Monthly Archives: February 2024

Foster care – rising to the challenge and finding the fun in ‘playing the game’

parenting, personal development

It’s been over a week with all the kids home sick.

When I started feeling under the weather, did I do anything I would tell someone else to do to boost their immune system?

No, I did not.

I so infrequently get sick that I thought that would be unnecessary.

Well, after spending three and a half days in bed while my husband took off from work to take care of me and the kids, I can say I was wrong.

A nice thing about having to rest is it gives one a lot of time to think. My mind has been churning on a few topics and I’m making significant progress on them all. It’s quite exciting.

In my last post, I shared that we will be having a surprise visit to check on our home and the kids. This was very stressful for me to think about.

The first day everyone was home sick, the kids were all sleeping in the living room and on the patio outside for hours. I couldn’t go anywhere, but I didn’t need to do much for them because they were all sleeping all day long. I got lots done in the kitchen, and as I was working throughout that day, I was picturing what it would look like if someone would come in at various points.

Even though I was on top of everything and the kids weren’t active so they didn’t make any messes, it became clear that even in the very best of circumstances my house can never be spotless when people are actively living in it.

I cook everything from scratch, so there’s constant peeling or slicing or whizzing in the food processor. I don’t use disposable dishes and combined with cooking from scratch, that means there are constantly pots and dishes being used and needing to be washed. I don’t have cleaning help. I do kitchen projects like making pickles or homemade apple cider which take up counter space (I strained my apple cider that very afternoon). I often get large quantities of produce that can be sitting around waiting to be processed or put away. That afternoon I put two huge pans of dried chickpeas on the counter to soak to prepare for canning.

One gaping flaw in the design of my home is that when you enter, you walk directly into the kitchen. It’s beyond absurd to have the mostly highly used room in the home be the first thing people see. Do you know how unrealistic it is to always have your kitchen company ready? It wasn’t actually designed like this, but the contractor took a shortcut in all the houses and reversed the location of the living room and kitchen rather than sticking to the plans.

At the end of that day of watching myself doing all that I do, it was clear to me that I could not and would not allow this woman in my home on the spur of the moment. It doesn’t matter how organized I am, how hard I work – it’s just impossible for me to have a home that looks like people don’t live here when so many people do. I called my social worker the next day and informed her that person is welcome to come any time she wants, but as would anyone else who wants to visit, she can call me to set up a time.

That was very freeing, and took away most of the stress I was feeling. While things can get very messy in the course of the day, I don’t have a problem having the house very clean for a scheduled visit.

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I wasn’t sure how this boundary was going to be received and in fact didn’t set this sooner because I felt hamstrung by my concern for the kids. I don’t want her to get so angry that she would feel she had an excuse to pull them from us, but I have to protect my boundaries. My home is my sanctuary, my safe place, and I can’t allow that to be taken from me.

I’ve had to make my peace with her threats to remove them. My social worker said she’s never going to be able to find someone else to take both children, but that was scant reassurance for me. I know it’s not a priority to her if they stay together or even if they end up in a family home. I believe she would be fine with placing them in an educational institution as soon as they’re old enough (I believe some children’s villages accept children at the age of six).

During the day I’m pretty matter of fact about the threats to remove them if I don’t do exactly what she wants, but twice in the last ten days I’ve had intense nightmares involving the twins being taken away. I woke up a couple of nights ago to my husband very worriedly bent over me – he said I was screaming in my sleep. I’ve never, ever done that in my life. This brought me to contemplating why I was reacting to this threat like this, to try to create some emotional distance.

I look at the twins sometimes and my heart clutches knowing how vulnerable they are.
Since they have challenging behaviors that require a lot of patience and understanding that most people don’t consistently have, the likelihood of abuse is high if placed somewhere else. They are so trusting of us, and it’s because they feel safe that so many of their behaviors have calmed down or disappeared. It pains me knowing how limited my ability to protect them is.

All of this criticism of me and worry about the kids is bringing me to the same place – to let go of my ego and fears, and to turn to Hashem (G-d), knowing this entire circumstance is being orchestrated for the highest good of everyone involved. I wanted to raise them to be healthy adults, and it’s very possible I won’t have the opportunity to do what I thought I would. It’s possible they’ll experience having to be different places that I would want to protect them from. But that’s also part of the plan. Thanks to all the thinking and processing time I had while I was in bed sick for a few days, at this point I feel pretty solid with that, not just intellectually but emotionally.

