how foster parents do this over and over again and for strangers no less; I have my nephews so I kind of knew what I was in for. And then there is the stepmom thing too…

Everything is complicated and hard to explain. Nothing is easy. And I can’t really talk to anybody about it. I can only attempt to write it here.

And then there is heartbreak…

I asked my nephews to clean their room; my oldest throws a fit, of course. I can’t deal with it so I don’t–do it or it is naughty chair. I’m not asking for much, certainly not asking for the room to be perfect– just picked up. It should not be too difficult.

Oldest is complaining and carrying on. Then I hear him talking about his mom–how she hates him and was abusive towards him. He was telling the other boys that his mom hates them too…that she doesn’t care about them, doesn’t love them. I had to put a stop to it– don’t want the other boys feeling worse than they already do. Their mom has not visited them for well over a year now; she hasn’t even made an attempt.

I yell out, “Hey, that’s not right, that’s not true.” Even though I truly don’t think their mom cares all that much for them. Not truly, not the way a mother should. My poor nephew thinks I think he is talking about me. I went into their room. I told him I know he isn’t talking about me and ask why is saying what he is saying. He just repeated what he said, “Our mom hates us. She doesn’t care about us and she was mean.” My other nephew chimed in, “Yeah, she hasn’t tried to visit us for a long time.” I had to tell him that she doesn’t hate them…that she loves them but she has problems. That had to cover it because to explain the complicated mess to them…well there really isn’t any way I could. I don’t think their mom HATES them but I do believe there is a lack of caring on her part. But she does have problems– this I always knew. She has always been troubled. And now she is Flint somewhere partying, living the lifestyle she always wanted– drinking and drugging, hanging out with men and probably trash. She is also trying to make money the old-fashioned way–as an escort, a prostitute more or less.

But I had to just shut my nephew down so he wouldn’t damage the other boys. The youngest refused to believe his mom hates him, he remembered a time when his mom was tickling him. My oldest nephew just talked about how his mom hit and kicked him so I pointed out to him that was part of the problems, her problems. Then I gave him a hug and told him I was sorry that he felt his mom hated him but I didn’t think it was true, that she just had problems and that is the way it is sometimes. That is just the way it is. That is all I could really say…

I feel so horrible that my nephews have to go through this. I feel bad that I can’t love them ‘enough’. In part because I am not their mother but in part, because I am just not equipped. I am not a touchy-feely kind of person; I am hard, too damn hard. There are conditions on my love, well most of it anway. Conditions that are rarely met and then I am unhappy.

Personally, I feel horrible because I hate being put in this position. I hate having to defend a person (a shitty person, a shitty mother) that I wouldn’t really give a rat’s ass for. I have done this before with my stepson–had to defend his mother to him, somewhat or at least try to figure out her behavior to keep the kid relatively happy and mentally healthy — I didn’t want to have to do it again. It is a losing battle…always. If a kid has a bad mother or a mother with problems then the kid will suffer no matter what anybody else tries to do to make up for it. That is the cold hard truth.

And I am ill-equipped to even begin to make up for shitty mothering. I try and try, I stretch and stretch til I feel like I am breaking. How much more can I give?

A long time ago I watched a program on PBS or National Geographic about DNA testing to find a person’s ethnic make-up and ancestors; to see how various peoples migrated around the world. It was really interesting and I always thought I’d like to have some genetic testing done to see where my people came from. I kind of knew…my mom and my grandma always talked about family, our ancestors; they were also big on family reunions. I knew my dad’s family, on one side are Polish/Russian (or German?East German aka Prussian– found that out from a reunion and some research a cousin had done) and French on the other side; I know this mostly because of their names: Kress and Shay, shortened from Krzewinski and Czajkowski (my paternal grandfather’s families) and Charboneau (my paternal grandma’s family). My mom has always said her family is English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, German, and maybe Spanish or Italian…also, maybe French and Irish. Basically, I am a medley…but still I wanted to do the genetic testing just to see if there were some surprises.

Then I saw that ancestry.com was offering  DNA testing. I thought, “Cool! I want to do that some day.” I couldn’t resist ordering a kit this past June…

I ordered my kit, got it quickly. It was easy– it is a saliva test. You have to fill a vial and send it back to the lab, then register your test online. Results would be ready online in 6 weeks. I did all that and decided I should start a family tree so when my DNA test was registered I could find some cousins on ancestry.com.

