"I love you, brother. I'm never gonna abuse you."
That's what Big Guy whispered to Little Guy while holding and kissing him this morning. Afterwards he started talking to me for an hour about how confusing it is when your family beat you but you still love them. This kid has the weight of the world on him - He is so convinced the judge is going to send his brother back to family again and he'll end up getting beat like Big Guy did.
Sometimes I don't know how I parent these kids without sobbing all the time or losing all faith in humanity.
Sorry I've been MIA. I have a lot to post about but am overwhelmed about trying to recap the last few months. Especially about the out-of-state relative Big Guy hasn't seen since he was a toddler, who appeared after the kids have been in (or in Little Guy's case, in and out) of foster care for six months and wants to take both children.
Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label abuse. Show all posts
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
How Do I Write About This?
I don't know how to write about what's going on lately. It just seems too hard to put into words.
How do I write about how after 6 weeks I have finally fallen in love with our 18 month old Little Guy, and how strange it is to find that I fell in love more easily and quickly with a behaviorally challenged 9 year old than an absurdly adorable cuddly 18 month old when once upon a time I had thought what I really wanted was a baby? (We were signed up for ONE child ages 0-5, remember? Haha).
How do I write about how hard it has been to let myself love the baby the way I love his brother, with the constant possibility of him being sent to his dad (who used to beat Big Guy) has been hanging over our head?
How do I write about how scary it is for us to be missing so much work/school because Little Guy has been sick with very little break for the entire 6 weeks he's been here? How I worry every day that Sarah will lose her job because of her excessive absences, and how my grades are suffering just as I am about to apply for graduate school?
How do I write about the complicated feelings I have about Patty, whose sweetness and simple-mindedness I have discovered is also used to manipulate others, and who will tell us she wants us to keep the kids and then hangs up the phone and calls The Agency to report that she thinks it was our fault that the baby was having seizures?
How do I write about how well Big Guy is doing when he also just disclosed about a time a family member threatened (and possibly even tried) to kill him?
How do I write about how Big Guy's has been ornery, argumentative and oppositional since the baby's been here when he a) told the psychiatrist this morning how scared he is of the baby going to (the baby's) dad because he worries the baby will get beaten and b) turned to me yesterday and said "I love y'all to death. Which really means I love you infinity."
Most of all... how do I write about the fact that The Agency just out of the blue dropped the biggest bomb of all: That after 6 months of the kids being in (or in and out, in Little Guy's case) of foster care, a distant aunt that Big Guy hasn't seen since he was a toddler has suddenly appeared... And that she's a licensed foster parent in a nearby state, and says she wants both kids?
How do I write about how I believe in family reunification (and how incensed I am about how the child welfare system destroys Black families in particular), when I also I think this move would be the absolutely the wrong thing for Big Guy after this many months of being with us, because of his emotional and behavioral issues and strong bond to us and how much he's thriving with us? How do I write about how stuck I feel about finding out if we have any recourse to fight this?
How do I write about how after 6 weeks I have finally fallen in love with our 18 month old Little Guy, and how strange it is to find that I fell in love more easily and quickly with a behaviorally challenged 9 year old than an absurdly adorable cuddly 18 month old when once upon a time I had thought what I really wanted was a baby? (We were signed up for ONE child ages 0-5, remember? Haha).
How do I write about how hard it has been to let myself love the baby the way I love his brother, with the constant possibility of him being sent to his dad (who used to beat Big Guy) has been hanging over our head?
How do I write about how scary it is for us to be missing so much work/school because Little Guy has been sick with very little break for the entire 6 weeks he's been here? How I worry every day that Sarah will lose her job because of her excessive absences, and how my grades are suffering just as I am about to apply for graduate school?
How do I write about the complicated feelings I have about Patty, whose sweetness and simple-mindedness I have discovered is also used to manipulate others, and who will tell us she wants us to keep the kids and then hangs up the phone and calls The Agency to report that she thinks it was our fault that the baby was having seizures?
How do I write about how well Big Guy is doing when he also just disclosed about a time a family member threatened (and possibly even tried) to kill him?
How do I write about how Big Guy's has been ornery, argumentative and oppositional since the baby's been here when he a) told the psychiatrist this morning how scared he is of the baby going to (the baby's) dad because he worries the baby will get beaten and b) turned to me yesterday and said "I love y'all to death. Which really means I love you infinity."
Most of all... how do I write about the fact that The Agency just out of the blue dropped the biggest bomb of all: That after 6 months of the kids being in (or in and out, in Little Guy's case) of foster care, a distant aunt that Big Guy hasn't seen since he was a toddler has suddenly appeared... And that she's a licensed foster parent in a nearby state, and says she wants both kids?
