i love my new friends

i want you to meet Ashley, Albert, Guadalupe, and sweet Haley

         brown-eyed Angel and her big brother George

            The Boys … Xavier, Brandon and Felipe

there are dozens more, but this is good enough for now

they range in age from 5 months to 14 years old

     we love playing Play-doh together ...
                    (i make a cool snake, and an amazing snowman)

     we love to eat food …

              but, they have to show up at a park with their parents on a Sunday

                      and wait for the nice church people to give their family food 

               or they stand in line with food stamps to get their weekly rations

               or they ask the very caring social worker if it's snack time yet

          … i just go to Costco or Trader Joe's and buy all the food and snacks my heart desires 

    we love to watch Madagascar or The Incredibles together, or even a good chick flick

    we love to hang with friends

              but, they have to wait for hours in a park to get new-old clothes

                      when they'd rather hang at the mall, play in the park
                               or just be safe in a home to call their own

         …. i just text my friends and say "wanna get coffee and a gluten-free donut?"

    we all love to sleep in a warm safe place, and be loved by our parents and family 

some of my new friends have very loving parents who want the best for their kids, 

               but language or culture,
                        illness, or even the law has added to the weight of growing up

        addiction, abuse, neglect or abandonment are something they are all too familiar with

kids should not be waiting in a park all day
                      where drug addicts are sleeping off a binge
                      waiting for a fix, tweaking
                      or freaking out from a bad trip

kids should not be so scared in their own home

                so familiar with violence that they've figured out,
                     by two years old,
                where to hide, what not to say, be invisible

they should not have to be taken from their neighborhood, their school, their friends

they should not be afraid of their mom, or not even know who their mom is


BUT this is reality … today
                 in Orange County
                 in Vancouver
                 in Germany, Finland, Thailand, New Zealand, Mexico, Russia, Great Britain ...

I love my new friends!
Some of them live in a place where beautiful people care for children who cannot go back to their own homes - in order to keep them safe. These little ones (and bigger ones too) are waiting for a family to take them to a safe place to live, with their own bed, a fridge to go to to have snacks, and "parents" who bring them to school, take them on vacation, give them birthday gifts.

Some of them live with their parents, or grandparents.
They live in tenement housing or apartments.
They do have shelter and somewhere to sleep - though rarely a bed of their own.
They live with their parents, or a mom or a grandma, who struggle to have enough money for a bus ride, let alone a school uniform.
Weekly they show up at a park,
     not a "beautiful flowers, jungle gym, baseball field" kind of park,
The kind where the bruised and the wounded of the mind sleep, where the addicted, abandoned and broken of our society choose to call home, a tarp to call their bed.
These kids hang out there for hours.
It's what their weekend consists of
      hoping people will show up with meals, water bottles, pizzas, sandwiches, clothes or even shoes in their actual size.

I love my new friends.

Playing Play-doh is a start,
Giving them a hug with one arm and a sandwich with the other,
Asking them their name, and really wanting to know it,
Letting them practice their English while I practice my Spanish,
Feeding them vegetables when all they've had is fried, sugary food,
Holding them and saying good night when they are crying and don't want you to leave cause they're scared of the dark.

I guess it's something
       for me it's not quite enough...
But it's a start.

I love my new friends.


Foster Care - One Family's Story
Foster Care - Another Family's Story
CASA Court Advocate for Children
Orangewood Children's Home - Orange County

Go make some friends today.

The letter ...

I think I was around 9 or 10 years old

I was home from school at lunchtime (it was the 70's)

My mom was in the kitchen, I was sitting in the family room watching the Flintstones or Brady Bunch while eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Then I heard it.

It was a sound I had never heard before
   I had never been touched by anything so raw
                                                       so mournful
                                              so filled with pain

My mom
    my beautiful mother.
       She was one of two kids, twins, a boy and a girl

(I always imagined that I would have twins some day… I really had wanted that huge Brady Bunch, Waltons kind of family)

My mom's twin brother, Uncle Albert, was a tall, handsome, blonde, football player-built kind of man.

I don't have many memories of him.
But I do remember he was quiet and gentle ...and tall

My uncle was not a man who chose to stay put … he traveled, lived in many places.
He was a wanderer.
Maybe that's a symptom.
    He just wasn't physically in our lives very often.

Back to lunchtime - in the 70's - eating my pb&j

A letter.
She was told devastatingly, life-changing news through pen and paper.
No human comfort
No arms to hug her
No eyes of compassion
Just ink on parchment.

Her twin brother had committed suicide in a small hotel room in a small town…alone

Writing that down is hard.
How do you even talk about that?
Why talk about it?

Well … here I am.
Fifty years old - decades later - and it's on my mind.
Suicide … in all it's ugliness, cruelty and violence, it doesn't impact less if it's not spoken about. It impacted me. It changed my young mind and heart forever. It made me aware of a pain. I didn't understand the pain, but I knew it was there. At that moment, when my mom cried out in despair, I recognized that the world was bigger than my Brady Bunch existence.

Many people equate suicide with selfishness … and yes it is self serving in a way. But my tall, handsome, gentle, football player-built uncle was suffering with a disease of the mind.
It's called Schizophrenia.
It took me many years to put all that together.
The journey I'm on
watching my sweet family deal with a mental illness that has affected our family. Yes … not just the one diagnosed but all who love him … we're all impacted

Read  "A Beautiful Mind"

In college I did write a paper about the perceived eternal consequences of taking one's own life… my take on it was not cut and dry. My mom, in the middle of her suffocating grief, taught me the Grace of a God Who sees us, saw my uncle, sees me and mine today. I didn't understand, really, that he was not well. But it makes sense, as much sense as schizophrenia can make, now.
And intense, serious, heart touching moments speaking with my sweet boy about the struggles of his beautiful mind help bring some clarity and maybe just a touch of sense to the invisible diseases that so many suffer with.
Whether someone is consumed with dying, entertains the thought, or feels compelled to finish life on this earth. Or if they act on that driving force and commit the deed. It is suffering beyond my ability to grasp. It makes me weep, it confuses me, and it makes me profoundly grateful for Grace.

Ahhh  this is exhausting stuff.
I think I'm done for now … writing about this