Being A Parent

Every night I come home from work and sit down at my computer to read the news. I keep hoping for some good news, something that someone did just out of kindness or some heroic measure that someone took for another and despite the holiday season, I see nothing.

I have been following the story of two adoptive/foster parents who are being accused of child abuse for caging their children at night.

They claim that the children were a danger to themselves and to one another. They claim that this was done for their own safety. Not only did they cage the children, but they also forced one boy to sleep for eighty-one days in a bathtub because he had a bed wetting problem.

Now I have a serious issue with this. I have a child who had a bed wetting issue and here is what I did at night when she woke up cold and crying. I got up, ran a warm bath for her, changed her sheets and put on clean blankets before sweeping her out of the tub and back into bed, all the while telling her that accidents happen and she was still my angel. For almost a year this was our nightly ritual. Then, a light bulb went off and I started waking her up in the middle of the night and walking her to the bathroom. I won't say she's never had an accident since then, but they are few and far between.

Was it tiring? Yes. Was it frustrating? Hell yes. Where there times I just wanted to sleep through it? Oh yeah. But you see, this is what parenting is all about. Helping your children find a way to overcome this kinds of things, and teaching them how to deal with it if it can't be overcome.

Where the hell was the state in this case? Why did they accept more children if they couldn't handle the ones they had without putting them in cages with alarms and chicken wire? Let me tell you why, because the state needed a place to put them, and they were willing to pay.

Many people think that foster homes that do this to their charges are few and far between. Let me tell you, as I was a foster child, having lived in about fourteen different foster homes, this is the normal. I can recall being drug out of my bed before the sun came up, being given a piece of toast and shoved outside to weed the garden as a punishment for talking out of turn. I can recall having a fork poked into my elbow hard enough to draw blood because I put my elbows on the table during dinner. I can recall sitting in a corner for the three hours every Sunday that they entertained dinner after church and being pointed at and compared to a dog.

I am sure that there are some foster homes out there that love the children that come into their lives. I am sure that some of these foster parents go into it because they want to make a difference, but they are the exception, not the rule.

I am going to go up now and kiss each of my sleeping children and whisper how much I love them into their ears. Perhaps they will sleep peacefully knowing that they are loved, cherished and protected by the people they expect to do so. I am going to go up and be a parent.