Tag: foster care

April 20, 2020 Hannah Pannell

1 in 10…

The month of April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. According to the Children’s Advocacy Center of Tennessee, nearly 700,000 children are victims of abuse in the US annually and 1 in 10 children will be sexually abused by their 18th birthday. This topic hits close to home for me for many reasons. 

First of all, I teach in a title 1 school with high rates of childhood trauma. Every year, I handle child abuse cases. I’ve collaborated with Child Protective Services, Guardian Ad Litems, and Detectives in my role as a teacher and a mandated reporter. Bearing witness to the stories my students live is equal parts brutal and beautiful.

Additionally, my husband and I are foster parents. We have fostered a handful of teens in emergency and respite placements. Their stories, while each unique, all carry the weight of abuse or neglect in some form. Because of the privilege we’ve been given to be a small part of their stories, we’ve chosen to dive deep into training and knowledge on abuse and trauma.

But finally, and most personally, I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. This issue is close to my heart because I’ve lived it. I’ve written about my story in the past here and even featured a host of other stories from guest posters of their own personal stories of sexual abuse. 

A couple years ago, I performed this spoken word piece in which I shared my story with those closest to me for the first time.

I’d shared my story a few times before, but this felt extra sacred because it was face to face with my people. People who knew me well, but had never heard my story. Over the course of the next year, friends and acquaintances who shared stories much like mine came out of the wood work. I felt and continue to feel so privileged to hold space for their stories with them. If you’re reading this and happen to share a similar story, can I share some encouragement with you? I read these words in Jen Hatmaker’s book Of Mess and Moxie several years ago and posted them on my mirror as a daily reminder. Maybe you need them too.

“This is not who you are. This happened to you, but it does not define you. You are not broken. You are not ruined. You are not destined to a lifetime of sexual dysfunction. You will become the exact person God intended all along, and you will be stronger in these fragile places than you were before it happened. This is a part of your story, not the end of it, and you will overcome. Not only that; you will thrive. If God is truly strongest where we are weakest, then He will win in this place.”

These words are my prayer for you fellow survivors. Amen and amen!

This April, awareness feels extra close to my heart. With recent school closures due to COVID-19, I worry about my students and children everywhere in unsafe home environments and abusive situations. I was recently interviewed about the effect of school closures on reports of child abuse in a great article you can find here.

No doubt, there are children and adults in crisis around our world right now. Being quarantined and stuck at home can make us feel helpless but this is not the case.

In honor of Child Abuse Prevention Month, here are a few suggestions of how we can be part of the solution:

  • Interested in becoming a foster parent? Now is the time! Use these free evenings to start the process. Many agencies are even doing online trainings for certification during this time. 
  • Support organizations like Virginia’s Kids Belong who provide advocacy, awareness and support in all avenues of the process from foster families to social workers. 
  • Be a good neighbor. See something? Say something. With many children away from their safety nets full of mandated reporters (school, YMCA, daycare, church), the risk for them is greater. Let’s all take on this responsibility. You can find the hotline numbers for reporting here. 
  • Consider becoming a CASA volunteer.
  • Be a safe person for your own kids and the kids in your life. Disclosure is hard, but it’s the first step to healing. Make sure you are someone your kids and other kids can talk to if they need to. 

Let’s all be part of the solution this April. 

January 21, 2019 Foster Care

Not Enough

not-enough

It’s a typical Thursday night and I’m at school far too late, grading papers at my computer when I get the call.  We’ve got a teenage girl who needs placement tonight. We don’t know much. Can you and Will take her?  I call Will and we agree. With our yes, our lives change once again, in an instant. I pack my bags and rush home. The schoolwork that felt so important five minutes ago now seems so insignificant as I toss it in the backseat. At home, I scramble around cleaning and safeguarding. Do we lock up the knife block? Do we have an empty dresser for her to unpack into? Why didn’t I vacuum this morning? I can’t sit still. The social workers aren’t coming for a cleanliness inspection, but somehow clean equates to competent in my mind and I think if I can clean off one more counter, I can convince them I know what I’m doing. I hurry to make dinner. Do you think she likes vegetables? What if she hates chicken? I worry about the intricacies of dinner because it feels like the one part of the evening I can control. We anxiously wait for her arrival. She’s nervous and tired when she walks in. So are we. We chat with social workers, sign papers, run through school details and just like that, they’re gone. Here we are, two twenty-somethings who moments ago became parents to a teenager we are too young to have birthed. Inadequate, incapable, scared to death, but determined as hell.  

She opts out of dinner, instead watching us through the open door from inside her room. One  of the first times she speaks to me, she asks if I know how to sew. She shows me a stuffed lion and says he’s made it longer than any of her other stuffies. He’s six years old, she tells me. He’s lived a hard six years, ragged and worn, limbs falling off from the very embraces of love and anxiety. That night as I sit and sew the legs back on that ragged lion, I wonder if maybe she’s a bit like him- limbs torn from trauma, worn and frayed at the edges. My greatest fear is that maybe I don’t have the skills or the tools to sew her back together. 

I am an achiever. This will surprise exactly 0 people who really know me. I’m a three on the Enneagram, but the desire to achieve has run in my blood long before there were the results of a personality test to explain it. In the last year or so, I’ve come face to face with a lot of the unhealthy facets of being an achiever (marriage is often a really painful, but sanctifying mirror). I’ve spent my fair share of time in a therapist’s office trying to work out why approval matters so much to me. I’ve also spent a fair share of time on my knees repenting of the idol I have made of approval in my life. And you know what? I’m nowhere near healed or done. I’m a work in progress, just like each of us. In this particular season, however, I’m keenly positioned to realize how much I am “not enough” for my life. I’m not enough as a new pastor’s wife, I’m not enough as a foster mom, I’m not enough as a teacher. Before you dive in to rescue me with platitudes of kindness, sit with me in the discomfort for a moment. I spent a few years diving into the word enough. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, this overwhelming fear of being insufficient. I thought I had worked it out. I really believed I could live in the reality that I was enough and put a period at the end of my searching. Here’s what I’ve come to realize on this journey. The only way to truly commune, the only way to live this one life in full awareness is to wake up every morning in the reality that I am far from enough. It is to wake up every morning and trade in my desire for success, achievements and approval for a deeper desire for Jesus.  I’m not enough, and I can quit my striving and searching because only Jesus is.  

When I look at that teenager asleep in our guest room, I can be terrified or I can be humbly submitted. Yesterday, I stood in church and I sobbed because I’m truthfully not sure that I know how to love her best. I’m not sure that I know how to love her at all. The part of my heart that strives and searches wants to retract and build walls. After all, if I can’t do it well, it’s not worth doing, right? Wrong. I may not be the most equipped to love her, but I am the most available. I am right here and I’m going to keep figuring it out as I go. Jesus so gently reminded me during worship that while I might not know how to love her yet, He is already holding and loving both of us. He is parenting the lost little girl in both of us. So I’ll keep showing up with all of my insufficiency and I’ll keep trusting Jesus to bridge the gaps. I’ll stitch up the little stuffed lions and I’ll advocate for her in a system where it feels she’s so often forgotten and I’ll trust Jesus to do the stitching up of hearts and lives.  

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