How do I write about how I believe in family reunification (and how incensed I am about how the child welfare system destroys Black families in particular), when I also I think this move would be the absolutely the wrong thing for Big Guy after this many months of being with us, because of his emotional and behavioral issues and strong bond to us and how much he's thriving with us? How do I write about how stuck I feel about finding out if we have any recourse to fight this?
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
What's goin' on.... and a plea for help.
Oh dear, it's been a while since I've updated, huh?
Did you think maybe I stopped posting because we threw in the towel and our boy got placed in a therapeutic foster home? Rest assured, we're still hanging in there with Big Guy and don't have any intent to stop.
It's partly the Jewish holidays - Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkos, Simchas Torah... They have taken up a huge part of my time for the last month. It's also partly that there's so much to say and I know I'll never be able to update you on everything that's going on.
Here is a bullet list of just a few of the many things that have happened since I last posted:
Did you think maybe I stopped posting because we threw in the towel and our boy got placed in a therapeutic foster home? Rest assured, we're still hanging in there with Big Guy and don't have any intent to stop.
It's partly the Jewish holidays - Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkos, Simchas Torah... They have taken up a huge part of my time for the last month. It's also partly that there's so much to say and I know I'll never be able to update you on everything that's going on.
Here is a bullet list of just a few of the many things that have happened since I last posted:
- His team (case workers, etc) decided if this placement fails he will be placed not in a therapeutic foster home but in a Residential Treatment Center. Holy crap, talk about pressure on us! We feel so strongly, as does his therapist, that at this point he does not need an RTC, he needs a family. It's one thing if we adopt him and then he needs RTC, because he'd have a family to visit him all the time and then to eventually come home to. If he went to RTC right now we'd have no rights to even visit him and at most he might get a weekly visit with mom and an occasional visit from a social worker.
- His therapist asked me "So, how does it feel living in a residential treatment center?" Because he acknowledged what everyone else is coming to realize, which is that we are basically providing a residential treatment center and therapeutic foster home without the training or compensation.
- Big Guy's therapist is excellent and Big Guy is starting to talk about his anger, why he takes it out on us, his sadness, etc.
- Big Guy has been revealing more abuse history. I'm feeling so angry I just want to kill everyone who hurt him. I have to laugh that I told people when he was first placed with us, "He doesn't seem to have any kind of major abuse history, at most maybe a little emotional neglect." Warning to first-time foster parents like us: Never, ever believe that the story you think you know during the first month or when a kid's placed is anything near what the full truth is.
- We found a great psychiatrist who is starting him on an anti-depressant! Hallelujah! She actually gets that it's not just ADHD and Oppositional Defiance Disorder that are happening here, and she diagnosed him with PTSD after we had been increasingly feeling that some of his behaviors are trauma reactions.
- We have been talking to Patty (Big Guy's mom) a lot and learned from her more about her own and her mom's mental health history which has helped us understand the situation better and also helped us inform the psychiatrist. We have an awesome relationship with her...
- ...Which makes it so frustrating that CPS has decided we shouldn't be allowed to supervise visits. Because an outside agency that CPS contracts with is now doing visits at their offices and doesn't allow any contact between birth families and foster families, we cannot see her, and Little Guy (Big Guy's baby brother who we had for the first week that Big Guy was with us), at all. She literally enters through a different door than us, we think, so we can't even "run into her" in the waiting room. It's awful. So much for our dream that we could help mentor and support her. Basically CPS has made it clear they want to build a case to terminate her parental rights, even though she is parenting her baby and her older kid has only been in foster care 3 months with us. They have a foster family who is very competent and has a good relationship with the birth mom, a birth mom who never hurt her child directly, and a foster child who isn't traumatized by contact with his birth mom... The perfect situation to allow a mentoring relationship between foster and birth family or at least to allow more casual visits outside a clinical setting. Yet they don't want to make more work for themselves or risk her actually getting help from us, so they're screwing everyone in the process. Nice.
- School started and life became much more manageable because of everyone having a set schedule, so we no longer feel we're living in constant crisis mode...
