Love Regardless

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Without further ado, today’s pocket.

In one of my recent therapy sessions, I tried to explain to my therapist why things have felt so hard with Mateo lately. (If you are new here, Mateo is our nine, soon to be ten-year-old, foster son who returned to live with us in May, after living with his birth family for almost three years.) “He gets so mad over stupid stuff,” I told her. He contradicts everything I say. He yells a lot, like a lot, about stuff that makes no sense.” I was relieved to talk about it but also frustrated that I couldn’t explain the reason it was bothering me so much. I left therapy with more questions than answers.

And then, on a Friday morning in January, I found myself in our high school auditorium listening to a guest speaker that our Shades Club had brought in for the MLK Jr. Con. Michael Bethely, a local businessman, community leader and public speaker, was speaking to us about love.

“Have you ever been kind to someone who hasn’t been kind to you?” Michael asked the students. “Have you ever loved someone who didn’t love you back? It sucks, right?” except he didn’t use the word sucks because he was in our high school auditorium, and there’s a sense of decorum, but we knew what he meant. “Martin Luther King Jr. was the most hated man of his time, but he preached about love,” Michael said. He went on to speak about what it means to love regardless. When you “love regardless,” he said, “it’s not about them, it’s about you.”

“If you don’t love regardless, hate controls the situation.”

Ah, I thought. I know how hard it is to love someone who is making it really hard to love them. I know what it feels like to lose control of the situation.

In a professional training I participated in once, we watched what was supposed to be an inspirational Ted Talk video of a foster parent who refused to give up on their kid no matter what they did. Their kid did some not so great things. The video was meant for teachers, to inspire us not to give up on kids, to be that one person that could make a difference for them. I’m not sure if anyone else in the audience was, like me, actually a foster parent. I was humbled by the speaker’s words, and at the same time, I was like, I don’t know about all that.

What I do know, from lots of experience, is that it’s really hard to move from a place of love when someone’s rage is directed at you, even if they are a child.

The day before Michael spoke to us about love, I came home and noticed the house felt unusually warm. I checked the thermostat. We normally keep it around 60 degrees, and it was at 72. I thought maybe the system had reset somehow, or it had malfunctioned. Later that night, after walking Kam, I came in the house, hung Kam’s leash up, and again felt like the house was warmer than normal. The thermostat was set to 84 degrees. Fortunately, it had only risen to 62 degrees in the time I took Kam to the park and back. I side eyed the boys who were seated together at the dining room table. “Seabass, did you raise the heat?”

“No.”

“Mateo, Did you raise the heat?”

“Yes.” He didn’t deny it.

I inhaled and calmly explained that he was not to touch the thermostat. Please understand, he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He agreed not to touch the thermostat anymore. I chalked it up to a lack of understanding. I didn’t mention it to Dan.

The next day, the same day as the MLK con, Mateo did not have school because of parent teacher conferences. Dan was working from home and taking care of him. The plan was for Dan to go into work in the afternoon and for me to go with Mateo to the teacher conference at the end of my workday. When I shared the plan with Mateo before leaving for work, he yelled at me. “Why didn’t you ask me? I don’t want to go to the stupid conference. I can’t read.” I had to get to work, so I left the conversation unfinished, again more questions than answers, and asked Dan if he could talk with him.

Later that day, listening to Michael speak, I got an idea. It was a simple idea, but it was a good one. I would take Mateo to a late lunch, before the conference. Recently, I coined the phrase M and M time, which stands for Mama and Mateo time. I did this after reflecting with a friend about how I felt like I wasn’t giving Mateo enough of my time. This attention to the time we spend together has shifted things a little. It reminds Mateo that he is special and important, and it reminds me that I’m doing things for him. My experience might not be worthy of a Ted Talk, and I might have a long way to go before I am loving regardless, but I could take an angry kid to lunch.

I left the MLK con, knowing what I needed to do, and then I got a text from Dan. He figured out what was going on with the heat, he said. (I wonder if other families take the heat this seriously, or if our sleuth work just makes us look insane.) Dan found Mateo laying on the radiator, the thermostat set to 75 degrees. Our radiators are wide and lovely, the kind that you can only find in a house built a hundred years ago. There is one right below the large living room window that makes a decent seat. We mostly use it to heat our gloves, hats and ski boots. Mateo had used it to create his very own sauna.

I wish that I could tell you that my heart melted thinking of Mateo laying down on the radiator, to feel its warmth, but that’s not what happened. Again, not that Ted Talk guy. I was angry, and when I’m angry, I have trouble seeing the periphery. I wasn’t focused on him seeking warmth. I was focused on the fact that he had gone and done something he specifically agreed he would not do. Yesterday. I felt betrayed.

