Learning to let go

If there is one thing that this journey though fostering has taught me; is that I am a control freak.

I have this need to control every little thing around me. What the kids are doing, where we are going, what we are doing, when we do it and how.
This I understand isn’t the very nicest quality about me and it has caused a rod for my back especially with Little Man who needs to have my go ahead with every single little thing in his world.

It’s hard becoming a parent to children that aren’t yours. They come with their own personalities that you haven’t helped grow. Morals are different, their life story is different and at times, you are from a completely different world. Things like eating with knives and forks the right way is completely alien, shampoo has never been used and when you hear “mum never washed our clothes” you want to go into your laundry and re-wash everything that has ever had contact with the children so they know what it’s like to know that the smell of washed clothes and know how much of a comforting thing the smell of fresh washed linen can be.

The contact has increased and along with that the blinders that the department have surrounding contact and the children. I find myself spending 50% of my weekend worrying about the boys when they are at an unsupervised contact. I can’t control what is happening in there and I’ve come to dread the anxiety I feel surrounding it. We have a run of great behaviour from the boys and then it starts going downhill at an alarming rate. By Saturday night both boys are up in the clouds and I can feel myself ageing and getting crankier and crankier by the second.

We found out their mother had an extremely inappropriate conversation with The Kid and I had to walk away before I lost my temper in front of the children. I will never understand why a mother feels the need to tell her autistic son she “got rid of a little baby because kids are too much of a handful” The waves of anger I feel when think about it still almost knocks me off my feet. We asked The Kid what he thought it meant and he said that he thought that it was ‘like exterminating someone’.
Wonderful.
This just shows me that they aren’t ready to parent any kind of children. I’m getting concussion from smacking my head against the departments brick wall.

We had a beautiful Mother’s Day morning with the boys. The day before Little Man had an afternoon tea at school that he invited me to. I was met at the door by Little Man where we took a picture together and then he was my waiter for the afternoon. The children had spent the morning making sugar cookies and icing them, mini quiches and fruit kebabs and decorating the classroom. They sung us a song and then gave us gifts to open on Sunday morning.
It was one of those moments that I will hold with me forever.
The boys made me a card each, The Kid bought me an iTunes card (to help with my Candy Crush addiction) and Little Man bought me a Best Mum mug and made me a book mark with his smiling face on it.
The best part of the whole Mothers Day thing was looking at the pictures the kids had drawn at school about their mums. I was curious to see if he had drawn his mum and was touched to see he had drawn me and him. The caption was “I love my mum Sass because she gives the best hugs and goes on the computer with me”

It made my life.