Foster Further

 I spoke with a therapist today about everything that happened over the last two days. Her responses were deeply insightful.  Some key take-aways.  In an open adoption with healthy adults involved we can expect the child to display some signs of grief after a family visit. They may be whiny or tired or irritable. This is to be expected and can be supported and the child can work through their grief over time.  The physical disassociation from her body that Jane experienced after the call with birth grandma goes beyond grief. She had a trauma response. It would not be healthy to repeatedly re-traumatize her with more visits.  Grandma is not a positive person, nor is she trust-worthy. The therapist was extremely disturbed the breaches of trust in the past (trying to sneak the grandkids into contact with her son, against court orders; sharing private pictures I was only sending to her with people not allowed to see them). Every time Grandma expressed fears that I'd...

 Every year I get a Christmas tree ornament for each child to reflect some milestone in their life. Since the adoption was finalized last February, I suppose this is the year to celebrate that.  I don't want to.  I think my initial reluctance is because the adoption is something that happened TO them, it's not a milestone they earned. I get ornaments to celebrate learning to read, or joining marching band, for example. Although, of course there are ornaments for things that happened to a kid, such as starting Kindergarten, or getting a pet.  But, still, I'm aware of the grief behind adoption for Jane. I think Kate would only see it as joyful, though. But, in the future, should there always be this tangible sign of them being different every year when we decorate the tree?  I did go back and buy ornaments for all their Christmases before they came to us because I wanted to celebrate every year of their life, as the ornaments are intended to do, and because I didn...

Jane has lived here for 19 months. Just over a year and a half. She came at 3 yrs, 2 months. She is now 4 years 10 months. Soon she will celebrate her second birthday since coming here. I've bought all the clothes and shoes and coats and toys she owns. I decorated her bedroom. I choose what she eats and when. I give her baths and wash her hair and sometimes assist her in the bathroom. I can tell you the exact shape of her toes and how their shape differs from mine. I can predict how she'll react to most situations. She doesn't like ketchup or baked beans. When she is most anxious she needs the super bright night light. I know she's in a good place when she asks for the smaller night light. She picks on the cat when she's mad at me. Jane and I have spent enough time together and know enough about each other (I bet she knows all the same details about my likes and dislikes) to be bonded by now. But I don't think we are. And I don't know that we will ever be. T...

This month Kate is 3 years, 2 months old. She is the exact age that Jane was when the girls came. Kate was 20 months old when she came. She is now 38 months old. July will mark the turning point where she will have lived half of her lifetime as a member of our family. From July 30th onward she'll be more ours than not. Jane won't hit that kind of milestone until she is 6 years, 4 months old so...January 30, 2022. Wow. That is so incredibly far away. And what a clear illustration of how many more years of unhealthy living Jane experienced and thus, why she has been much more effected. But, after the growth of these last few weeks, I feel like we have sped up her transition to healthy living exponentially. (Horray!) These milestones don't really matter to the girls, or anyone else in the family for that matter, but they feel really significant to me. Marking the girls movement from their old life to their new life. Perhaps because it is springtime and there is new life blosso...

...an organized mind. Planning, finding patterns, predicting outcomes, maintaining focus long enough to follow through creatively--I am suddenly seeing mental skills I've never observed in Jane before. This week Jane began lining up her dolls when playing with them. She played school with them for the very first time in her life, ever.  In the sandbox area Jane has begun putting on tea parties. Each container (all identically holding mud, but some decorated with leaves while others have stones or twigs) is a different food. There are even condiments such as salt and paper and sprinkles. She does an elaborate explanation for me while inviting me to sit down and partake. It's so earnest and intentional and creative and REAL to her. She's enthralled. She began writing "storybooks" which consist of multiple pages with pictures and scribbled lines that she tells me are the words of her story. She tells me what she plans to write before she makes a book. Her stories hav...

Jane has a new phrase. She says, "You're my favorite mama!" while hugging me tight. Always aware of her jealousy issues it took me a moment to think of the right response that wouldn't set her up in comparison to her siblings, but then I responded, "And you're my favorite Jane!" She loves it. Tonight she was sitting on my lap--really, sprawling across me as I watched TV--when she said it. After my line she sprang up, turned to face me, and retold the story of her adoption. She does this every few weeks, it always takes me by surprise because it seems to always come out of nowhere, but I make sure I pay attention and acknowledge her story. I've also started correcting a few inaccuracies that creep in due to her young age and lack of ability to understand. Tonight's version was very simple. She said, (some paraphrasing here on my part), "My other mom misses me. I used to live at my other mom's house but then I came here and you borrowe...

