Dancing with a Porcupine by Jennie Owens

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Some books are not easy to read because they tell the truth too plainly. Dancing with a Porcupine by Jennie Owens is one of those books.

It is about parenting kids who have been through trauma.

It is about parenting kids who have been through trauma, mostly through foster care and adoption. Jennie writes with honesty and humor and a bone-deep tiredness a lot of parents feel but never say out loud. She does not make trauma sound simple, and she never pretends that love, all by itself, patches a child back together. What she tells the truth about is how you can pour everything you have into a kid and still end the day emptied out.

There is an idea floating around that a safe home settles everything down. Get the child somewhere stable, add love and structure and prayer and consistency, and the hard part is behind you. Those things matter, but a child does not stop carrying trauma the day the home gets safe. The body keeps score long after the danger is gone. Fear and grief and anger and every survival habit a kid learned to stay alive can show up in ways that confuse and wear out everybody under the roof.

Jennie gives that a language. She writes about what it costs the parents, and she keeps pointing back to the pain the child is carrying underneath. Holding both of those at once is the whole trick. It is easy to lock in on the behavior when a kid is raging or lying or running or shoving away the very person trying to help. This book keeps reminding you there is a story sitting under the behavior. None of that makes it easier to live with. It does help you meet it with something besides anger.

One of the strongest things she does is name the loneliness. There are families who look fine in the church pew and are barely holding it together by the time they pull in the driveway. A lot of them are scared to say so, because they figure they will be judged or told they just need more patience.

Parents need support, and so do the siblings nobody thinks to ask about. The kids from hard places need skilled, trauma-informed care, not just a soft place to land. And these families need people who stick around past adoption day, the kind who do not disappear the minute things get complicated.

This one is worth reading if you work with these families too. Counselors, social workers, teachers, church folks, doctors, anybody walking alongside a foster or adoptive home needs to understand that trauma does not always show up looking like sadness. Sometimes it looks like control. Other times it is charm in the grocery store and chaos by bedtime. And when a parent finally tells you how bad it is, they are usually not exaggerating. A lot of times they are the only one who has seen the whole picture.

Dancing with a Porcupine is not a tidy parenting book with easy steps and a bow on top. It is more honest than that. Jennie writes from the middle of the mess, where faith is still there but not always pretty, the love is real but does not keep a worn-out parent from running on fumes, and help was needed a long time before anything fell apart.

I would hand this to foster parents, adoptive parents, kinship caregivers, the professionals in their corner, and anybody who loves a family walking through this kind of hard.

It is also a good reminder to go easy with the simple advice. Quit telling parents to just love harder. Safety does not erase grief, so stop expecting it to. And for the love, do not judge what you have not had to carry yourself.

Kids from hard places are worth fighting for. What their families need is real, though. Tools, respite, education, and people willing to sit close and listen without flinching. Trauma is brutal, and healing comes slower than anybody wants it to. The kids need room for it. So do the parents worn thin trying to love them through it.