Apres le move.

I had no idea how long it'd been since I'd blogged. Wow. Sorry 'bout that, folks. We moved in April, before Pesach (Passover). Lots of endings and new beginnings around here since then. We're hanging in, though. Little Guy and Big Guy are loving having more space in our new home, life is much improved since we are no longer on top of each other.

The biggest news to share is that adoption is looking like it's going to be the plan for Big Guy. Because Big Guy and Little Guy came into care on the same day but Little Guy was sent home not long after and was home for several months, CPS is counting his re-entry to foster care rather than his original entry as his "date of entry into the foster care system" (the date upon which his parents' 12 months of working their case plan will be based). This means the boys are on different timelines in terms of their cases. So Big Guy's permanency hearing was early this month and his case was moved to the adoption unit, meaning that the goal is now adoption (by us) rather than reunification. This doesn't mean parental rights have been terminated yet or that if a family member came out of the woodwork CPS wouldn't have to consider them. But it means that a TPR hearing will be scheduled. It is quite possible we will adopt Big Guy by some time this winter, barring any legal appeals made by Patty.

Little Guy, on the other hand, won't be done with his year in foster care (the year that's required before CPS can file for TPR) until fall. And unlike Big Guy, he has a dad who is fighting for him. Fighting in an ambivalent, flaky way, but still doing some of what CPS has asked him to do for his caseplan. So the possibility of the boys' outcomes being different still hovers above our heads. Unfortunately Big Guy has started picking up on this and it is contributing to the hard time he is having. You have to understand that he is not happy that he is likely going to be adopted. Those stories about kids who are just so happy to finally have a forever family? That is not our story. Our story is one of a little boy who absolutely adores his mom, whose mom is loving to him and never overtly abused him... and who is being told he still cannot go home to her. This is a story of a kid who is told over and over the reasons why he is in care (mom's mental illness, her cognitive limitations, how easily she got overwhelmed parenting them, the normal kid things she wouldn't let them do due to her paranoia, the lack of family support she has, the way she couldn't protect him from getting badly abused by other family members, his behavioral/emotional needs she couldn't meet) and still doesn't really get why he can't go home to her and thinks it's his fault and if his behavior was better he could go home. This is a story of a kid who adores his foster parents but wants to be with his birth mom... but who doesn't get any say in the matter because he's so young and his needs so clearly cannot be met by his birth mom. It's a sad story, to say the least.

So it's probably no surprise when I say that Big Guy, who in many ways has been doing quite well, is lashing out like crazy at us and finding new ways to test us. His goal in his testing/behaviors seems to be to prove that we don't really love him and aren't "real" parents. He will act out intensely so that we are stern with him or ask him to go to his room - And when he refuses to go to his room he will "trip" and "hurt himself" in a very obviously purposeful way, so that when we don't make a huge scene over how he's hurt he can then accuse us of not caring that he's hurt and tell us that proves we're not "real parents." He will tell us he's going to do something dangerous or self-destructive and when we use the appropriate behavioral techniques (since this is truly a behavioral issue, not a psychiatric one) which involves not over-reacting, he will tell us we don't care if he hurts himself and his mom would care and that this proves we don't love him. It is very, very trying. He is trying to push us away. At the same time, he has been telling us more than usual how much he loves us and even told Sarah the other day "you're the best mommy ever!" (Mommy is a term he never uses for us, only for his birth mom). Can you say AMBIVALENCE?!?!

Little Guy is growing like a weed. He has grown almost 4 inches since he's been with us (8 months) and has gone from having not a single recognizable word to being almost on-target in terms of his language. He is 2 and is very bossy and very funny and sweet. This morning he climbed across my lap while I was on my computer and demanded "Snuggles!" He is just a delight. So cute and so loving and happy. Unfortunately he continues to have seizures, which is a challenge. He also is having a lot of sleeping troubles of late, which is not fun for any of us.

As for Sarah and I, we're doing okay. Okay enough to be thinking about Foster Child #3. We got a call last night for an after-hours placement of a teenager and I immediately told Sarah to say no, but afterwards spent an hour trying to fall asleep while I couldn't stop thinking about whether they could find a home for this young lady. I know we made the right choice, however. It's easy to get excited about taking whichever child they call for (especially because we get so few calls) but we need to think of our boys first and foremost and make sure whoever joins our family is a good, safe fit for them.