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I’ve shifted to being irritated at the demands and insinuations that I’m not careful enough about their hygiene, to accepting as a fact of life that you have to put on a show when dealing with the system. I hate that kind of thing, particularly since it seems incredibly unnecessary since everything is so good without making a special effort to try to impress anyone. But now I’m embracing the challenge and even see ‘playing the game’ as fun. Why shouldn’t I learn to do something better or in a different more efficient way if it will benefit me?

I asked myself, what make a child look more well-cared for then what I already do? Maybe more involved hair styles, different styles every day? Dd6 has waist length hair, and usually I make two long ponytails and braid them both. Dd is very sensitive and screams a lot when her hair is brushed and styled; this style takes ten minutes every morning and I haven’t wanted to ask her to stand still for something more involved than that.

Now I have a reason to spend more time on her hair. To get her buy-in, I let her watch a couple of braiding videos with me and then she requested for me to make those styles for her. To keep her calm while I do her hair, I let her look at a video of someone’s hair being styled. I’ve been doing this a week and she’s gotten used to fifteen minute sessions.

I often made French braids for my older daughters when they were young, and for a few days I’ve made her French braids on each side of her head. Now I’m learning new styles – I’ve just mastered a fishtail braid today – and I even created a new hairstyle for Shabbos thanks to getting my creative juices flowing by watching different braiding techniques.

My oldest daughter mentioned there’s a way to fold clothes so they don’t get unfolded when a child moves things around. Now I’m learning about pocket folding and once I better understand how to use that method, the drawers will stay neater with less need for me to rearrange the drawer.

I decided that the night before they have visitation will now be their regular nail cutting time for them both, and scalp moisturizing time for ds6. I already give ds6 haircuts a couple of days after visitation, so that his hair grows out a little before his parents see him. Then it’s harder for them to feel if he has a little dry patch on his scalp (which I was taking care of for months before they noticed it and complained about it).

I take them directly from kindergarten to the visitation, and now I’m going to build in fifteen extra minutes to fix dd’s hair so it will be freshly done, and make sure she’s wearing her nicest clothing. It’s ironic that their parents complained about their clothing, because I was dressing the kids on the day of the visits in the clothing their parents bought them, thinking the parents would have pleasure seeing their children wearing it. The social worker told me that the parents commented that they really liked seeing the kids wearing the shoes and clothes they gave them – but it was just a week later that they made the specious complaint to the committee about me not dressing the children in clothing that fit them properly.

I’m a visual person, and I like when things are clean. I like when things are organized, and I like when children are nicely dressed – it gives me pleasure to see that. I’m going to enjoy raising the standard of whatever I’m doing because I want to do it; no one is forcing me to do any of this. I don’t feel like a victim of ridiculous dictates anymore. I’m choosing to see it as fun and expansive for me. Believe me, that feels worlds better than the way I was previously looking at it.

Avivah

Foster care – things that shouldn’t be a big deal but are

parenting

I’ve been struggling lately with some things going on after the last committee meeting for the twins. I can jokingly say that parenting by committee is not for wimps but honestly it’s so defeating that last week I felt like quitting – not because of the kids and the complexity of their issues, which I feel capable of dealing with, but because of the system.

Recap: the kids are doing amazingly in every area by everyone’s (sometimes grudging) opinion, far better than anyone expected, and certainly not in nine months. Their emotional and psychological health was given token attention at the committee because they needed to focus on what’s really important.

Dd’s bedroom – it must be pink, have two pictures on the wall and a rug between the beds. I already bought the sheets (with unicorns and rainbows), curtains and rug and am still looking for suitable wall hangings. While it looks cute, as I was hanging the curtains and changing the sheets there was resentment instead of pleasure to have been dictated to in this way. I was warned by someone who knows the person involved, who said she can and will pull the kids if we don’t do exactly what she said.

The other complaint was that dd’s clothing drawer needs to be better organized. I don’t think I previously mentioned that our visitor had all the kids open their closets and drawers for inspection when she came. Even though she had asked specific questions about how dd gets dressed and knew that dd chooses her clothing herself (with my guidance to make sure things match) and therefore jumbles her clothing in the process, this is something I’ve been told needs to be corrected. It’s frustrating because I already organize her drawer every day or two when I put clean clothes in, and the focus on this drawer when the entire house was neat and the boys’ drawers were organized is ridiculous to me.