- ...However, around the time school started Big Guy stopped sleeping through the night. He woke us up no less than seven times last night. He simply cannot and will not sleep without a grown-up in bed with him (please, spare me the lectures and horror stories about how foster parents should protect themselves from abuse allegations by never ever laying down with a child. It's the only way to keep from multiple violent meltdowns at night right now, and if those meltdowns are hard to deal with during the day they are impossible to deal with when half-asleep). His anxiety is so out of control. Usually I go lay down with him when he wakes us up, but end up falling asleep and waking up hours later in horrible pain because his bed sucks and I have a bad back. If anything is making my life feel unmanageable right now, it's not his tantrums or violence... it's the lack of continuous sleep and how we're held hostage by him at night because he wakes up multiple times and is terrified to go back to sleep without us with him. Have I mentioned I have idiopathic hypersomnolence, and am therefore supposed to get 9 hours of sleep a night in order to safely drive? Haha.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
When foster kids threaten false abuse allegations
This one's to throw out there to the foster-blogosphere: What do you do when your foster kids threaten to make false abuse allegations against you? It seems to come with the territory with older foster kids, from what I hear. I want to hear how you deal with this.
I have to say that it really freaks me out when, during tantrums, Big Guy threatens to tell CPS we're abusing him. This only happens when he gets mad at us and has a massive tantrum (he becomes like a totally different kid during these tantrums). He learned some time before he entered foster care that you could theaten someone by saying you'd report them for abuse. He seems to understand that CPS is who you should tell. He's so naive and immature, and didn't come into care due to an abuse allegation, so it's pretty clear to us that someone must have told him that he could get grownups in trouble this way. Being a foster parent to an older kid is scary. It's scary partly because you hear warning stories about how it's a matter of when you'll get an allegation made against you, not if.
As much as I know that Big Guy's therapist, caseworker, etc. think we're doing a great job and respect us and don't suspect us of abusing him... if he made an allegation they'd be obligated to investigate, and that investigation alone could be very traumatic for all of us. I know people it's happened to, and even when they discover that the allegation was BS, it turns peoples' lives upside down. We had to have a conversation tonight with Big Guy about how lying is not okay, and I finally let him know that if he lied and told someone we were hurting him, he might be removed and never allowed to see us again... and reminded him he wouldn't be sent back to mommy, which when he's mad at us is probably what he'd like. I had tried for so long to not say anything like that, but I think it's time he understand how serious it is for him to lie about something like this. He is not a liar. This kid really can't seem to lie. But you never know what he might say when he gets mad enough at us, and it's just so scary to think that not only we would pay the price... he would pay the price. We reiterated the importance of honesty. We emphasized that we would never hurt him and we don't believe in hitting children (and reminded him of our anger that he was beaten by relatives) and told him if we ever did hit him he should tell somebody, so that he'd understand that we're serious about kids being safe. I hope we dealt with this the right way. I can't ignore it any more. As usual, we are writing e-mails to caseworkers and therapists to let them know what he said - I make sure to constantly have them document his threats.
By the way, when did Big Guy make the most recent and by far the most serious threat of making a false allegation? Mere hours after he told us for the first time, out of the blue, "I want to stay with y'all forever. I don't want to have to leave."
I have to say that it really freaks me out when, during tantrums, Big Guy threatens to tell CPS we're abusing him. This only happens when he gets mad at us and has a massive tantrum (he becomes like a totally different kid during these tantrums). He learned some time before he entered foster care that you could theaten someone by saying you'd report them for abuse. He seems to understand that CPS is who you should tell. He's so naive and immature, and didn't come into care due to an abuse allegation, so it's pretty clear to us that someone must have told him that he could get grownups in trouble this way. Being a foster parent to an older kid is scary. It's scary partly because you hear warning stories about how it's a matter of when you'll get an allegation made against you, not if.
As much as I know that Big Guy's therapist, caseworker, etc. think we're doing a great job and respect us and don't suspect us of abusing him... if he made an allegation they'd be obligated to investigate, and that investigation alone could be very traumatic for all of us. I know people it's happened to, and even when they discover that the allegation was BS, it turns peoples' lives upside down. We had to have a conversation tonight with Big Guy about how lying is not okay, and I finally let him know that if he lied and told someone we were hurting him, he might be removed and never allowed to see us again... and reminded him he wouldn't be sent back to mommy, which when he's mad at us is probably what he'd like. I had tried for so long to not say anything like that, but I think it's time he understand how serious it is for him to lie about something like this. He is not a liar. This kid really can't seem to lie. But you never know what he might say when he gets mad enough at us, and it's just so scary to think that not only we would pay the price... he would pay the price. We reiterated the importance of honesty. We emphasized that we would never hurt him and we don't believe in hitting children (and reminded him of our anger that he was beaten by relatives) and told him if we ever did hit him he should tell somebody, so that he'd understand that we're serious about kids being safe. I hope we dealt with this the right way. I can't ignore it any more. As usual, we are writing e-mails to caseworkers and therapists to let them know what he said - I make sure to constantly have them document his threats.
