Leaning into the Light

The little blonde boy hops down from his power wheel and runs to my side. He plants a kiss on my cheek and another on the top of my head, then charges back to the waiting John Deere. Landing next to my other foster son, the two race away to fight dragons and catch fairies somewhere in the backyard.

Soon, they return, each presenting me with careful, cupped hands holding fairies from the woods. We talk to their captives, exchange names and pleasantries before the duo heads back toward adventure. By the fifth lap, the whine of their carriage indicates a dying battery. A little magic turns their plastic scooters into horses, and they climb aboard. I sit in my beach chair on the front pavement in awe of the transformation before me.

This child with the fresh cut hair and sneaky smile hardly resembles the one brought to this driveway four short months ago. His are the same eyes, the same white blonde widow’s peak, but there are times like this one where his presence seems wholly changed. I watch the two boys play together without pinching fingers or shoving matches. They laugh and take turns. We go entire minutes without tears or anyone screaming my name. As the early sun peeks through the canopy above, they delight in one another’s company – a feat so unimaginable during the initial adjustment period. That’s not to say we aren’t still adjusting.

Every day, we adjust to each other’s needs, tiptoe around fears, inadvertently excavate each other’s flaws. Every day, the unnaturalness of the whole thing becomes a smidge more comfortable – sometimes for an hour, other times, just a moment. It is hard on mornings like this not to wonder how long these two playmates will ride off into the woods together. It is hard to not know how this will all change and how we will all change because of it.

But these things cannot be foretold, so I shift my focus to the tasks of today – to bring a sense of normalcy to the children in my care, to salvage some bit of normalcy for myself, to stay afloat despite the turmoil simmering all around us, to pour love into children who are both eager and reluctant to accept it.

We are held at arm’s length much of the time. The angry cries echo through this house almost nightly, making these golden sunrise mornings so necessary. Without them and the shred of hope they provide, I might have walked away after only a few steps. Parenting children with trauma histories is traumatic in itself. Watching a child spiral into fury forces me to stare at my own shortcomings as I try and fail to calm myself time after maddening time. To hold the stress and dysregulation and buried pain of others is no easy task, especially for those of us still working on ourselves.

The next time the boys reach the pavement, they are no longer interested in kisses or fairies. My youngest runs off as the other dismounts, then throws his horse to the ground. He stares at it, then gives it a kick. The thrust of his tiny foot does little harm, so he picks up the scooter and slams it against the concrete.

“It’s not nice to treat your horse like that,” I say, uncertain of whether he is angry at the imaginary stallion, the scooter hiding beneath it, or the cruel world at large.

The little boy I first met in the driveway emerges. He kicks the toy again, picks it up and shoves it back to the pavement. He does this repeatedly until I am able to catch his gaze.

“We can’t treat the things we love like that,” a lesson I have had to learn and relearn over the years.
He erupts into his siren cry, and my chest constricts. We’ve been through this routine so. many. times. before. Each time, his sudden burst of emotion engulfs the space between us, chips away another piece of me, threatens to pull my own screams from deep inside my gut.

He wails, empties all of his pain into the peaceful morning. The sound alone could do me in. His volume grows and grows, and soon, I want to scream and cry and throw the scooter. I picture the scooter busted into a thousand shredded plastic pieces. I see it scattered across the concrete. My arms tense, then shake, and I think I might actually grab it. I think I might destroy that scooter myself just to drown out his screams. But it’s never about the scooter. This I know, and he needs to know, too.

I take one slow, prolonged breath. I remember that I am not the child here. Why is that always so easy to forget?

“What’s going on, buddy? Why are you upset?” He looks at his fallen steed, then at me.

“Don’t know! Don’t know!” he shouts, eyes darting back and forth, searching. Then, finally…

“Me so sad!” he exclaims, then buries his red face in my neck. I hold him, our morning expanding into so much more than fairies and foster brothers. For the first time since his arrival, this child has given voice to what hides inside all of us. Naming our hurt is a challenge for grown-ups, let alone a four-year-old child. Yet, here he stands, a little boy boldly unpacking his sadness as the sun streams overhead.

My chest loosens as I squeeze him tighter. He is the same boy who was brought here, and yet, he is not, just as I am the same woman he ran from that first day, and yet, I am not. Together, we are growing. We are practicing patience while staring at the pain. We are pushing ourselves beyond what we used to be. Instead of something to run from, I have become something to run to, and morning by morning, he is learning he doesn’t have to hide. It is warm here in the sun. The light heals so much faster than the dark.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Grace