Hope is a B*tch

We went weeks without hearing anything about the two babies. I will never get used to the "hurry up and wait" aspects of this process.

In the meantime, I decided to call a pediatrician friend of mind and she echoed my concerns about bringing a little one with severe asthma into a home (albeit a very clean home) with pets. It would have been a "let's just see what happens" situation. No thank you. Asthma is nothing to be messed around with and babies are not guinea pigs. I told CW to please withdraw us from consideration. She agreed that that was probably best. I didn't get the feeling that anything was happening with the case anyway.

But my oh my, have we had a heartbreak this week.

Two very medical fragile babies. Beyond gorgeous.

D*C*F*S ideally wanted them placed in a home together, of course, but their care was so intensive that they were strongly considering separate homes until surgeries could resolve some of the medical issues.

We knew that we didn't have the support system in place to care for two babies who would need eyes on them 24/7 (and when I say 24/7, it is no exaggeration), but after much conversation we agreed to take one with the offer to adopt both after their surgeries, provided we could get a few basic questions answered first.

Our CW said she was almost sure they'd have to separate them - that their care would be too much for one foster home.

Our hopes went up.

Soared . . . to the point that I was figuring out how to arrange our bedroom for the baby to sleep with us each night so we could care for it.

We visited them in the hospital. We held and comforted them. We learned a little bit about their daily care. We dared to dream that they might be our babies, until I got an email from our worker yesterday morning.

They found the babies a home together.

Best for them, but heartbreaking for us.

Even O was shaken by the news.

He too had dared to hope.

Hope - - - she is such a b*tch.

When will I ever learn?

And Still We Wait

We've been approached about two siblings, both very little ones.

There is one stumbling block. (It wouldn't be us if there wasn't a stumbling block.)

One of the kids has what sounds like pretty serious asthma. Knowing what I do about allergies and asthma, I requested that someone speak with the child's physician to confirm that it would be okay for them to be placed in a home with pets.

As it is, our home is pretty asthma-friendly. We have no carpet (only hardwoods) and no curtains, and I keep things pretty well dusted and vacuumed because of my own allergies. But we do still have two part-time indoor kitties and two full-time indoor small dogs and they do have some dander. I won't do anything to put a child's health at risk, no matter how much I'd love to be their parent.

So our caseworker will be checking on that and getting back to us before we'll agree to proceed with anything.

We've also sent a list of questions to the caseworker based on the info we were given. One of them was if we could get a photo of the kids. I mentioned to O that I sort of wished we hadn't requested the picture - that if the asthma was going to be a stumbling block, I'd rather not see how stinkin' cute they are.

Cut to Friday afternoon just before 5pm. We're on our way to dinner and an email from our caseworker pops up on my Black*berry. It's the photo. Except the Black*berry has done something to zap the attachment so not only can't we open the photo, but we can't even forward the email to another email address to open.

Torture.

So I've zipped off a friendly email to our caseworker asking her to resend on Monday.

And still we wait.

But really, when you approach these situations assuming they won't work out, it really makes the wait a lot easier. If only I'd know that four or five years ago, life would have been so much easier.

Oh well, live and learn.

One Big Party

Isn't it funny how different things can be from what you'd imagined?

While searching online for things to add to the life books, I visited birthfather's FB page several times to copy and print photos that I thought the kids would like to have someday.

My most recent and final visit was just last week, as I was preparing to finish up the last of the pages. I was jarred by what I saw on his homepage.

He had just "friended" birthmom.

Now, the one and only time I spoke with birthdad, he was very clear that birthmom was Satan incarnate. I guess things have changed.

You know what I did next, of course.

I zipped over to her FB page as fast as my little mouse would carry me.

(I choose to view myself as a modern-day Nancy Drew rather than as a creepy nosy stalker, by the way. Ahem.)

I was surprised to learn that she is still in the area. She's from another part of the country and I figured that her stay in this state would be very temporary once she'd signed her rights to the kids away.

But the thing that surprised me most was a post on her homepage where she talked about how excited she was for an upcoming 3-day trip to the beach and yee-haw, it was just going to be one big party.

I confess, I had to read it a couple of times before it computed.

This is a woman who has walked away from five children.

Five.

She did not one thing to get her two youngest back - just signed them over.

I suppose I always assumed that she was suffering as a result. Like, suffering to the point that she probably couldn't function very well.

Don't get me wrong, that's not what I HOPED for her. I'm clear that she has many serious issues and needs HELP more than she needs my disdain.

But, I guess I always just imagined that she must have been nearly paralyzed with grief.

How could it possibly be any other way?

I was wrong, though.

Because yee-haw, it was going to just be one big party.

I will never ever understand some people.

Never.

And I'm okay with that.

One Final Gift

When the kids moved in with us, they came with the stereotypical foster kids’ black trash bags filled with crappy, stained, too-small clothes, and a lot of broken toys.

We replaced almost everything. It was our pleasure to do so.

While they lived here, I never left the house without returning home with something for them. Often I didn’t make a big deal of it, tucking whatever I’d bought into their toy box, drawers, or bookshelves (so many books!) for them to run across later. I didn’t want to try and buy their love and certainly didn’t want them to become spoiled, but I really wanted them to have nice things.

Now, after all these months have passed, I am finishing up what I think will be one of our most important gifts to them.

Life books.

Life books are generally scrapbooks that tell the kids’ life story as best as it can be pieced together.

Their previous foster mom agreed in her ISP to maintain life books for them each of the 18 months they lived with her.

The kids came to us with nothing.