By the way, when did Big Guy make the most recent and by far the most serious threat of making a false allegation? Mere hours after he told us for the first time, out of the blue, "I want to stay with y'all forever. I don't want to have to leave."
Monday, August 9, 2010
Patty
Compounding my frustration with the psych hospitalization seeming like a totally pointless waste of time, is today's interactions with "Patty", Big Guy's birth mom. She was at the meeting with the social worker at the psych hospital. She brought Little Guy (her other son, our former foster baby) and it was really nice to see him and make him laugh. We were warm and friendly to her, as usual. But I wanted to throttle her when we were informing the social worker about the fact that Big Guy been talking a lot about physical abuse he'd experienced at the hands of another family member... and the first thing she asked was "did he say if I was there when it happened?" Um, yes he did. He said you were there and you were laughing while she beat him. Seriously, you care more about whether you were implicated than knowing what happened and how it's affected him?
I am struggling with my patience with her. I have generally had a lot of empathy for her and wanted to support her in any way we can. We got into foster parenting hoping we'd have the opportunity to mentor birth parents to help them attain reunification (though CPS has gotten in the way of this at every turn.) We believe strongly in supporting reunification and helping first families/birth families get the help they need to be able to parent, yet since all the abuse stuff has come out, I'm finding myself feeling less patience for her cluelessness, her bad judgment, and the way she's more concerned about whether Big Guy's mad at her than dealing with what she did wrong that led to her no longer being able to parent him.
Patty is sweet, and she loves Big Guy. But not only is she unable to parent Big Guy, I'm also starting to doubt that she could ever parent him no matter what support is provided to her, and I'm worrying increasingly about whether she can keep Little Guy, her baby, physically and emotionally safe. Her judgment is so poor and due to her cognitive disabilities and mental illness, it's unlikely to change significantly. I would love to see her get parenting services that are available for people with developmental disabilities (DD) but because she didn't get DD services when she was young, she's not eligible for them. She's gotten more services than CPS has ever provided, though... all to keep the family intact and avoid having to remove the children. Now that she's lost her older son (she called CPS to take him) the court isn't even sure what services are left to give her. She's had intensive parenting training and so much more, and is unable to assimilate the information. It's so frustrating. I want her to have the best possible chance to parent her kids, and she is compliant with showing up to classes and appointments... but is unable to process any of the information in a meaningful way.
I could tell many more stories about the things she said today, but I won't. I really am trying to access my empathy for her. I can totally understand why she couldn't handle Big Guy's outbursts - We barely can, and there are two of us with above-average intelligence and more family support than she has. But I still feel so angry that she stood by and let him be hurt by her sister.
I am struggling with my patience with her. I have generally had a lot of empathy for her and wanted to support her in any way we can. We got into foster parenting hoping we'd have the opportunity to mentor birth parents to help them attain reunification (though CPS has gotten in the way of this at every turn.) We believe strongly in supporting reunification and helping first families/birth families get the help they need to be able to parent, yet since all the abuse stuff has come out, I'm finding myself feeling less patience for her cluelessness, her bad judgment, and the way she's more concerned about whether Big Guy's mad at her than dealing with what she did wrong that led to her no longer being able to parent him.
Patty is sweet, and she loves Big Guy. But not only is she unable to parent Big Guy, I'm also starting to doubt that she could ever parent him no matter what support is provided to her, and I'm worrying increasingly about whether she can keep Little Guy, her baby, physically and emotionally safe. Her judgment is so poor and due to her cognitive disabilities and mental illness, it's unlikely to change significantly. I would love to see her get parenting services that are available for people with developmental disabilities (DD) but because she didn't get DD services when she was young, she's not eligible for them. She's gotten more services than CPS has ever provided, though... all to keep the family intact and avoid having to remove the children. Now that she's lost her older son (she called CPS to take him) the court isn't even sure what services are left to give her. She's had intensive parenting training and so much more, and is unable to assimilate the information. It's so frustrating. I want her to have the best possible chance to parent her kids, and she is compliant with showing up to classes and appointments... but is unable to process any of the information in a meaningful way.
I could tell many more stories about the things she said today, but I won't. I really am trying to access my empathy for her. I can totally understand why she couldn't handle Big Guy's outbursts - We barely can, and there are two of us with above-average intelligence and more family support than she has. But I still feel so angry that she stood by and let him be hurt by her sister.
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