Those were the official complaints. Sounds good? Let’s continue.

Onto the bio parents feedback. They see the children once or twice a month for an hour during supervised visitation. I was surprised that they acknowledged that the kids seem to be doing very well; I didn’t think they would have that level of awareness even though the change in the kids is visible.

When they spoke to the committee they claimed the children have dirty fingernails, ds smells like urine, they wear clothes that don’t fit properly, they don’t bathe regularly and I don’t tend to their appearance. I was taken aback when I heard this but more shocked that what they said was being considered as evidence.

Ironically, all of these claims were what was said about them and documented for months before the kids were removed from their care. My husband and I both believe they’re trying to make a case against us because they want to get the kids back, and these are things they know are a problem.

We not only have a thirty year history of parenting visibly well-cared for children, we’ve been foster parents for seven years and had monthly social worker visits and school checks all that time. Not only have we never received a complaint, but I get regular compliments on how cute dd always looks (people don’t usually comment on boys’ attire). The teachers have all told the social worker the kids are always clean and dressed appropriately, and dd’s teacher filed a report in which she stated that dd’s hygiene and clothing was at the highest level – which the social worker has seen herself every time she’s done a school or home visit.

None of the facts matter, and I was perplexed why the statements of the parents were being taken as evidence of my neglectful care, particularly in light of their own history. It’s typical of bio parents whose children are in foster care to be very critical of small details; that’s a known phenomenon. But why is the positive testimony that contradicts these false claims being ignored?

It also seems irrelevant how amazing the progress of the children has been.

We are now mandated to have twice monthly meetings with the social worker with a walkthrough of our home each time. Previously she came once a month. We had a walkthrough once before ds7 came as part of the approval process, then never again. For the twins, we had a walkthrough/inspection prior to them coming, and then again when the guardian ad litem came. So having inspections twice a month is out of the norm, particularly when there was nothing wrong except the two points above (lack of pink and the jumbled clothing drawer).

Our social worker is embarrassed to have to do this and has told me though it’s completely unnecessary she has no choice.

Additionally, the guardian ad litem is planning a surprise visit. She will come unannounced when the kids are home and expect a walkthrough of our home on the spur of the moment. We have no idea when this will be.

This has been very stressful to think about, as she has a very critical eye and no tolerance for a mess, regardless of the circumstances. You can imagine if she was upset about the lack of pink sheets and the clothing in the drawer when the house was very neat, what she’ll say when she comes into an actively lived-in home during the most hectic hours of the day.

I don’t understand how this is legal – in the US, police can’t enter the home of suspected criminals without a search warrant. But I haven’t done anything wrong …and still have to have this imposed on me? Having this person in my home feels unsafe to me.

I told my social worker I can’t understand why I’m being treated with suspicion despite all the evidence to the contrary. It just doesn’t make sense.

Since we’re also now being mandated to have parenting classes every other week, I set up a meeting with dd’s therapist. She called our social worker to find out what is going on and thanks to her, learned something that made the puzzle pieces fall into place.

I knew that my social worker was holding back on things this person said about us (before she ever met us ) from a couple of comments about hoping this person could let go of her prejudices once she met us. At the end of our meeting, our therapist explained that the legal rep won’t believe any of the feedback of teachers who see the kids daily because they are all religious, and “It’s known that charedim have a low standard of hygiene.”

This seems to be why what the parents said is taken as factual – because it supports her bigoted beliefs about religious Jews. It’s clear to me that the truth is irrelevant and nothing I do will change her perspective. In fact, I think she’s looking for something that will validate her strong opposition to us before the kids came, to prove to everyone that she was right to not want them here. She thinks we’re lying and so is anyone else who says something in support of us.

I’ve been feeling angry and frustrated and distressed about this for over a week. I’ve tried very, very hard to see everyone involved in a favorable light but at this point there’s not a bone in my body that believes that what is good for the children is the priority.

I’m being treated like an employee who has to do what she’s told, but social services is the last ’employer’ I’d want anything to do with if not for my desire to help the children. I don’t have a voice at all, I can’t say anything to defend myself or explain during the committee meeting – everything is decided on and then handed down to me without my input or clarification.

