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Driven to fill a need Joe Zavala Sunday Nov 27, 2016 at 2:00 AM Joe Zavala Ashland Daily Tidings @Joe_Zavala99 Stress and sleep deprivation both are considered major triggers for Meniere’s Disease-related vertigo attacks, to which I'm prone. So my wife and I have decided to become foster parents again.  Normally, it takes months to log the required training sessions, but we opted for the express training — three 12-hour sessions over three consecutive days on a recent Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Now we’re just waiting for the call, which may light up my iPhone at any moment or not until next year, or anytime between now and then.  We expect to have at least one foster child living with us sooner than later. Why? According to a letter signed by Oregon juvenile court judges that ran in the Medford Mail Tribune in August, the need here is so great foster children have been forced to sleep on cots in state offices and in motel rooms, supervised by case workers. That sounds third-worldish to me. I told my wife, who’s one of those people who, upon hearing such things, feels compelled to do something about it rather than post a video on Facebook like a normal human. So on the morning of Nov. 4, I found myself sitting along with 43 fellow future foster or adoptive parents in a large, stale conference room in the DHS building in northeast Medford, learning what it means to be a substitute caregiver while mom and/or dad get it together.  It was mostly review for Team Zavala. We were in our mid-20’s and living in The Dalles, Oregon, the first time we signed up to be what my wife’s friend (another foster parent) calls a glorified babysitter. Over the next six years we cared for eight children. Their ages ranged from only a few months old to 12, and their stays with us ranged from a single night to, for a brother-sister combination, a full year.  I’d be lying if I said it was easy, that we weren’t pushed well past what we thought we could handle over and over again. But it was all worth it. The 9-1-1 calls (two of those), the screaming fits, the chronic lying, the smeared feces on the bathroom wall, the grocery store meltdowns, all of it.  So, some 15 years later, we’re throwing our hats back in the octagon. Our certification had expired, hence the training sessions, which are required I believe partly to equip, partly to weed out those whose heart led them this far but, upon learning of the immense challenges that lie ahead, perhaps no further. Just get a load of the titles of the videos available via the Oregon Post Adoption Resource Center: “Living with an angry child,” “Raising Children Who Refuse to be Raised,” “Parenting the Explosive Child,” and my personal favorite, “The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children.”  Sings, don’t it?  The training was broken down into eight sessions (actually nine; don’t think I didn’t notice that section eight was divided into 8A and 8B) and, by the time we hit section 2.5 (“what to do when I’m mad”), I half expected three-quarters of the audience to start filing out like the last five minutes of a Blazers-Nets blowout. See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya, maybe next time. But no, everybody stuck it out, even the woman behind me whose wet, hacking cough became the unofficial soundtrack of our “Foundations Training for Caregivers” weekend.  The trainees were a mixed bag: roughly a third were interested in adoption, about half had their hearts set on a specific child — usually a relative — and the rest of us were training to become plain old community foster parents. A few were from Ashland, most Medford. No matter our chosen specialty, we all received the same training. Some examples of section titles: “Child development and the impact of abuse”; “Sexual abuse”; “Behavior management”; “Valuing the child’s heritage”; “Working with the child’s family.”  A great deal of the training involved simply listening to trainers break down the topics, but there were also some small group exercises and a few videos. In small groups, we were usually tasked with reading a scenario and brainstorming solutions. One scenario, for instance, described a foster mom discovering her 6-year-old birth son, Billy, and 5-year-old foster daughter, Jane, naked under a ping-pong table. The questions: “Why is this child acting in a sexual way? Could it be normal sexual growth and development? The result of sexual abuse? How should a substitute caregiver handle this situation?”  Our group concluded that while most ping pong matches do not end this way — I’d ballpark it at less than 10 percent — it’s important to remain calm, talk to each child, separately, about what happened and why, discuss boundaries and notify the caseworker. I thought we aced it, until somebody pointed out that our genius checklist didn’t include asking the kids to put their clothes back on. Rookie mistake.  The final hour of the training was probably my favorite. Two foster moms sat before the class and talked candidly about their experience, offered advice, told stories and answered questions. One had cared for more than 100 foster children, the other around 40. They opened up their homes, they explained, simply because they wanted to help, and because they could think of no reason not to. These are our community’s angels, I believe. You’ve probably seen them at the supermarket or park toting bags under their eyes, followed closely by four or five little ones, a rainbow of hair and skin colors. It’s a thankless job that doesn’t pay much and only requires most of your time and all your heart. Because regardless of what you think about the birth parents or family, the vast majority of these children will return home (every one of our foster children did). And you’ll miss them. Then, you’ll be asked to do it all again.  The foster moms did share some success stories — one called these her “goose-bump stories” — but it was their accounts of everyday struggles, of wrapping their lives around countless visits with parents and specialists and their arms around children beat down by an unfair world that, for me at least, most accurately captured the foster parent experience.  As they spoke, I looked around the room and saw the looks on the faces of my fellow trainees, those future “substitute caregivers,” and many of them looked like I felt — apprehensive, maybe a little concerned. OK, terrified. But for me at least, that’s not because I’m afraid we won’t be able to handle it. It’s because now that we’ve heard the stories, seen the pictures and learned about the challenges these children face (and will continue to face long after they leave our home), yet another inconvenient reality has revealed itself, which is that we simply have no other choice. Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @Joe_Zavala99.