The first time we meet him is at his foster home, an old farmhouse with a rambling yard. Jake and Keaton were moved to this foster home a few months earlier, after things deteriorated with a previous foster home. Their social worker Craig described the ugliness of quickly collecting their belongings in garbage bags and bringing the boys here – all on Jake’s sixth birthday.
There’s us, Craig, foster Mom and Dad, older foster sister and younger foster brother named Foster. And Jake and Keaton. And a large German Shepherd.
We’re invited in through the mud room. This is where we meet Jake. He’s with the dog, sharing a fat carrot. He’s holding it out, and the dog is gnawing at it, groove marks from his canine teeth visible. When I say fat carrot, I mean the kind you feed to a horse. There’s a hip-high bag of these carrots, with the circumference of a donut. We know he’s been sharing it, because Jake is orange from cheek to cheek, from the tip of his nose to his chin. And before we’ve even said a word or locked eyes, I love him even more.
In an instant, Jake is Jake. Completely unafraid of and in love with the large dog who is torn between barking at us and eating his treat. The boy with dog scratches on his arms and stitches over his left eye. And a boy who, when he’s into something, is all in. At that moment, it was carrots.
As Craig makes introductions and we settle in, we learn that the stitches happened over the holidays. The kids were learning in-line skating on the shag carpet. The foster Mom, Tracey figured it was safe because the shag kept it all low-speed. But Jake was eager to show the Christmas tree to a visitor and forgot the sofa had been moved and skated right into it and hit the wooden arm with his eyebrow which the boys proclaimed produced a magnificent pouring of blood.
The story made me realize that these boys were ours and not-ours. With a planned period of getting to know each other before making the move, it made me uneasy how I had to trust all these other folks to take care of our boys. The people who had been caring for them before we even knew they existed.
It was a strange mix of feelings – powerful responsibility and haplessness. I had the boys tucked on a shelf in my mind, to come to life only in my presence. It had been a month since knowing we were selected to be their parents. A month of breakfasts, classes, recesses, dinners, bath times, dreams and nightmares. And we had no say or part in any of it.
To be clear, the stitches incident wasn’t anybody’s fault. In fact after witnessing the shag carpet skating myself, I thought his foster mother was brilliant and could make a fortune with beginner in-line skate training in shag carpet studios. Seriously, zero speed hazards and a soft ground for spills.
The stitches brought their fragility into focus, and our dependence on the commitment and ability of these strangers to keep them safe. It was a keen awakening of my protective mother lioness. But my cubs lived in another savannah and I could only see them on a schedule.
We did lots of training and research before heading into adoption. We learned how key routine is. In our case, we knew the boys had had no routine and little supervision in their home life before foster care. We wanted to carry over as much familiarity as possible to ease the transition.
After dinner, I sit with Tracey on the infamous sofa to go over routines and preferences. Bed times, chores, favourite foods, toys, activities, what they love, what they hate. I’m a good student, taking notes. We hear sniffling and Jake skates up to the sofa with a booboo. Tracey understands what’s happening and settles back on the sofa. He places himself right between the two of us, looking down.
It was a textbook scenario: adoptive children need to find out if they can trust the new parents, and instinctively put them to the test. Within hours of meeting me, Jake literally placed himself between foster mom and new mom with a typical mommy issue to see who would take care of him.
Fervently thankful for this super foster mom, I lean forward to examine and question and comfort in a soothing tone. He looks at me with his orange-tinged face, decides it doesn’t need a band-aid and skates off. Tracey and I look at each other in wonder. I had passed my first Mom test.