Caregiving Stories Reprise

Wounded Sacred Dementia: Part Two Dementia's derelict WinLose SocialWorker suboptimizingly hesitates when I tell her I have not changed my mind about not adopting Fetal Alcohol Syndrome into my vulnerable home with a seven-year-old AfricanAmerican boy blind and unable to defend himself, or even run paraplegically away, in the likely event of predative attack by a jealous younger girl-child who needs to be the ego-nurtured baby addict of her household. My older two AfricanAmerican sons could defend their Nubian Princely selves, and most certainly would, after all, they had experience living with Tyrant who was older and bigger and louder. The SocialWorker commits to giving me six months unless someone else comes along as WinWin qualified and ready to commit to bipolar alcoholism for ZeroZone Soul life. We both knew how unlikely this would unfold in our shared HereNow 4Dimensional RealTime of ZeroSoul understorying TaoSpirit. So we got Dementia's ears tubed, all the better to hear our creolizing consonants with. Her eyes WinWin opened to communication's PositivEnergy integrities all the better to watch us form our cooperative consonants. Her brain pictures all the better to predict her bipolar ZeroSoul RightBrain emotional swings. Her scalp de-ringwormed all the better to fill her pretty head with ribbgons and butterfly berets on her own tiny yang-braids. Her now open eyes wearing glasses all the better to watch us WinWin smile back and too often LoseLose frown, to be incontinently honest, holding our noses and heads against each LoseLose other. By the end of the first week she no longer needed to take food to bed with her. By the end of the first day she taught me When Dementia rises from her feeding chair during a meal, more of an athletic event, a wrestling match really, to jump Yang-up and Yin-down and run around, this does not mean she is done eating, or feeding, or whatever. She has other messier ways to let me know when she's All Done!!!! Jumping during mealtime is something about liking the food, absorbing PositivEnergy nurture, and needing to calm down and express Yang-enthusiasm. So I stop removing her food until the pink plastic bowl is serenely empty. Although she usually takes care of bowl removal for me, or against me-- not entirely sure she is sure. I put out another bowl if she asks for it (no judgment) and leave it out for her to eat or feed on, again, depending on your dipolar-bipolar perspective, or to just check on from time to time to be sure it remains there and not yet LoseLose empty, until she learns to trust me to listen to her good food to eat PositivEnergy messages as much or little as she wants to share whenever she wants. All I require is a Please? Not even ThankYou! although that would be nice, and PositivEnergy appreciated. So, no need to hoard food or bolt it down without chewing or LoseLose throw it before someone takes it away. Eventually, more like a slow groaning year, Dementia's SocialWorker threatens to remove her from my care rather than leaving her with me until she finds a more appropriate pre-adoptive placement. Is this a WinWin promise or a WinLose threat? I offer to help her recruit an ego-ecotherapeutic adult or two without young vulnerable children and pets, and too awfully many sharp knives and scissors and voices, who might agree to adopt if I provide monthly respite. But the Professional SocialWorker in her infinitely divine ZeroSum Win-Lose wisdom does not want my help. She refuses to look for a household without high risks of further Dementia dings, or to even disclose Fetal Alcohol labels to prospects for WinWin adoption, Or to even find an appropriate foster placement in which Dementia could more successfully more restoratively, with further resilience and self-sustainability, wait and heal and hope for that just-right therapeutic parent(s). I am now persuaded that Dementia's best restorative justice and peace hope is to be rescued from her demented SocialWorker and, to be fair, from a retributive lack of welfare committed system designed to reward the heavily mortgaged SocialWorker for punitive anti-BirthFamily decisions not in Dementia's best short-term or long-term healthy interests. My AfricanAmerican husband and older sons agreed, given SocialWorker's issues, fueled by denial of internal climate pathologies, we should proceed toward WinWin committed adoption and hope for our mutual therapeutic best, and not worst, somehow both care-giving and care-receiving democracy, mutual creolizing acclimation as a resilient Left and resonant Right multiculturing household, environment, habitat, home, sort of a PositivEnergy networking nest. I would have asked my youngest son but would not have known how to ask, nor how to misunderstand his non-verbal benign response. So Dementia is still with us, turning seventeen later this year, our only post-millennial girl living with five trans-millennial males, deep listening with Dementia teaching hard lessons: Resilience is to LeftBrain cognitive dissonance as RightBrain Resonance is to affective disintegration, as notnot PositivEnergy WinWin democratic trust is to NegativEnergy LoseLose autocratic anti-trust in self or Professional SocialWorker other. Resilience Left and Resonance Right polypathic Yang and Polyphonic Yin nurturing nutrients for rich dense resonantly complex WinWin attitudinal and behavioral co-empathic systems. Just as chaotically dissonant WinLose angry and LoseLose fearful ecopolitical systems can grow wickedly complex interdependencies unraveling GoldenRule cooperative WinWin strategies to sustain self-other perpetuating equanimity. Resilient healthy gains sustain despite fading outdoor voice losses of RightBrain therapeutic polyculturing resonance. Dementia has her own wild outsideLeft--insideRight polarizing resonance of voices as deep and sacred with each new outdoor RedSky dawn as resilient resonant DNA-RNA Solidarity Blues-inside imparts.