A Brief Debriefing, And Why The Boys Are Still Here

We are still here, alive, and mostly healthy. A brief update in bullet points:

• The boys are still with us, and it doesn't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon, though with foster care anything can happen at any time.
• Patty got notified that CPS' evaluations have found her incapable of parenting on her own due to her cognitive limitations and mental illness. That means she cannot and will not get custody of her children unless she is living with a capable family member who will be their legal guardian.
• Patty's uncle Thomas, who sounds like one of the more stable members of her family (which is not saying much), moved in with her in hopes that they can get the kids back if he helps with them. However, CPS has doubts about how long-term his commitment is and whether he understands how much work this entails and that he will be signing up for no less than 16 years (until the baby is 18). So CPS could theoretically send the kids to live with Thomas and Patty, but we kind of doubt it will. 
• In addition to issues with Uncle Thomas' commitment, we aren't sure that he has a job, and we don't know what they'd do about their living situation since Patty lives in a 2-bedroom and CPS does not look kindly upon kids and their parents (or uncles) sleeping in the same room, plus if Section 8 gets wind of Thomas living there they may have problems. Please understand I am not saying that I think that how many bedrooms there are should influence whether the children are returned - I'm just acknowledging the reality that while one wouldn't have their children taken away in most cases for simply co-sleeping or not having enough bedrooms, when a parent is trying to prove that they can have their children back from the system those scenarios are generally not acceptable to the Power That Be.
• Patty had been complaining to me that she really didn't want the kids to go to their great aunt in another state. I felt powerless to do anything and I told her over and over she needed to tell her lawyer and CPS who are the only ones who can actually do something. Well, before court last month I reminded her again who she can tell if she wants to make sure that doesn't happen (which she had told me yet again). I'm proud of her because I actually saw her go up to her lawyer and tell him in no uncertain terms that she is not moving in with the aunt and does not want her children to go there. In addition, the great aunt seems to have been discouraged by the whole process of getting the kids. It is likely it would involve her losing the foster kid she currently has because she cannot be licensed by her home agency and our state simultaneously (absurd, right?)  It's doubtful right now that the kids will end up with this aunt.

• The baby had been having seizures. Frequently. As some of you know, he started having them shortly after being placed with us but they went away for a long time. Now he is on medication for them, but it's not fully controlling them. It is slowly sinking in that we now have not one special needs child, but two. Granted all adopted and foster children are special needs in my larger worldview due to the specific attachment issues and grief they will deal with for the rest of their life, but having two kids with major emotional/medical/behavioral needs is different.
• Little Guy is big! He is 21 months and is talking up a storm. He is still delayed in terms of his speech but he's catching up really fast with the help of Early Intervention. His newest word is "diaper." He says it almost perfectly. Between this and his patting his crotch when he's in the bathroom with us (watching us pee, one of his favorite pasttimes) I think he's going to be more than ready to start potty-training when my schoolyear is over in May! 
• Big Guy at 10 is increasingly sophisticated in how he fights with us, tries to get his way, manipulates, and argues. But he's also incredibly loving and affectionate (you should see him when he gets overcome with love and comes up and kisses me 20 times on the cheek!)  He has started calling me Ima in public, which is a huge milestone for him, and let me come into the classroom with him after months of having aggressive meltdowns if I'd even show up at school because he was so embarrassed to be seen with a white woman who people would think was his mom.  He's talking a lot about his feelings with his new therapist. 
• Big Guy is incredibly sad right now about being in foster care and misses his mommy so so much. He's going through a lot of fantasizing about how he could go home - Whether by running away, or by offering to never have behavioral problems again, or by saying he'll help mommy with the things she has a hard time with. It's really painful. The up side is we're finally being more honest with him about mommy's shortcomings and why he's in foster care and he's having to start to deal with the reality of why he can't be with her. This is so painful for him, but so necessary since within a few months the goal could change from reunification to adoption. We want him to have a better understanding of the problems mommy has instead of simply thinking "but mommy didn't hurt me! there's no reason for me to not be with her!" or thinking "but I'm only in foster care because of my behavior problems and if I stop acting out there's no reason she can't take care of us!" We have been carefully finding ways to describe her mental illness and cognitive limitations and asking him questions to help him realize on his own the ways mommy has "problems with how her brain works."
• Overall, as a family, I think we're doing pretty darn well. We're moving to a house with a yard this spring, which is really exciting! We're also talking now and then about theoretically being open to another child or two in the not-too-distant future, though not actively planning for it yet.