Generally I move away from dysfunctional people and unhealthy situations and minimize engagement; I don’t try to defend or justify myself. Now I’m forced to deal with an unhealthy system that I’d rather stay far away from, and I find it upsetting that I have to detail how often I bathe the kids and wash their hair, how often I cut their nails, explain that I dress the children in clothing that fits appropriately, etc, etc, etc.

I’ve been tempted to take a picture of the coats I put them in and contrast that with a picture of the oversized coats the parents gave them that will fit them in a year or two (They claimed they had to buy them coats because what I gave them was much too big.) Or to ask the supervisory social worker to note in her report that she has yet to send in, that ds never smelled like urine except for when he wet himself during a visit with his parents because they didn’t take him to the bathroom.

Being told what to do and how to do something will always negatively impact someone’s intrinsic motivation. There was more conversation regarding expanding visitation with their parents and educational choices that may be mandated that may be very different than what we would choose for them, that even further created a question for me as how to stay lovingly engaged with the children when it feels safer for me to detach.

It’s been challenging as I’ve been working through all of these emotions that were stirred up. It’s only today that I found inner calm about it all, and was able to put it all emotionally to the side. It is what it is, and I don’t want to give away my peace of mind to anyone involved.

Avivah

My new financial goal – focus on paying off mortgage early

frugal strategies

This past May, the engine on our van went out and we didn’t want to invest in putting a new engine into a 2006 vehicle. Though I was planning to upgrade our vehicle, I hadn’t yet built the ‘new car account’ high enough to buy what I wanted.

We brought the twins home four days later, and almost immediately needed to take them to appointments. It was an incredibly hectic time and we had not even an extra moment to shop around for car loans so we did something out of character – we took a loan for the car through our bank since it was automatically approved, with monthly payments for a year.

The interest rate started off at 11% and was up to 11.5% two months later.

I don’t like debt but that interest rate was extra motivating. I buckled down hard on getting this paid off, throwing every bit of extra money that came in at this loan. I was so relieved and gratified to make the final payment less than three months after we took the loan.

Our success in paying down the car loan inspired me to set a very ambitious goal that I’m excited about: to have our mortgage paid off by December 2025.

When we made aliya twelve years ago we started over financially at the bottom of the ladder. It was really tough and it took a few years until we began to get some traction. That has built slowly but steadily, thank G-d. When we bought our home in Israel, I felt acutely aware that taking a thirty year mortgage in our late thirties/early forties meant we would have a mortgage years after my husband’s official retirement age. By taking a home loan at a time in life that many people had paid their mortgages off, or were close to paying them off, we were financial late starters.

Though I always wished we could pay off our mortgage early, it wasn’t until we made the decision to move to Yavneel that we were able to make any progress on this goal. When we made the decision to buy a home in Yavneel, we could have purchased at a comparable cost to what we sold our previous home for, or since we qualified for a higher mortgage amount, bought something more expensive.

That didn’t fit our goal of going into retirement mortgage-free. I was adamant about buying below our budget. When we looked at different homes for sale, we chose a large home with a beautiful view, opposite fields and next to an orchard, and very easy walking distance to the shul. In was also a fixer-upper in a rundown neighborhood; there wasn’t a single indoor picture of the house shown on the online listing, or even a close up of the outside. There was a reason for that – there was no good picture to be had!

My daughter who viewed the house with us said she didn’t see what made us want to buy it, and when we moved in in March 2020, my kids looked around and later told me their first impressions were that it looked really bad. It wasn’t horrible, but there was nowhere you laid your eyes that didn’t need fixing or replacing.

We did the necessary renovations ourselves and fortunately the neighborhood has improved quite a bit since we bought. We took the difference from what we made on the sale of our previous home and what we bought our new home for, and by putting it toward our mortgage loan, we were able to pay down a third of our mortgage.

Our remaining mortgage is split into two parts: the first is the original fixed mortgage payment, set at 4.2% interest, to be paid off in 2037 (we were fortunate to get a mortgage when rates were super low). The second payment is the portion of our mortgage that we refinanced in January 2023 from a loan linked to inflation to a fixed rate of 5%. That loan was also initially set to end in 2037 but when we did the refinance, we slightly increased our monthly payments in order to shorten the length of the loan by five years, so it was reset to end in 2032.