In July I started with a 2 week free trial on ancestry and began working on my tree. I got a good start just from memory of all that I had heard from my family already. I actually quite proud at how much I could remember. Before I knew it I had 700 people on my tree. Some families are easier to trace than others because some are more researched than others. I knew a cousin had already done extensive research on my mother’s paternal line. What surprised me was how easy it was to trace my dad’s maternal line. My grandma Marjorie was a Charboneau. At one time her family lived in Detroit and I had heard tell of a farm in Monroe County, Michigan. A couple of years ago, my friend Melissa and I did some cursory research into the Charboneau family and found out that the family was among the first settlers in Monroe County. I was excited to find out more, and excited that it seemed fairly easy to trace my Grandma’s line. Lots of research had already been done, and there were lots of records. Her maternal line, my great-grandma Charlotte had been a Knaggs…there is a whole book written on that family. It is online for free! What a valuable resource. I traced/researched farther and found out the Knaggs family was actually Dutch and English– surprise, surprise! I thought my grandma’s family were French but here is a whole other branch I knew little about. I traced the Knaggs family back to their arrival in the Americas– they came through New York and Pennsylvania, settled in Ohio for a while but then moved into Michigan. The later Knaggs did marry into many of the French families. I picked one French line to trace– I wanted to see when they all arrived in America.

Little did I know that my French ancestors have been in the Americas since the beginning. My first clue came through that very first French line I traced through my Knaggs family line (a Morin family daughter married Alexis Knaggs, my fourth great grandfather). They came to the Detroit area from Canada. I traced back further. All this in one night because I was so intrigued…I traced back to the first settlers in Canada– Quebec. To my tenth great grandma, Helen Desportes. She was apparently the first white baby born in Canada! I was blown away. Lots of research has been done on her and her family. There is a whole book written about her and her family. It is called Helene’s World.

http://smile.amazon.com/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8nes-World-H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-Desportes-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0615738591/ref=smi_www_rcolv2_go_smi?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

So I ordered the book but I have not read it cover to cover yet. I am hooked on ancestry.com and researching my French, or French-Canadian ancestors. Lots more of my discoveries to write about but I’ll stop here and just share my DNA results.

Results

DNA results from ancestry.com came quickly– I think it actually took less than a month. More surprises. Lots of what I expected: I am 42% Eastern European (those are my German/Polish/Prussian ancestors on both sides of my family); I am only 6% Western European; my next biggest ethnic group is Irish–28%– I wasn’t expecting so much Irish but that includes the Scottish and Welsh ethnic groups; I only tested 1% Great Britain or English (surprise); Scandinavian 12% (surprise), Iberian Peninsula 6% (so perhaps I do have Spanish ancestors), Italy/Greece 3%, Finland/North Russia <1% (so much for being Russian), and…AND <% Native American. What? That was the biggest surprise for me because nobody in either of my families had ever talked about Native American ancestors. At less than 1% it had to be fairly far back. I didn’t know but it was (is) very interesting. And I got a few pages of tree hints, and lots of pages of cousins– 119 at first but I am up 132 pages now. Yikes.

After I posted my UnHappy Camper Part 1 the other day my stepson’s mother called him– he had been a day late on this truck payment. My stepson actually had to go to his mother’s house to get bitched out (I guess). Not that it did any good. He went out quite a bit this week, and I am fairly certain (don’t ask me how I know–lets just say I have insider information) that he went to the Adult Entertainment establishment on Dort Hwy –AHEM AKA the titty bar– at least one this past week, if not more. He is still blowing his money and not paying his bills. And I wonder if his mother knows her son doesn’t have insurance on their truck.

UnHappy Camper Part 2

What can I say? I guess I wasn’t meant to have kids…or at least to be a pseudo-mother to other people’s children. Being a foster parent has not been rewarding, in fact it has been one of the hardest things I have done (even harder than being a stepmom, but only by a smidge). It is not that I don’t love my nephews– I do. I just can’t deal with all their BS on top of dealing with the BS my brother (their father) and the  BS state (which feels like a damn betrayal) dishes out. It is all super disheartening and exhausting. I constantly feel like I have no support, no one backing me up…well except for the boys school; they–Gaines Elementary– have been wonderful.

