Birchwood Isle Family Roleplay

Basic Information

Where do you live? Orphan Village
Are you married? If yes, to whom? Yes. I am married to Hermione Morrow
Do you have any children? If yes, list them. No children yet!
Is your family open to adopting children or adolescents? We would love to adopt a child or adolescent. Probably no more than 2, but you never know!

Appearance

Height: 5'6"
Build: slight
Hair Color: medium brown
Eye Color: brown
Distinguishing Features: a slightly crooked right upper incisor
Brief Description: Grace is of average height and very slender, almost to the point of being skinny. She has medium-brown hair that hangs to just past her shoulders and warm brown eyes that smile even before the smile reaches her mouth. Her frame suggests that she isn't particularly strong, and this is an accurate assessment of her physical ability. What she lacks in strength, however, she makes up for in speed and agility! Her face is slender and angular, and some people have accused her of having an RBF, but most of the time those are the people she genuinely doesn't like! She doesn't wear a lot of makeup most of the time because she feels that it's silly to wear makeup when women are, in her opinion, naturally beautiful. Similarly, she prefers to wear blue jeans and t-shirts and she doesn't dress up except for on special occasions. There are a lot of those in Oak House, but she tries to reserve her dresses for the same occasions they have the children dress up -- like Christmas or Easter.

Personality

Strengths: steadfast; patient listener; skilled at building routines; practical; emotionally resilient; inclusive; reliable under pressure; skilled mediator; remembers details

Flaws: slow to trust outsiders; stubborn; overburdened; over protective; dislikes sudden changes; finds it hard to admit to vulnerability; holds grudges over breaches in trust; overly nostalgic; holds impossibly high standards for herself; avoids asking for help

Likes: family-style dinners where everybody gathers at the table; baking with the children; seasonal traditions; board games on rainy days; big family celebrations; handmade crafts she can keep; refrigerators plastered with childhood pride; early mornings before the rest of the house wakes up

Dislikes: wasting perfectly good food; phones at the dinner table; distracted children and adolescents; broken promises and the people who break them; senseless conflict between roommates or siblings; littering or disrespecting nature; perfectly tidy living spaces that don't look lived in

Vices: Grace hoards old seed catalogs
Fears: house fires, getting snowed in and not being able to leave the island if necessary
Personality: Grace is not a naturally friendly person. She's standoffish to the point of being rude, she doesn't trust people easily, and she is slow to accept people into her personal sphere. What she does have going for her is a genuine warmth for struggling adolescents, and she opens up almost immediately when she encounters young people who truly need her. Nothing means more to her than being needed and the moment she feels certain that she can help someone, Grace transforms from "ice queen" to "warm mother hen." It's important, then, to recognize that while she is not friendly, she is certainly kind, and if she discovers that someone is in need or in distress, she will bend over backward to do whatever they need to make them feel safe, comfortable, and confident. You absolutely cannot take her at face value, and while first impressions die hard, they are not the most valuable impression you will form of someone like Grace Morrow.

Relationships & Discipline

How do you normally get along with other adults? Honestly, Grace is distrustful of most adults and it takes a while for her to warm up to people. She's seen the way modern adults treat their children, all while claiming that their way is "better" because they don't "hit their children." What she sees is parents who are highly neglectful and who want to pass their troubled kids off to somebody else instead of dealing with the mess they made themselves. Until you have won her over, she can be quite aloof.

How do you normally get along with teenagers? Grace gets along well with teenagers because she spent the majority of her career picking up the pieces of their broken hearts. She's good at earning their trust, explaining consequences to them, and helping to lead them toward making better choices. She didn't think much about becoming a mother until recently, and now that she's over 35 her preference is to adopt an older child or teenager. That says a lot about how she generally gets along with them.

How do you normally get along with children? In contrast to her relationship with teenagers, Grace is a little bit aloof with children at first because she has a lot less experience with them. She's working on improving the way she handles them, and she is quickly warming up the more children she has the opportunity to get to know at Oak House.

