Freedom

Awhile back I posted a profile picture of a child in my blog a talked about how much I missed that child..at the time I thought that I broke no major confidentially laws anything since the picture was much less revealing than picture that are posted by State agencies of children in foster care... I also know that I am not the only blogger who blogs about being a foster parent or about adopting kids...goggle it.

Here is a few I found:
Foster Care
The journey to my child
Lauren Christianson
Adoption by Grace
Foster care Log !this one is written by a grown man who was himself a foster child.~~~
Lisa's Website ~~another site by a former foster child, now a grown woman
Janet


Even being involved in Royal Family Kid's Camp has taught me that pictures of children and even their full names are scared things that are to be protected with the fierceness of a lioness protecting her cubs. (The above picture is an example of a picture we CAN publish on our RFKC website of a child from camp, one that protects the child's identity but still shows a child being a child at camp. It shows more of the face than the picture I posted which showed only the underside of a chin.) When we are at camp we create memory books for our campers and we go to great lengths to ensure that no campers receives pictures of others campers but yet still appears to have been at camp with lots of other kids. That means there are profile shots and scrap booking things going on with the pictures to make sure you can not really tell who a person is UNLESS you are completely intimate with them.

Back to the picture thing, it caused me to loose the ability to write and I almost lost my blog in full because someone complained about the picture to my agency. (That is what I have meant by the blog police.) Anyway, threw process of elimination, I pretty much know who it was and now, because my adoptions are done, I am now free to write again. YEAH!!!!

That means I can blog again without constant fear of my words being used against me, even though I have not ever truly done anything wrong. Pettiness is a bitter root and I have been working hard at not being petty about this whole situation but I have been oh so bitter.

Bitter that some of my best writing and stories have been left unshared. Bitter that I have lost touch with my online friends and lost an outlet that I have cherished over the last four years of my life; a public blog. Bitter that another person's actions can in fact impact my freedom of speech and freedom of expression. I have always tried very hard to honor and respect any family member that I write about because I want to be able to look them in the eye and never, ever be ashamed of myself. Whenever I share things in my blog I am very sensitive about the nature of my life, the nature of my illness and the overall public life I live in a VERY small town. It is, in fact the main reason I have more than one site tracking system on my blog...so that I can tell who is looking. So that I can be wary of people who may be out there, lurking, seeking what they may use against me.


I digress, a little.

So I will write again with more regularity and less fearfulness. I will still not write about the children that are not mine is a way that would ever reveal their true gender, age or name but I can hardly hide the fact that I am a parent or even that I am a foster/ adoptive parent. I was told that for a short while I should not even mention the fact that I am a parent...all because I mentioned that I loved and missed a child that had been in my care and posted a picture of a baby chin and tummy. I use to talk often of Alexis, my teenage daughter who is not a foster child, but had to stop even that because my agency was not sure if how I parented her would be used against me. An example? One day she missed the school bus and I joked that I was going to make her walk, seems that state workers may not find that funny. Or blog police. First of all she has chosen to walk from school on her own several times before and second of all I was joking. I DID pick her up from school that day and every other day she chooses to miss the bus. (Do not bother looking for the entry because they told me to delete it.)


Over the last few days though I have been able to share my joy and show pictures of my life, without putting my children at risk or revealing confidential information that I would not ever share in such a public forum. I looked in the mirror today and Stupid was not on my forehead.

I love my kids, the ones we have adopted, the ones we will not adopt and the ones we are keeping until they can be reunited with their families of origin. It is those children I end up missing the most and grieving for the most...the ones that are returned home. When you consider that my husband and I are long term, adoptive foster parents that means we get the "lost cause" cases that the state feels there is little hope for. The kids who have been asked to have new placements found for...we adopted the first three "placements" we got and they had been in multiple homes in a short time before getting to us.

Here is the God part of the story: He had His hand in it all and led us to the right agency for He had the right children for us. When we were READY neither He or they were READY so he had to sabotage it the only it could happen.

Life is good, if you let it be.

All children deserve to be cherished and loved without having to earn the love. Thankfully we have had our greatest dream fulfilled despite all the things the enemy threw at us.

A happy New year to you...this one trumped watching Hanana Montana all night only because this year I knew that there would not be a kindly social worker showing up and moving the kids to a new home. And they knew it too so they were completely relaxed and fully at home.

xxoo