As a homeowner in the US, it was easy to regularly put money toward the mortgage principle using a simple online payment. It didn’t have to be a large amount; I regularly put a hundred dollars toward the principle. That’s not an option here; at least not at our bank. When we asked the bank about how to make extra payments, they told us we can only do it for large amounts. I asked how much, and she told me a minimum of 50,000 shekels. We put money aside until we had enough for a payment of that amount. The process was not quick and easy and they charged us several thousand shekels as a fee for the interest they were losing. But it did bring down our mortgage some more.

After making that prepayment, I felt daunted about making more early payments. In any event, our daughter got married soon afterwards and our ‘extra’ funds were being put towards that. Then the twins came soon afterwards and we had the car to pay off. When I started actively thinking again about how to prepay our mortgage loans, I mentioned to my husband how frustrating and intimidating I found the prepayment process.

He informed me there’s a webpage on the bank site where you can easily prepay whatever amount you want. I was delighted to hear this and checked it out right away, only to find the webpage was down – and has continued to be non-functional for months. Apparently making it convenient for borrowers to pay off their mortgages even a bit early isn’t a priority.

Fortunately my husband and I are a good team; I comb through our budget to put towards the extra mortgage payment and he takes care of the hassle of making the payment. I’m going to share what’s involved and if you’re interested in making a one time or regular prepayment on your mortgage, knowing what is involved will make it more doable for you.

One huge thing I learned is that we don’t have to put down a very large amount, despite what I was previously told. It seems that the minimum payment you can make depends on the loan amount so you can’t throw five hundred shekels at it. And there is a fee of 60 shekels each time we make a prepayment, so it’s worth waiting a little longer and paying a larger amount to save a bit on the fee. I have no idea why we had to pay a penalty fee of thousands of shekels in the past when we prepaid a large amount.

First you have to call the bank to request a link to make the payment. It can take a long time to get someone on the phone but if you stick with it you’ll eventually get a representative. You let them know you want to make a partial mortgage payoff (siluk chilki), and choose to either make your monthly payment smaller to shorten the length of the loan. We choose the second option. They’ll send you a link to a form that tells you where to make the transfer.

Then you make the transfer, and fill out the form they sent with the details of what part of the mortgage you’re paying, the amount, the details of the transfer and upload the pdf from the bank of the transfer.

Once you do this, it will take three days until your mortgage will show the funds being credited to your account.

While this is annoying when it could easily be automated, it’s also not nearly as involved or as costly as I initially thought.

And it is so exciting to see the progress we’re making on the mortgage! I wanted to have a way to visually see our progress, so my husband made a chart that we keep on the fridge, with each block representing 5000 shekels paid off.

When I checked our mortgage balance before making our last prepayment, I was surprised to find it was ten thousand shekels less than I thought it should be based on the amount we paid off. When I did my original calculations, I forgot to take into account that our regular monthly payments were also paying off some of the principle. It was fun to be able to color in two more blocks on our chart – it felt like a freebie.

We’re working on first paying down the higher interest loan, and by making these early payments, we’ve already cut off four additional years off this loan since last year (the one that we shortened by 5 years when we refinanced last year) so after just a year, we’ve shaved nine years off the loan. It’s now set to end in 2028 versus 2037. My goal is to finish paying this one off in the next six months; assuming that happens, it will shorten the loan by thirteen years. That’s a lot of years of interest payments we’ll be saving.

Then we plan to tackle the remaining mortgage loan, using the monthly payment we previously paid for our first loan to accelerate our payments.

I was hesitant to set such an ambitious goal because I don’t like setting a goal and then not achieving it, and there are so many variables that are out of my hands that can affect my plans. But then I decided to set a goal that would energize and really motivate me, which this one does.

I talked to our teens before we did this, letting them know I’d be doing budget cutting. They were very supportive. One recently told me he thought we’d be eating rice and beans, sitting in the dark, and was disappointed by how ‘normal’ life felt. I laughed and told him we don’t have to give up all of our quality of life to do this! I’m thankful that all of our older children feel very abundant at the same time that we continue to live frugally.

I know that some people would say that the money could be invested in something that earns more interest than the interest we save by prepaying. While I’m sure there’s merit in that approach, I’m a financially conservative person and find comfort in the thought of having our primary residence paid for in full. The emotional benefits combined with the financial benefits make this a good choice for us. d financial benefits are worth it for us.

Have you paid off a mortgage early, or is it something you’re currently working towards? I’d love to hear your experience!

Avivah