One of the first things we had to learn was that it doesn't matter who did what first, or who started it, or who was to blame. What matters is the relationships in the family. We had a very large family, including our 2 birth children, foster children, guardianship children and adopted children. Our children were of every race and economic status.
Does the phrase, "You're not my real mother sound familiar to you"? I heard it on a regular basis. It's hard to build a family base line with this much diversity and this much emotional trauma. The answer to the question is, "I know I'm not your real mother, and I'm not trying to be, but if you look around, I seem to be the only mom around here at the moment. How can we make things work?"
When something was broken, it was useless to ask who did it, because only a person named "Not Me" lives in my house. So then what matters? How you fix things, how you make a better plan with the children for next time, and how you get through a hard time without calling names, blaming, or punishing.
Tomorrow, we'll share how to set up a system so you can do that.
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