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?

Seizures and court hearings.

Warning: This post is long, but I would feel so appreciative if anyone took the time to read it and share their thoughts or words of support... or even just prayers.
 
Little Guy has been with us for 2.5 weeks and it's been a total joy. Except for when he started having seizures, unexpectedly, last week! I was sitting in the waiting room of Big Guy's pediatrician's office, waiting for Big Guy to go in to have his hives checked out. He'd woken up with horrendous hives all over his body and I kept him home from school. The baby was sitting across from me in his stroller and started to shake. I thought maybe it was shivers from a fever, but when he started blinking his eyes and scrunching his face over and over, and his eyes would sometimes roll up 1/2 way and then he looked drunk afterwards... I was so scared that I ran crying to the receptionist and said someone needed to look at the baby. That office doesn't even take Little Guy's insurance, but the doctor who usually sees Big Guy was fantastic and checked him out pretty thoroughly. He diagnosed it as a febrile seizure but said that we should either make a neurologist appointment or take the baby to the pediatric ER to have him checked out. We chose to go to the ER. They sent us home, saying that if it didn't happen again in 24 hours than there was no need for any follow-up or EEG, but that we should bring him back if it happened again. Well, the next day he didn't have any fever at all... yet it happened again. Long story short, he spent the weekend (Fri-Mon) hooked up to an EEG and Sarah and I traded off staying with him 24/7 and staying with his brother. It was really scary and stressful.

While in the hospital with the baby, we got to meet Little Guy's dad Gerald. That was fascinating (he's so much older than I expected!), and in some ways reassuring since at tomorrow's hearing the court may well send the baby to dad. It's a little less scary now that we have a face to put with the name and we have seen him interact with the baby. Patty also visited a lot and was grasping at straws to try to blame us for the baby's seizure. E.g. "You said you wash his hair once a week? In our culture we only wash hair once a month. Maybe that's why he is having seizures"... and so on and so forth. Nevermind that the baby has fine, soft hair that's not at all like mom's thanks to a) him being a baby and b) his dad being part white and part American Indian in addition to being Black. His haircare is not going to be exactly like hers or the rest of her family's, but I'm not sure she's aware of that. Of course earlier in the same day she was complementing how we did her boys' hair and saying she wished she could do it so well!  I feel for her because it makes sense she'd be concerned about whether we know how to take care of Black childrens' hair and skincare needs, but she was grasping at straws because she had no control. She usually trusts us pretty well (enough to place her baby with us voluntarily!) but we also learned that, as CPS had warned us, she can often twist peoples' words. To be fair, her baby was sick, she's paranoid and has a low IQ so everything is scarier and more confusing for her than it would be otherwise, and she doesn't have custody of him so all she can think is that if only the baby'd stayed with her this never would have happened. But she also showed up unannounced, and woke the baby up when he was already asleep for the night (needless to say he hardly slept that night). She called all the time. The nurses told us she called the hospital at midnight because she was freaked out. We both have a lot of empathy for her, but we were so underslept and stressed after being with the baby for days at the hospital that she was really just contributing to our stress and we ended up having to set limits with her about when she should call and when she should visit and for how long.

So, the hearing is tomorrow that determines whether Little Guy stays (at least until the January hearing) or goes. Either the judge could say that dad still has to jump through certain hoops to be able to get the baby, in which case we'll have him at least until January when they will reconvene and reevaluate... or he could go to dad tomorrow or Friday. Because of this new medical info (seizures) and all the follow-up that needs to happen (MRI, etc), as well as the neurologist's concern about the baby needing an Early Intervention evaluation due to possible developmental issues, I chose to call his lawyer. I filled her in and she implied that she would be arguing for him to not go to dad yet, especially given this new information. She certainly said that they would need to make sure whoever the baby's with can meet his medical and developmental needs. In the meantime, we are making the appointments he needs and if dad takes him I'm going to ensure that CPS gives him adequate info about what a seizure looks like, how to administer the medicine we were given if the baby has one, the importance of controlling his fever, and the dates and times of the appointments that we made.

