Carol of the Wails

Yeah, it's Christmas and honestly, not feelin the posting thing lately...well at least for the last few months. Things are starting to settle down. It's just been a bummer of a season. It's been 3 Christmas's since the last of our foster kids left. Three!! Well, I really don't count the 1st one, because we were dealing with Koiboy's dad dying of cancer, so we were kind of delayed in working through those emotions, to technically this is our second kidless Christmas. And quite frankly, it's not going as well as I had hoped. We are both really feeling it this year.

I was trying to explain to a coworker that it's almost like your children have died. No disrespect to those who have lost children, I can only imagine how that must feel. But I can't help but feel that this will be an eternal grieving processes. We had the blessings of a teenager, preteen, preschooler and a few babies. So in a funny way we ran the gamut of having a family in a compressed period of time. But now they are all gone. We don't know where they are, if they are safe. some of them will never remember us but most of all we will never see them again. Every once in a while during cleaning I pull a little pink beret from under the bed, or a little green army man from the cushions of the sofa, and it feels like death. In my "hope" chest, we have a little baby blanket, a smattering of toys, a pacifier, and a little book with shaky ABC's written on the pages. Should any stranger go through our house, it would read like a tragic loss of children. Things carefully preserved, put away out of sight in a special place and no other trace in the house of their existence.

We sit in the dark and look at the lights on the tree, reminiscing; "Remember when Little Godfather did this? How Princess Amadala looked when she opened her clarinet? Scooby coming home with hickeys from her 'Christmas party' with friends" all the while looking at one single ornament hung on the front of the tree that says, "To Mom and Dad". The only thing we will ever posses that is written like that....just for us.

I think if we couple this with the realization we are not getting any younger, our day's of being hopeful parents are now gone it doesn't help the situation. We are aging and being a parent now with the tough financial situation of our country and hardly making a living for just ourselves, adopting is still not in our checkbooks and even if we could, how can we support a child? Not to mention as time passes my health situation continues to roll down hill. Being a parent of a teenager in my 60's worries me. Sometimes I wonder if we took too many (5) years trying to have our own, or wasted time fostering when maybe by some miracle we could have saved enough to adopt. Our fosters were never clear for adoption while we had them, so that was out of the question. We had to give them back.

So I guess, as I hear that soft click of the door latch behind me this Christmas, I'll spend next year wandering around our empty house looking for an open window.

I hope you don't think this blog too morose, it's just simply how I feel this season. I'll be up and at em' again soon enough. I'm a "glass is half full" type of gal. Besides, a wise woman once told me, "My child, you may not be able to polish a turd, but you can always roll it in glitter." That is my hope for 2011.

Merry Christmas to All and to All a Goodnight.