I knew my nephews would be a handful; I knew they had behavior problems. What I wasn’t prepared for was how inept the system is at dealing with kids with behavior problems– how much help IS NOT out there. All my nephews have mild forms of Asperger’s; two have ADHD. This on top of too lax parenting that let the boys run wild and not meet certain benchmarks. They also had not attended school regularly or were in any kind of counseling or services. Right away, as soon as I got the boys, their case worker said I should look into getting respite care. Okay, where? No respite care to be found– not through the foster care agency, not through any other program–at least not that I could access. Even the boys counselor (once I got them into counseling close to home) said I needed respite care, that caring for these boys was too much for any one person (the first foster home the boys were in filed notice that they could/would not care for them after a month). She tried, through her clinic, to get me respite care, but she and the clinic were unsuccessful. Nobody cared ultimately, and I had to give up trying after numerous emails and phone calls because it made me too damn angry.

Our system is horribly flawed. And that is one little piece of what I’ve been through.

But all that is the past. Somehow I was able to take care of the boys, and do it fairly well, despite our challenges.

The boys’ mom has all but abandoned them. She hasn’t seen them since July 10, 2013. She is doing her thing in Flint, Michigan. You can look her up on Craigslist and Flint’s Backpage. Naughty Nikki and Bella– escorts, massages, etc. They will work on trade.

Okay, so now the boys are supposed to be going ‘home’, except that they don’t really have a home. They do have a dad that has worked to get them back…he has a house…but he doesn’t live there and doesn’t want to. There is no ‘HOME’. Their dad, my brother, works out of state a lot and likes to stay down in the Detroit area; he has been living with a girlfriend. The foster care worker knows all this– if he doesn’t he certainly should because I have made no bones about telling him. But he insists that the boys are to be returned ‘home’. See the plan was that I would still take care of the boys while my brother workers, and my brother would pay me. Except that the boys and I can’t live on promises, excuses, and apologies; we can’t eat those. I refuse to ask my husband to support me AND my 3 nephews. I have told everybody that. So then the plan was that the boys’ dad would give the boys’ Social Security (SS) money in order for me to take care of them (the two older boys get Social Security). But in order for that to happen, dad would have to go to the SS office and get the payment straightened out and preferably before foster care monies were cut off (so there’d be no gap in fundage). It took me forever for the foster care worker to understand that you can’t just turn SS payments on in the middle of the month; it may take months. There were too many unknowns. Finally he understood. Then he gave dad the responsibility of getting SS squared away. Of course my brother put it off until the last minute, of course.

Also, my brother, the boys’ father was given the task of scheduling the boys (and himself) with counseling since the boys’ counselor retired in April. That responsibility was taken out of my hands. These boys and their father need counseling. Do you think their dad made an effort to call and make a counseling appointment over the 5 months he was given chance after chance to do so? NO, he did not. Even though I reminded him and gave him info on counseling offices. Even though I asked the foster care worker time after time (he just kept saying he’d give my brother another week, a few more days–all of a sudden 5 months had gone by–total BS). Finally I had to complain to the boys’ lawyer. Once I did so the foster care worker got on my brother’s ass…so his solution was to lie about calling and making an appointment. A lie I uncovored with one fucking phone call in 5 fucking minutes. I had to call because my youngest nephew was having behavioral problems in school– 5 write ups in September and the principal telling me he was going to be kicked out of school. A first grader!!

So those things–SS and counseling my brother was to have done before the boys were returned ‘home’. Neither done and the dumb caseworker was returning the boys home anyway. All the while I still had/have the boys. Total BS.

I called the boys’ counseling clinic and got the ball rolling for appointments. My brother did finally get SS taken care of, or so he says. The boys were released from foster care and returned ‘home’ (even though they are still with me) without the sanction of the DHS monitor overseeing the case. Then the people that are supposed to help my brother with transitioning his family from foster care to HOME are not at all happy with his house (which he has not been living it); it doesn’t looked lived it– the grass is a mile high, the fridge wasn’t on, he had no furniture. This house that passed the foster care workers inspection, mind you. These transitioning people, called Families First, aren’t really going to work with my brother until he has his house in order. He can’t understand why he is being so persecuted; I can’t understand how the foster care worker can even imagine it is in the best interests of my nephews to be returned ‘home’.

Went to court today…everybody was confused and unhappy. Me most of all though.

So yes, I am unhappy, depressed in fact. All my hard work with the boys for naught. At the same time I wish they could go home and I could have my house back to myself– peaceful.

Cool spider web outside my house. I noticed it yesterday after I got the boys on the bus. It looked a little nicer (more taut) yesterday but I couldn’t get a decent picture until this morning.