It's me!

Someone: Are you SURE? Older adoptees present UNIQUE CHALLENGES

I’m real over it. If I become a foster mom to a 17 year old kid and I get the privilege of the option to adopt them? You better believe I am legally making that kid mine.

“They’ll be a legal adult in no time, why spend the money to adopt? They’ll be aged out of the system.”

There’s no aging out of family, Marvin.

“They might be rebellious or smoke or do drugs or steal things! What if they won’t listen to you?”

Then I guess I’ll have to step up and do some fruxking parenting, Stanley.

“You want to adopt problem children then?”

1. Parenting will be harder. You are adding in the trauma of rejection from other caregivers, and it takes more time and more love to heal that. It isn't a bad thing, but for months maybe years you have to say daily "this is where you belong. You belong with me and I am not going anywhere"

2. They will try and test that statement constantly. You need to have someone to debrief with due to this.

3. Adopting a 17 year old is a great idea. Nothing says "I will always love you" quite like legally making a child part of your family forever.

Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.

(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice - they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

taller, shorter, slimmer, more muscular, purple hair, tattoos everywhere, tattoos nowhere, 

every single shoe would fit you every single time you tried it on, every single article of clothing would fit your perfectly, all you have to do is transform slightly, you’d never run out of ‘your size’ again

~cosplay

~Halloween costumes

~acting

~cosplay

~stretching to reach stuff and shrinking to fit through spaces

~cosplay

~cosplay

I call this set… “Noir Princesses”.

A selection of postcards we have available from our store  here