This topic today may or may not apply to you (which is something that can be said for all of my topics) but today I want to talk about the other kids in your home.
So what do I mean by that? Well, I’m coming at this from the presumption that if you are fostering or have adopted, there might be more than one child in your home AND there’s at least one kiddo in your home that needs a little bit more of you. I realize also it’s possible that it’s a biological child that needs more of you. If there’s more than one child in the home, I am just making an assumption that there is probably not an equal balance of your time because at least one child needs more attention.
That’s definitely true in our family’s home. Our youngest, who was adopted through foster care, has a lot of needs and requires a greater percentage of our time than our other two. Granted, our older ones are 11 and 13 years older than him and are adults at this point.
All that set up to say: I wish I could say that I did a better job of taking the advice that I am about to give, but I really did not feel like I had margin at the time. I probably did, in all honesty, but I just did not choose it. I don’t even know if it occurred to me. I was so overwhelmed with caring for a medically-fragile baby that the other boys were pushed to the side. Now, even years following his adoption, our youngest son continues to require a lot of us…as well as anyone whom he’s with.
My point in all this and my encouragement today is to spend time with your other kids. The ones who don’t seem to require as much of your time. If they are neurotypical and not come from trauma, they have possibly taken a backseat in many ways. And because they’re neurotypical, they have probably not necessarily told you or shown you that they need you.
But they definitely still need you. And even more so than you might believe.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I got all wrapped up in being a foster parent and lost a lot of myself to that identity. And one of the things I will admit that I seemed to forget for a while was that I was biological mother to two amazing kids who still needed me. And even though they’re now adults, they still need me. Obviously it looks different now, but it is still important to feed into those relationships, apart from the child with the additional needs.
For instance, we love to do things together as a family (or with as many of us as possible). But one of the boys who is home from college for the summer and preparing for his senior year…and he recently discovered that he likes to do puzzles.
Now we would work on puzzles sometimes as part of our homeschool day when he was younger and he would always complain about it…so I (and he) had always assumed that this just wasn’t his jam. But we recently took a big family vacation a couple months ago and we were supposed to have Wi-Fi in the apartment where we stayed, but we never were able to connect to it. They did, however, have a stash of puzzles there, so we started doing puzzles in our free time instead of staring at a screen. He and I were the ones most engaged in it and that has continued since we’ve been back.
And since we’ve been doing this together, I have realized this is probably the first thing ever that he and I have done together without anyone else…just the two of us. And that makes me so sad that he’s 21 years old and we just now figured this out.
But the fact that he is leaning into this and asking me to spend time with him to work on a puzzle…even going so far as to buy puzzles for us to do…it shows me that he wants that time with me.
So, I guess all that to say is don’t neglect your relationships with your other kids, even if they seem fine, or even if they seem like they don’t need you. They do need you and a connection to you. They might not even realize how much.
Sincerely,
Kris