The day after the adoption was finalized I call Aunt and told her the news. It was never going to be an easy phone call and I didn't want to see underhanded in any way by delaying. I mean, it's not like this was a surprise; they knew the adoption was imminent. Aunt was very nice. Saying all kinds of nice things about our family and how happy the girls are now. I'm grateful for her continued support. She's a great liaison between me and grandma on difficult topics. After calling Aunt I contacted Grandma and set up our next monthly visit for today. We met at the mall after church. There's an indoor kiddie playground that my three love to romp around in while we adults chat. The minute Grandma walked in I knew that she already knew about the adoption. Her sister probably called the second we hung up. Grandma was extremely subdued and weird--she tried to sneak in without Jane seeing her in order to generate a big response by surprising Jane. The girls always act v...

Tomorrow we tell Grandma that the adoption was finalized. I've been preparing a letter we will give her that a) thanks her for continuing to be a part of their lives, b) assures her we want that to continue, and c) outlines our boundaries going forward. I'll talk this through in person but I also wanted to give her a letter so she'd have something concrete to read if she became too emotional while we were talking and also so she could show it to others in her life who could help her understand. I've already called the Aunt and told her about the adoption finalization and she agrees this is a good plan. One thing I waffled with is trying to manage her social media posts. On one hand it's ridiculous to even try. She can open up new accounts I don't know about--she can show people pictures she takes on her phone when she's with them in person. If she's going to have access to the girls then I cannot control what she does with that access. On the other...

I wrote this letter today to thank the clerk of the court who, I believe, pushed our paperwork through sooner than we might have expected after I wrote her an email detailing how stressed Jane has been about lack of permanency. Dear Ms. B*, (*all names changed for privacy) Enclosed please find our adoption announcement. I wanted to share this with you to thank you for your help as Adoption Coordinator for J* Family Court. I am sure you have a very busy job and we appreciate you taking the time to communicate with us during the process. I thought you might also like to hear how the girls have taken the news that their adoption is finalized. Jane* is 4 and she was clearly more aware of the situation and more distressed by it than her younger sister, Kate*, who is 2, so her reaction was more immediate.  I got your email just minutes before Jane and I needed to head out to her dance class. I had just enough time to shoot out some quick emails to my husband and our social wo...

It's still sinking in. We are done with foster care. They are no longer foster children. We all have the same last name. I can introduce "my daughters" without feeling a bit like a fraud or obligated to whisper the caveat over their heads. We no longer have any social workers in our lives. We no longer have to see the therapist we no longer felt was effective and are free to pursue a better one. We no longer have to go to O.T. (which was super helpful for a time but at this point she'd met all her goals and now the therapist was just killing time to fulfill the doc's prescription). So much more freedom. The ability to just make good parenting decisions without any bureaucratic hassle. Freedom from either feeling like a criminal when we skirted rules we felt were silly; or gritting our teeth through meeting a silly rule we couldn't get around. This morning Theo and I left the kids in the care of their 17-year-old brother, Seth, and it was finally legal to...

I thought of another example (see previous post) on how bureaucracy harms more than helps. In the checklist of items to do before being initially licensed was a CPR certification for the adults in the home. The agency offered a link to a website where you could do a chintzy online quiz to get your certification (the same one I've done every year before school starts as part of back-to-school PD for teachers). I knew it was a joke and I wanted us to all be truly prepared--even our oldest son since I knew he'd be watching the kids sometimes. So, back then I signed up Theo, Seth (then 16) and I for a 4 hour class, in person, with real CPR dummies, an AED practice thingy, first aid materials, etc. We paid about $60 per person out of our own pocket. Since we were the only people in the class we were able to focus on infant and child CPR and scenarios that might come up, like choking. In the weeks after the class we talked about it and also taught Gus (then 12) a few things. It w...

It's really hard to rise above bureaucracy. There's pretty much no rising allowed. Either you do the petty paperwork or...you're out. Tomorrow we meet with our licensing social worker to renew our license. (This is social worker #3 in our lives. She's not to be confused with the foster care social worker nor the adoption social worker. If I believed it actually took some level of expertise to manage all the rules and paperwork for each area then I'd understand. But, in reality, all three of them give us the forms ahead of time and we fill them all out by ourselves, then turn them back in. If the forms are so easy a layman can do it--how does their agency need to hire three different people just to manage one family?) The list of things we have to do to renew our license is long and feels sillier by the minute. There's a 10 page questionnaire with statements like: In the past year have you kept your medications locked up? In the past year, if you own a g...

I just finished reading: Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother by Jana Wolff. A quick read, I was through it in a couple hours. And it was riveting. She speaks with the clear voice of someone who is living an experience and has much to say. She also speaks with all the honesty of a gut punch. Real and immediate and shocking and violent. She spoke so honestly I feared for her adoptive son, one day, when he would read this book. But, she's right. And, at the end, when she talks about how naive she and her husband were, as white people, adopting a black boy, well, I had to applaud her honesty. She's not painting herself as any hero here. And I appreciate her efforts to educate herself and educate her reader to see the inherent racism in a world created by whites, for whites, where black people are often, to quote her on p. 143 as either, "...missing, misrepresented or included as if for extra credit." My favorite quote is on p. 111, "Adoption is a bittersweet so...

