Clearwater Fit

How does one know a great writer? When one studies a written scenario and agrees with it like was a real situation. I enjoy tearing apart his reasoning and putting it back together just like a study of Shakespeare or Confucius. Thank you for making your novels come to life. Write on, sir!

Al,
I've been a foster mom for years. It's one of the hardest jobs I know. They brought the roughest drugged out babies to our home. One came to us not speaking English or Spanish. Poor kid could only cry help me and milk. He was only in a diaper that was severely stuck to his butt in the middle of January in Oregon. He came from a huge drug bust where 27 children were stuck in one bedroom filled with loaded needles of meth and heroine. This little guy had to be constantly monitored. He'd stay up 72 hrs straight and if he wasn't monitored he'd stick his thumb up his nose so hard to make it bleed and paint with it. Needless to say with 7 children in our home, staying up 72 hrs straight and napping when they'd all crash, was exhausting. His mother walked in to DHS and stated that we had her kid, she was in Cali on a drug run and left him with the people at the apartment. She didn't know who actually had him. She gave them his name but said he really doesn't know it. They were able to put together who I had. He wasn't 2 or early 3 years old. He was 5 years old and only knew how to say help me and milk. She's left him before with strangers and they always have a room for children while she went off and did her thing. She bragged about leaving him one place and actually having to investigate over a month to find him. Of course there was partying and selling while she was looking. She finally found him and left him with these friends of hers so she could go to Cali with a guy and sell. She was currently using so she knew that they wouldn't hand him back to her and turned herself in. The child was high as a kite when he came to us. Tripping out. I took him to the Dr and had him checked out. Do you know DHS will not approve of HIV testing of these children that are exposed to this life style? They won't even approve it if both parents are HIV+!!! We had our own three in our home. With this one jamming his nose to bleed and paint himself with it, well its worrisome. Fortunately I had an awesome pediatrician that was very protective of my family. She tested all of the children for free.
We had kids that needed psychological treatment. I had to learn aphelia therapy to work with several of these children. They didn't understand what it was like to have a parent pay attention to you and play ball, have them do fun projects with you. Failure to thrive was a huge issue for this little guy. In one year I managed to work with Dr's psychologists and early intervention and caught the little guy up on his speech. I did speech therapy for a long time with students. I got him into a regular schedule of sleep with the assistance of our dr. He gained weight, caught up on his size and was potty trained before preschool. Then they started integrating him back to mom. I noticed she was pregnant. DHS freaked when I asked how far along she was. They had no idea, she was wearing a sweatshirt. She was in a half way house and two urine tests came out dirty. When they approached her about the baby, she freaked and told them that this is her third baby and they were never getting this one. They didn't know about baby #3! She sold her for drug money to a couple trying to have a baby. She got a lot out of it and didn't remember the parents names or she would have brought our little guy to their attention and DHS would be none the wiser. She left the office and ran. Weeks went by. No one heard anything from her. She was either in the wind or dead. Her boyfriend at the time was an illegal from Mexico.
I could write my own book just in the scary poop a foster parent goes through. We even had a child that ended up institutionalize. She was hurting her sister and herself and blaming it on the old foster parents. She attacked my daughter in the middle of the night. Biting her so hard it bled. When I got her off of my baby girl, I took her downstairs with my hubby. She was really not there with us. It was someone else. When that someone else left and she came back, she asked why she was in the living room. We knew we had a problem. It started to happen during the day. The psychologist actually figured that there were two other personalities that would come out during sessions and recommended the sisters be separated for safety issues, and only in a home of older children or older couples. The next couple lasted a week, the personalities were showing up more often and the cruel one tried to drown their dog in their pool and cut of one of their birds wings. That's when the state sadly had to put her in psychiatric care. My heart broke for that poor girl. Her sister was adorable and had taken the brunt of her older sisters brutality. When her sister left us it was like the little one could finally breath. She would get out of her spot on the couch and come do things with the other kids. After a meeting with the previous and the last foster parents we figured that the little one was always afraid that if she moved she would be punished. Then her sister blamed the marks on the previous Foster parents who had lost their right to foster care children and were being investigated for child abuse. I had taken photo's of the bruising when they arrived at our home, I took photo's of every attack in our home. I kept record of her conversations with herself, even recorded it for the therapist to listen. The pitch in the voice changed, the attitude could be heard and felt in her words. She was a very smart and calculating 5 year old!!! So when we all sat down, I gave copies of my notes to DHS to decide if they'd share with the other parents and told them that I had the tape and the therapist wanted that and it was to be played at the meeting. After the meeting they cleared the other Foster parents of any wrong doing and apologized, then asked if they could take one little girl for a while. They thanked them and said it was nice to have an apology, after all the meetings with police investigators, DHS shunning them they graciously declined.