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Who Rocks This Child to Sleep Tonight? Not You.

A few weeks ago I wrote about two major stressors in our home--incompetent house painters dragging out a job while also making our yard a danger zone for playing kids; and young, inexperienced social workers who thought they'd uncovered something happening that isn't allowed by the state (spanking) which launched a Special Investigation.

It's been a very long couple of weeks.

I did ask the house painters to make some changes that they agreed to and it helped. They, supposedly, entered the final touch-ups three days ago. It was only, "a few hours work" three days ago and they've put in three more 6-8 hour days and still aren't done. They've packed up and then brought back all their ladders and equipment three times in three days. Because that's the kind of highly efficient, highly organized dweebs these guys are. Enough of them. I don't even care anymore. They'll be gone by October...I think.

And today the big Special Investigation began. So, I knew that each of the three little kids, Jane, 4, and James, 4, and Kate, 2.5, would be taken into a separate room and asked if we spanked them. I spent three weeks thinking about how the girls answered these questions--how very easily led they were before--and how to prepare for this round.

Recently, the Brett Kavanaugh stuff is back in the news and it's making me think a lot about memory, and consent, and how people talk about what happens to them.

I'm thinking about how to teach my girls to be good, accurate witnesses when they talk about their lives and their bodies. Especially when we get to the point in therapy where they may need to talk about hard things.

I'm thinking about Jane's issue with lying (which is vastly improved as every few days I find an extremely low-stakes opportunity for her to practice telling the truth so now it's something she can do after only three minutes of painful hemming and hawing rather than whole hours of outright panic, stuck in a silly lie and unable to confess).

I'm thinking about how much little girls want to please and will go along with anybody who shows them attention and whom they want to like them.

All of these big thoughts rolling around in my brain. I've been that angry/distracted lady glaring at her cart the whole way around the grocery store because I'm mulling over all this stuff during any moment of the day that is not consumed by kids.

And this was the big realization that hit me about a week ago. Little kids don't know there's an alternative to, "yes" and "no". At some point we all learn phrases like, "I don't know" or "I can't remember" or "I'm not sure" or even just simply, "maybe". But little girls like mine just say 'yes' or 'no' after reading the body language of the adult to figure out what answer is expected of them.

So, I taught them. I flat out, explicitly, taught my girls that if they're asked a question that makes them uncomfortable they can say, "I don't know" or "I don't remember". They can also say, "I don't want to talk to you anymore. I want to go to my mom."

We are in that transition period where the girls are leaving their lives as wards of the state and becoming members of a family. I know the social workers would say they're losing rights as they leave the care of the state. The right to lawyers and agencies and laws designed to protect them.

I would say the girls are gaining the most important right a young child has. The right to say, "I want my mom" and there's an adult in arm's reach who loves them more than anyone in the whole wide world and will protect them to her dying breath.

So the girls totally stonewalled the social workers and I was outside the door listening and, I'll admit it, I was downright gleeful. They stood up for themselves like tiny little girl warriors and looked an adult in the eye and said, "No!" It was the first time I've ever seen them not employ pleasing-the-adult behaviors. It. Was. Fabulous!

Kate left the room first. Jane came a few minutes later. And I scooped each one up into my arms while they wrapped their whole bodies around me and we just swayed and rocked. It felt like this awesome us-against-the-world moment that was finally one tiny little victory against the bureaucracy that has ruled our lives for so long.

Tonight I sent a follow-up email to two agency administrators trying to explain what a foster parent experiences when the social worker invades their home once a month to interrogate the children. (After first clarifying that if they ever offered any meaningful help to specific things we ask for and need, in exchange for their invading and interrogating, it might not feel like an invasion and interrogation at all.)

I zeroed in on one phrase that was lectured to me today. Four social workers sitting in my living room today, practically pulling out the mammoth rule book and waving it in my face, saying "every foster child has the right to speak privately to their social worker". I know they are focused on the words: "rights" and "private" in that rule. What I'm focused in on is, "foster child".

Because these aren't foster children anymore. In my heart these are MY DAUGHTERS. So, hell yes, when I know that seeing social workers freaks my kids out because it reminds them of the worst moments in their lives, then I absolutely will stand outside the door and be there for them when they come out and need the comfort of my arms. And hell no, I won't entrust them to the judgment of a 21 yr old twit barely three months on the job with zero parenting experience of her own.

Dealing with an agency is like emotional whiplash. For 29 days out of every month the agency trusts us to be absolutely everything a parent is to a child. All the physical care. All the emotional care. We are 100% trustworthy and independent. Then, on the 30th day the agency worker swoops in with her cape on and whisks the child away to privacy where they're supposed to confide their scariest moments to a person (probably the third such person in less than a year) they've spent all of five minutes with.

It is demeaning to everything we do the other 29 days of the month. It breeds deep distrust between the foster parent and social worker. And, finally, it's just plain stupid. Do they really think a small child is going to speak accurately and honestly in those ten minutes?

I really wish that every social worker would be made to pause on the doorstep of every foster home and be asked this question, "Who will rock this child to sleep tonight? Not you? Then take off your cape and tread lightly for you are entering the hallowed ground where broken children are being healed. Don't you dare add more trauma to this family."

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