In fact, after the kids moved in with us, I asked her to please make me copies of the photos she’d taken of the kids so I could start the life books myself. She stated that she didn’t know how to do that, though I was welcomed to take the memory card from her camera and have them made myself.

She DID, however, know how to upload all those photos to her Facebook page, which is strictly against foster parent rules, by the way.

She simply didn’t want to pay the few dollars that it would have cost to have the photos printed.

Shameful.

As it was, I simply swiped the pictures off of her FB page and printed them out myself. There were probably only 20 photos each of the kids, but they were certainly better than nothing.

I then worked with birth grandmother who provided me stacks of photos from the kids’ earliest years.

I researched online and found photos of the kids’ sisters whom they have never met.

I found additional photos of the kids that birth father had put online from the one time he visited with them while they were in foster care.

I added photos of the hospitals where they were born, along with the dates, times, doctors’ names, their heights and weights at birth, and even what the weather was on those days. (It’s amazing what you can find online when you start poking around.)

I included copies of honors certificates and report cards and pictures they'd colored, along with letters written to them by the people they were closest to when they lived here.

Then of course, I added the ridiculous number of photos that we’d taken of them during their time with us, describing each one.

All told, each life book is well over one hundred fifty pages. Our caseworker will be picking them up in a couple of weeks and delivering them to the new foster family next month when she visits their home.

Given that all contact to/with the past has been cut off for the kids, I am quite certain that they will not see these books for years to come. I am hopeful, though, that foster mom will keep them for the kids to have when they are older (or send them with the kids if they are moved).

When the kids do see them, I hope they will understand that although some really awful things happened to them during their childhoods, they were also cared for by a lot of people who loved them dearly.

That’s what I hope, though I'll never know for sure. 

Choice

Sixty-two months have passed since I sat down to write my first blog post.

Holy Bananas. Sixty-two months.

It was January 17, 2007. We were about to make our first visit to the RE to hopefully get some help in adding to our family. I was excited, scared, and quite frankly angry that we were to the point of inviting doctors into a part of our lives that should have been private and sacred.

In closing, combining, and “sanitizing” my two blogs to start this one, I read back through each and every post I’d written over the years. Once I removed the identifying information, O also read through to double check that I’d taken out everything I’d meant to.

“Shell shocked.”

That is how I would best describe both of us after reliving the past five years.

For each sweet memory that my words evoked, there were so many more that were devastating to revisit. We could not believe how much we’d been through and sadly, how much of it we’d simply forgotten.

We have had so many children pass through the periphery of our lives – children we were approached about adopting either through foster care or privately. I thought about figuring out of the exact number as I read, but decided that it was probably best that I didn’t know. I’d guess that it was close to a hundred though, and for whatever reason none of the situations have lead to a forever child in our home.

Five years is a really long time. Five years can bring about a lot of change. And a lot of changes of heart.

As I said in a post a while back, I don't know if I want to be a mom. 

Perhaps it’s not so much the passage of time, but rather the fallout from the hell we lived through last year living with a violent child. I don’t really know.

I remember quite clearly retreating with O to our front porch so often last summer, holding hands and silently rocking, desperate to find just a moment of peace in our hearts and in our minds. We could not have felt more like prisoners if we’d been looking through the cell bars at the local county jail. It felt like a nightmare that we’d never wake up from.

If that's still impacting my views of what motherhood would be, I’m sure that time will bring more healing and my desire to be a parent will return.

But I’m starting to think that maybe it’s something bigger than that.

Heaven knows that we started this whole family-building adventure pretty late in life, relatively speaking. Tack on five years and I am now nearing my mid-40’s. I wonder if I have simply moved into another phase of my life, one where I’m just not certain that I'm still willing to give up all that we'd have to sacrifice in order to become parents. I love my husband madly. I love our little home and our pets who share it. I love spending time with friends and family. I love that we can travel when we want to. Simply put, I love that we come first. 

I have always appreciated this life we have created together because quite frankly, I never thought I’d have someone like O. But since the kids left nearly six months ago (to the day), I treasure it all the more. I revel in it. It feels like the most precious gift in the world to me and I am so very grateful for it, and for the return of peace to our lives. I have not forgotten what it was like to live in a war zone.

So I can’t quite put my finger on why I’m no longer in a super-motivated-must-make-it-happen frame of mind anymore when it comes to motherhood.

But I’m not.

And that leaves us with a choice.

Pants on Fire

A week or so ago, we were approached about an adoptive situation through D*C*F*S.

From the beginning, something hasn’t added up.

They state that the child has some pretty typical challenges for a child in foster care.

Nothing terribly dramatic.

Yet their current placement indicates issues well beyond what they are describing.

If our experiences over the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that if something doesn’t seem right, it’s probably very very wrong.

After sending a question-laden email, I think we landed on the answer.

Apparently the child’s issues were “magnified” to get them into the placement.

(Ahem.)

So let me get this straight.

You admit that you fudged information to get this child into their current foster home.

Yet you want us to agree to work with you to place the child in OUR home?

How could we ever, ever believe that you were telling US the unvarnished truth about this child?

We could’t.

We wouldn’t.

We’re out.

We're Southern - Of Course We Named Our Dog Biscuit

We have a new addition to the family. He is warm, soft, fluffy, a bit flaky, and brown around the edges.

Meet Biscu*it.

Bisc*uit and our other inside dog, The Squirrel, run and play and slam into walls as they slide across our hardwood floors. There have been occasional minor squabbles as they try to figure out who will be the boss, but they are having so much fun.

Biscuit is eight months old and spent the last three months in a cage at a “rescue”, waiting for someone to adopt him.

So we did.

And we are all pretty happy about it.