The New Caseworker Blues.

Big Guy's permanency plan was changed to adoption. We are waiting to hear when the TPR trial is scheduled. It sounds like this fall Little Guy's permanency plan is likely to be changed to adoption, too. You would think we're feeling happy about all this, and in many ways we are. We think TPR is in the kids' best interest. But we are also experiencing a lot of anxiety and stress as well. Am I the only foster parent who experiences foster parenting as being accompanied at all times by a vague sense of nausea? Because that's how I feel much of the time, even when things are great with the boys. There is always this anxious nausea in the pit of my stomach, this sense that things are so out of our control, that anything could happen, that people who don't even know our kids could make awful decisions for them, that we could experience great loss... or that our kids will experience even greater loss. I'm having a hard time with this right now. Big Guy's goal being adoption means a new caseworker for him (an idiotic policy if I've ever heard one). I'm sure she may be very nice and very competent and I will try to give her a chance but I just don't trust her like I trust Angel, at least not yet and probably not ever. She just has no clue about this case, about these kids. It's really hard for me knowing that she's going to make decisions without knowing the kids, us, or the birth family as well as Angel does. There is still so much that's complicated about our boys' cases that I cannot trust that we'll actually be adopting them any time soon. Too much likelihood of appeals, or a new judge taking pity on one of the boys' dads, or the new caseworker deciding they don't like us the way that Angel does. I am trying to learn how to not be too trusting of a caseworker. Our only caseworker until now has been a truly trustworthy, respectful and wonderful human being who I feel I can share the good, the bad and ugly with. We were spoiled and now I have to learn how to navigate a relationship with someone who is in the same role but who doesn't know and trust our family, and never saw the utter hell that Big Guy put us through and the amazing healing and change he has experienced since living with us. Someone who probably sees us as just another foster family, not as the amazingly committed therapeutic family that Angel knows us as.