CPS is going to argue for the baby to go dad, but it looks like the baby's lawyer may argue for him not to go yet. Angel, our caseworker, says that the judge is the same one who sent Little Guy back home (see bullet point #7 of the post that link sends you to) early in the summer due to lack of proof that the baby was being neglected or abused, and the fact that the removal was really because mom called CPS saying she couldn't handle Big Guy's behavioral issues. This judge is unpredictable and CPS never knows how to predict how he'll rule. So we're holding our breaths and trying so hard to trust that the kids will be okay even if they are separated. This is so, so hard. I don't know if I'm more worried about the baby or about Big Guy, who is doing so well but could really be set back by this huge loss of having his brother taken away again. I have to believe we'll all be okay. I have no other choice if I don't want to fall apart.

Antidepressants Are a Beautiful Thing

Our boy has done a complete 180 degree turn during the past week. He has gone an entire week without a single tantrum (by which I mean no hitting, punching, throwing things, threatening to hurt himself). That is probably the longest he's ever gone since being with us. He's been happy, smiling a lot, telling us he loves us a lot (unsolicited statements like "I love you, Ima..." or "I love spending time with you, Mama..."), and totally fun to be around. He's earned new privileges, he's talked about his feelings instead of acting out, and he's been pretty much like a "normal" kid with fairly severe ADHD. He's had no aggression or violence or angry outbursts. It's pretty incredible.

Family life has been a total joy lately, which is such a relief from the constant struggling of the last 4 months. There have been difficult moments, things are far from perfect... but they are so, so much better. I think the Prozac is working, and allowing the therapy to be more effective... which is giving credence to our belief that Big Guy's violent tantrums were not just behavioral but instead were due to a combination of anxiety, depression and PTSD. He's only been on Prozac a few weeks, and just this week we upped the dose, so it's possible things will get even better from here. I can't help feeling like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop - How can this be real? How long can it last? But I'm also starting to let go and just enjoy these times... and giving him loads of positive feedback about how awesome his behavior is and how much fun he is to be around.

Big Guy told us last night that he's being good so the judge will let him go home. It broke my heart to hear him say that, because it means he really still thinks he was removed because he was bad and he can go home when he's good. But it was a good opportunity to let  him know that being happy and being well-behaved will help him in every aspect of life, no matter where he lives. Whether he goes home or is adopted, he will have a better life and more privileges if he can behave respectfully and he feels good inside. We reminded him he isn't in foster care because he is bad, that he's in foster care because mommy has problems parenting (problems she is working on right now), and that we can't promise that good behavior will mean he gets to go home.

At first I was worried that raining on his parade like this might make him start acting out again, but my dad reminded me that there's no way that Big Guy was able to keep up such amazing behavior for an entire week purely out of willpower so he could go home. If that was the case, he'd have been on perfect behavior from the beginning of his time here. I think he just had an easier time behaving the way he'd like to behave because he's less depressed and anxious, plus he's been working in therapy on internalizing that hurting us isn't going to make him be able to go home. When he saw his behavior being so positive, it may have renewed his hope that now he can have enough self-control that he can behave well at home so that mommy will want him back and the judge will send him back. So I don't think he's going to regress simply because we are giving him reality checks about his power to make the judge send him home to mommy. He looked so deflated after I corrected him, I wanted to cry.

We knew from the beginning that "Oppositional-Defiance Disorder" and "ADHD" didn't fully encapsulate what was going on with this child. I'm so glad we finally found professionals who agreed that we needed to dig deeper into the psychiatric issues. Big Guy is happier, calmer and so much more focused. I feel like a weight has been lifted off of me. Even if it's temporary, it's a huge gift. Times like this remind me that all this hard work is worth it. And you know what? In the (unlikely) change that he does go back home to mommy, who is so limited in so many ways, I think it would be great to send him back as a happier, less aggressive, more well-adjusted kid who is easier for a cognitively limited mom to parent. I finally understand what foster parents mean when they say that they get satisfaction out of reuniting with their families a healthier kid who's done a lot of healing and learned new coping skills.