Today I've spoken with, or exchanged emails with, the adoption caseworker, the adoption caseworker's supervisor, the clerk of the court, and the guardian ad litem. All have given me different information about how and when the adoption paperwork progresses through the courts. The supervisor is obviously lying. The caseworker thinks she knows stuff and uses phrases like, "in my experience" but I know she's been on the job about six months. The clerk of the court tells it straight. According to the clerk no, we cannot switch over to the "quicker" judge and whoever told us that was lying (supervisor). Also, we should expect the signing to take up to a month, not be done in two weeks and whoever told us two weeks is lying (again, the supervisor). The supervisor called me in response to my pestering emails and phone calls and I called her on all her false promises by saying the clerk told me something different and she tried to backpeddle and claim she ...

Kinda sickly sweet but then, birth announcement are super sappy too, right? I want the mixed emotions adoption announcement card. Something along the lines of the image of the cat hanging on by one claw to the tree branch and the slogan about hanging on, or something like that. Maybe I want something religious with a patron saint and a plea to pray for us. But maybe this isn't the time to be honest. Most importantly, maybe this isn't all about me. I realized the girls are going to look back on this and wonder what we did to mark the occasion and I instantly felt so guilty that now I'm all in and over the top.  Luckily, because we're so close to Valentine's Day, I went to the store today and bought an obnoxious amount of heart-shaped doo dads and sometime this weekend Seth, my photographer son, will set up a backdrop that I'll bling out in hearts and then we'll take pictures and it'll be so sickly sweet I'll cringe every time I look at it. (Bu...

Every time we inch a little closer to the adoption I take note of how I feel in hopes of gaining insight into how I'll really feel when it's really all done, for real . Because I have absolutely no idea and not knowing how I'm going to feel seems very, I dunno, unnatural, or something. In the days leading up to each birth I already knew that I loved this baby fiercely. Of course there were the usual fears about the health of the baby or complications from birth, but under-girding those fears was the deep knowledge that I would absolutely, unquestioningly, unwaveringly, love my baby. I knew I was the kind of mother who could look a seriously deformed baby right in the face and love it no matter what. I knew I was the kind of mother who could do a horrendous stint in the NICU and still show up every day, a fierce advocate for that child. Regret was never going to be a part of my relationship with my birth child. But adoption, especially after 14 months of foster care w...

Just got this email from the adoption worker: "We will be filing both girls’ adoption petitions tomorrow in [ ] County." Now I just want to sit right here with my cell phone and landline phone and email browser refreshing every thirty seconds until we get the final word. And today at 4:15 there's another social worker meeting at our house. I'm not doing this one. Theo is taking it, per my request, well, demand. I can't even think about them derailing us, again, when we're so close, again.   

From the last post of feeling so good, feeling so in love with my little girls, feeling so at peace and happy with the world...we come to today. Today I am frightened, threatened, angry, frustrated. Awhile ago Kate was supposed to have a 30 month well child checkup. When the social worker told me about this I totally blew it off. I figured by the time they'd get around to caring the adoption would be final and we could skate by. I made this decision not on my own but when I took her in for her flu shot and the nurse told me that she's up to date on all her shots. I asked them about a 30 month checkup and they looked at me funny and said, uh, nobody does that anymore. Okay, if the doctor's office says it isn't needed then I'm not about to pitch a fit trying to make them do something they can't even bill for. Last Monday the state's official adoption agency okayed the adoption. But, there was a delay in taking that paperwork to the judge because the subs...

Today has been a momentous day. And the stress just keeps rolling off... A good, good day. 1) I got my book to enough of a polished rough draft that I'm willing to show it to initial readers. This blog and this fictional book have both been outlets for my worst fears and most constant anxieties. They got me through a lot of anxiety-induced insomnia. It felt amazing to watch my "manuscript" (hardly seems I have the right to use the word, but maybe I do) get bound at the printers and then shipped off. A tiny step toward a long held dream of mine. 2) While I standing there at the printers Theo called and told me that the state agency that approves adoptions had signed off on the girls' adoption. That's it! We're done! The next step is a quick signature by a judge on all the legal paperwork but that's really a rubber stamp. They're essentially adopted. What a relief! No more foster care social worker harassment!! That's like ten pounds of worry off...

Today Theo and I went to the adoption agency to sign a bunch of paperwork, write some checks, and receive the super secret documentation about why the girls were removed from their birth home that we'd been asking to see for months but were told would only be made available to us at this stage in the adoption process. There was no new super secret information. We already knew it all. I guess our first foster care social worker was a total blabbermouth who told us stuff we weren't supposed to know. Plus, I'd sat in on the termination of parental rights hearing where, I recognized from the awkward legalese of the reports I read today, this stuff had all been read aloud by the judge to all assembled there in the courtroom. Let's think about that--I had access to deeply private stuff as a random member of the public that I, as a foster and potentially adoptive parent, did NOT have until a year after the girls were placed with us. Our system is seriously screwed up. I ...