Link to your discipline sheet: click here ✅

Orphan Village

What is your role at the Orphan Village? Co-Head
Which house or building do you work for? Oak House
Do you live in the Village or commute? Lives at Oak House
Do you have any special training, certification, or skills relevant to your role? Grace has a Masters of Social Work and spent years working with troubled teenagers at risk of being placed in residential treatment centers.
Do you prefer to work with a particular age group? Which one? Teenagers in particular, but also older adolescents
Do you struggle with a particular age group? Which one? Yes. Younger children.

Briefly describe your caregiving or mentoring style. Grace looks for situations in which she can bring together groups of people, and she especially enjoys opportunities to praise one of the children or adolescents she mentors in front of a group of people -- whether their peers or other adults. If someone does especially well on a test, or if they go out of their way to draw her a picture, she makes sure that page has front-and-center attention on the refrigerator where everybody can see it. In this way she is incredibly encouraging, but she can also be somewhat self-centered in her mentoring style; Instead of giving youngsters the opportunity to express the ways in which they are proud of their own work, she tells them how she's proud of what they've done. It works, but she's leaving wide-open an area of opportunity that many of the children at the Orphan Village would benefit from.

Describe how you see your role in the village. Grace sees herself first and foremost as an interim parent to children and adolescents who don't have one. It's actually hard for her because, when she does become attached, she becomes very attached, and the idea of letting any child or adolescent go with adoptive parents is painful for her. Because of the way she views her role, she doesn't often venture outside the sphere of her home (though she does move beyond the walls of Oak House and its grounds, of course!). Specifically, she doesn't try to take on any parenting or "adulting" duties with children or adolescents who aren't assigned to her.

Is there anything else we should know about your role in the Village? If Grace could, she would adopt every single one of the Oak House kids. (Writer note: This assumes that the children and adolescents who choose to join Oak House are suited to Grace. Peep her discipline sheet to see what conflicts might look like.) At the same time, she has significantly less interest in children and adolescents outside of Oak House, and is most likely to send them back to their "interim parents" if she spots them misbehaving or out of bounds. Unless she has a very specific type of relationship with children or adolescents from other houses, she won't interact much with them.

Background

Education: MSW
Work History: Prior to coming to Birchwood Isle to work for the new Orphan Village, Grace worked as a therapist with troubled youth
Current Goals or Challenges: Establish a strong sense of family within the Oak House and help the youth living there feel that they belong.
Reason for Living on Birchwood Isle: Burnout. She was tired of watching disinterested parents discard their teens to programs or refuse to engage with them emotionally or intellectually. Somewhere along the line she decided she believed that corporal punishment was better than ignoring the youth and the island's mission won her over.
Brief History: Grace was born to cold parents who wanted to do what was right for their daughter, but didn't have the warmth of personality for genuine caring. She spent most of her youth doing whatever she had to so that she could get their attention, and in time it led her to serious mistakes that would have cost her in the long run if it wasn't for her grandparents stepping up to give her the support she'd always needed. They were stricter than her parents, and she had to answer to them at the cost of a stern hiding if she broke their rules. For a long time, Grace hated it. Her career in social work taught her that corporal punishment damaged kids, but in the back of her mind she could never quite rectify that with her own experience. Corporal punishment from her grandparents felt more caring than the emotional neglect from her parents.

In the end, she decided on social work because she wanted to help teenagers who were like she had been when she was in her teens. She left school with big hopes that she could make a genuine difference in the lives of young people growing up with "modern parents" like the ones who raised her in the era of Dr. Spock. And she did make a difference! She was able to help increase the confidence in the teenagers she worked with and instill in them a belief in themselves. It was good enough until they went home and their parents disregarded their accomplishments, spoke down to them, and started the cycle all over again. About a third of her clients wound up in residential treatment programs and some of those died or were lost in the system.

Thanks to her grandparents, Grace decided to try something different. Hoping for real change, she moved to Birchwood Isle and accepted the position at Oak House, with her wife, as soon as it was opened to her.