I texted Dan that I was scrapping my plan. “We will not be going to lunch,” I angrily announced. Like every other angry person ever, I believed I was taking control of the situation. Fortunately, my body stepped in. My stomach growled. I needed to eat. The words from Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” came to me. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” First lunch, and then maybe that.

When I got home, I told Mateo that he would have a consequence because he lied about raising the heat. “I didn’t lie,” he said. Papa asked me, and I said it was me.”

Touché.

“Yes, you told the truth and that was good, but also, I specifically asked you not to touch the thermostat last night, and you agreed, so you broke my trust.” He accepted that, and he didn’t argue with me about losing electronics for the rest of the day. I think the offer of lunch together softened things. In the car, though, he proceeded to yell at me from the backseat about “the stupid conference. You didn’t even ask me,” he said, his voice escalating.

I explained to him how it was my responsibility as his guardian to go to the conference, how he didn’t have to come in, he could wait outside the room if he wanted, but he should probably come in because his teacher was definitely going to say nice things about him.

“What if she talks smack about me?” he asked.

“She wouldn’t do that,” I said.

He knew his teacher too well to argue that point. Instead, he told me about another teacher who would, and I believed him. There are lots of teachers who make kids feel big, and there are also some that make them feel small. “I’m angry,” he said. “I’m really mad.” He raised his voice again. I told him he could be mad, but he couldn’t yell. I practiced loving regardless.

We were going to lunch at The Grain Shed, one of my favorite places. He’d never been. He asked if we could go to My Fresh Basket instead. He knew what to expect there. As we exited the car, he slammed the door. I cringed. A voice inside of me wanted to turn us around. Ungrateful kids shouldn’t get special treats. I ignored the voice. Instead, I listened to another voice, a wiser one, that Michael had triggered with his words about what it means to love regardless. I kept on walking to the bakery, Mateo a few steps behind.

He ran to catch up to me, and as we approached the patio, the smell of fresh bread wafted our way. Mateo looked at me and smiled, “It smells really good.”

I smiled back at him. “It’s so good,” I said. “I think you’re going to love it.” He grabbed my hand, and we walked in together.

Once inside, we got in line. The menu was written on a chalkboard above the counter. I started reading off some of the items to him. “What do you usually get?” he asked. I told him I always get the breakfast sando, and he said he’d have that too. His eyes darted to a picture of hot chocolate, and I asked him if he would like one. He nodded his head eagerly. I ordered our lunch and our drinks, and I let him pick out a cookie to share. We found a table, and while we waited for our food, we sat and chatted about what to expect at the conference. “I’ve never been to one before,” he told me. The school district keeps track of conferences with a parent signature sheet. When I signed the sheet at the initial conference Dan and I had with his teacher in August, I noticed that Mateo had signed his own signature for every conference that occurred in the time he was away from us. In two and a half years, no one had showed up for him.

Over lunch, he asked a few times if we would be late. “No,” I told him. “We’re okay”.

“Will we be early?” He asked. He was nervous, but his anger had dissipated like the marshmallows in his hot chocolate, which he noted, there could be more of.

“We’ll be alright,” I said.

And we were.

At the conference, his teacher said the nicest things. I’m grateful that he has a teacher that knows how to make little people feel big. She showed us the chart where Mateo’s reading level was still very much in the red, but no one focused on that. We focused instead on how he raised his score by almost thirty points. Huge growth. That’s what it’s about right now, not success but growth… in reading, in foster parenting, in loving regardless.

For the rest of the day, Mateo told the rest of the family about his scores. Each story involved a different number. He told Papa he scored 130, he told Seabass 150. When he talked to Anna on the phone, it was 120. He couldn’t remember the actual number, and neither could I. It didn’t matter. He was so proud of himself, and he wasn’t afraid of parent teacher conferences anymore.

At some point, I remembered the radiator. I thought about its warmth, and I imagined what that warmth must feel like on the body. I thought about how hot showers work like that for me, how the heat does more than warm me. It dissipates my stress and restores me to my body in the healthiest way. It is good for my nervous system. That night, when I was reading to Mateo at bedtime, and we were having some more M and M time, I told him that we can raise the heat sometimes when we’re together. “I will raise the thermostat,” I said. One or two degrees, I thought, as opposed to twenty-five, but I kept that part to myself, “and you can lay on the radiator.” And let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. He liked that idea, and I did too. Like the radiator, it felt warm.

Speaking of Keeping People Warm… Here’s a link where you can donate to an Emergency Rent Fund in Minnesota. Kudos to Garrett Bucks and Erin Boyle for getting this going and helping families stay safe.

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