My wife and I just finished a weekend respite care session with a group of siblings. After all the horrific experiences I have heard, the war-stories I was expecting, all i can think is, "well, huh. at the risk of throwing the universe out of adjustment: that was easy."
I'm not saying we had a perfect "peaches and roses" weekend. but i really had feared a far more chaotic "adventure" than what we experienced. i know there are a lot of kids in care, and most of them have (shall we call it) extra luggage. but these siblings were relatively well-adjusted, respectful, and not at all like i was expecting. i felt a little left out of the conversations, because they whispered to each other more often than they didn't. but then again, i was only an outsider to any of it anyway. i wasn't really expecting them to open up quickly and explain their entire life-stories to us, but i guess i just wasn't expecting what we got. Others have it tougher, i know. but for us, it really mostly consisted of them playing video games on their kindle tablets, having three days of glee-marathons on the netflix, and not a lot of excitement.
at least that was my experience.
at one meal, the conversation turned how it did naturally, with me mentioning that my wife was good friends with some radio personalities, and they admitted that their parent was also, and then my wife and they traded names around and found that she had been close friends with one of their parents as a youth. it was a little surprising to learn that the parent of these kids was one of her childhood friends, that she knew the friend's parents and grandparents by name. suddenly i began to consider how differently the lives had diverged in course from the time they were friends and mostly similar to how their lives had developed to date. with a few different choices, my wife could be in a similar situation to her friend, our kids in foster-care, with periodic visitations only. and i think back on the historic line, slightly modified, "There, but for the Grace of God, go my children."
I think honestly to myself that it may not take much to put my family in a similar situation. how many choices would it take to secure my children in the foster system? how many poor decisions would i need to make before i find myself in jail, my kids in the custody of the state? how many times have i narrowly avoided a similar situation, the whole time oblivious to how close i had come to losing my family, possibly permanently? sometimes hindsight isn't 20/20, but blindness altogether.
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