Insightful...

We had behavioral therapy yesterday and we were talking about a lot of things. It was very insightful. To me at least... I realize how much fostering has brought stress into our lives. It's been a blessing too...or we wouldn't have some of the children that we do. It's just the pressures and the stresses that it's brought into my life that I didn't even truly realize until we got to talking about everything. I am so worried about being reported for something that I am stressing over everything...the house being clean, the kids being perfect when others are around, getting them all caught up, and trying to do the best by everyone. They told me that I have to start letting the therapists do their job and quit feeling like I have to do all this extra stuff on top of it... I think I am trying to be the perfect MOm and I just cannot be. I just feel like I have to measure up to everyone. We were talking about how we deal with blow-ups from Deidra one way and we just brush it off and when they happen with the others, we deal with it completely different. I told her that I want to let them be kids, but Josiah doesn't always know his own strength and he can hurt people and since I still have to do incident reports on the girls, I guess I put more emphasis on that because I don't want anything to happen that would hurt anything. They understand that is a real fear that I have and that I worry about getting reported for things or false allegations. I think I will start feeling better about everything once the girls are finally ours and we can just be a real family without having to feel like we have to please everyone else all of the time. I have come to the real conclusion that I think we're done fostering after the girls adoption is finalized. I may do respite from time to time for some of our other foster family friends, but I think we'll be closing our home once the adoption is final. I'm ready to start getting our life back and being able to do family things without having to worry about getting judge approval and all the red tape that is involved in some of this stuff. The behavioral therapists feel that we are doing a great job and that we're wonderful parents and that we just need to trust in ourselves. I think when we first started all of this, we felt that we did trust our parenting, but after being in the system so long, I've started to doubt things...one person says we have to be more consistent and discipline for every little behavior, one person says we're too strict, all these comments coming from here and there and it makes you start to wonder after awhile if you are going about things the right way. One thing that really struck me last night was that they told me I'm putting too much pressure on myself and that I needed to take care of myself better so that me and the baby were taken care of. I get to worrying so much about the months ahead and behaviors and so forth, that I need to quit doing that and leave that to the teachers and the therapists to do their jobs. I don't buy totally that I need to quit doing some of the stuff that I am doing with them, as I do want to get them caught up so we can get away from doing SO much therapy and get them into doing more little kid stuff that they want to do, but I will try to not to push myself so hard to do every little thing that I think that I need to do.