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?

Baruch Hashem! Investigation over.

Praise G-d. The investigation ended as quickly as it started. It was a mere formality - The school had to report what happened, but made it clear to the investigator that they weren't concerned. We've done a good job keeping them apprised of his behaviors at home and we also notified them as soon as he got hurt the first time. The investigator made it clear she wasn't concerned as soon as she walked through the door. So all is well. They didn't even really speak to Big Guy, as when they stopped by school he refused to show them anything or talk to them, and she didn't think it was worth trying to convince him to talk to him. So we just answered some questions, she was very nice and said we'll get a letter clearing us within a few weeks. I have to be diligent about contacting CPS to put us back on the list when we're cleared, in case Little Guy re-enters the system... because while you're being investigated, your home is "closed" to all new foster placements.


It was painless, other than the waiting. I really appreciate how respectful and friendly the investigator was. She apologized for it taking so long to come out - She was out of the office right after our holidays ended. I am just so glad Big Guy was on good behavior when she came - it would have been stressful to have her looking on as we handled him punching or kicking, though I'm sure it would have made a point as to how he got hurt in the first place! He was great tonight, even if he wouldn't eat the chicken shnitzel I cooked special for him.

The morals of the story:

1) If you think an allegation can't happen to you... It can. And it will. We are educated, middle class folks* who are completely anti-corporal punishment, have child-positive values and treat our kid with respect even when we're being physically pummeled by him. We don't have neighbors that hate us. We have a great relationship with (birth) mom. We have great relationships with all of the professionals involved in our foster kid's life. Big Guy hasn't made false allegations per se. We've documented everything a lot and are quick to call CPS if he ever makes a threat of some sort or his behavior is particularly difficult or he gets hurt. We've done (almost) everything by the book... and it still happened. But guess what? It's also not always the end of the world.  I will be a lot less freaked out if (when?) this happens again.

2) If you ever injure your child by accident, there is no such thing as documenting it too much.

3) Having open lines of communication with your foster kid's school social worker, school nurse, and teacher is really helpful if/when an investigation happens.

*This is not to say educated or middle-class people don't abuse their kids - Instead, I'm referring to the fact that we are privileged within the child welfare system. My non-scientific observations are that middle class, educated people are less likely to have allegations made against them and more likely to have them dismissed. We've already seen how the foster care licensing people didn't even look at anything that was on their safety checklist because once they saw what was clearly a nicely decorated, white, middle class home they seemed to lose interest in checking the bath water temperature, the fire and carbon monoxide detectors, etc.

Allegation Non-Update

Apparently the investigators are taking the allegation so seriously that a week has gone by and they haven't returned our call. Geez. I called our foster parent advocate organization and hopefully I'll hear back, as they are supposed to help walk you through the process.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who left supportive or informative comments to my post about this issue. It helps so much to feel like we're not alone, and that there are people rooting for us.

The word says it all.

Allegation.

Yes, that's right. It's what you think it is. After all this time, all the days when we felt like we couldn't do it any more but still held on, all the times we got kicked, hit, peed on, or cursed at... Going on four months of hanging in there with this amazing child in hopes he can begin to heal...  After all this time, at a time when we're finally feeling like we can do this... like we are no longer in crisis mode and we're actually holding our heads well above the water... when Big Guy is finally making some progress...

...We could lose him.

We haven't gotten any clear answers but we don't think Big Guy made the allegation, we think it's the school reporting that he had visible injuries (which he sustained when we tried to keep him from throwing things at us and hurting us... and which we immediately reported to the school social worker and to CPS). If that's true, then they probably did the right thing by reporting it - It should have been a red flag for them. But that doesn't make this less scary. Our family hangs in the balance, its destiny decided by an investigator who doesn't know our family (and doesn't know a lot about Big Guy's case). We are lucky enough to have our caseworker, therapist, etc in our corner. They have all seen his tantrums, seen how violent he can get, and seen how we handle them. They all think we're doing a great job. Our caseworker seems to think her opinion will weigh heavily on the final outcome. I hope she's right.

We could lose him. But it's not us that I'm worried about. It's him. It's Big Guy who has everything to lose, because CPS says the next step for him is Residential Treatment.

I have no idea what to expect of the investigation. I know they already tried to talk to him at school but he says he didn't talk to them because he didn't want to miss class (!)

Pardon my language, but screw this. The last thing we needed was this anxiety and fear, when we were finally feeling some semblance of calm at times in our home and our hearts.


Please pray for this sweet boy, who deserves to stay with a stable family who doesn't give up on him, not an institution.

NOTE: This entry may self-destruct if I decide it was stupid to post about this.

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:

• 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.

Any suggestions on how to deal with the sleep issue, experienced mamas and papas? He's already on 3mg of Melatonin and is taking his Risperdal at night as well. He has nightmares but frequently he wakes up without having nightmares. I hope the SSRI will help. I feel like the parent of a colicky infant, who feels ready to kill someone due to weeks and weeks of interrupted sleep.

From bad to worse.

I love this kiddo so much. But we are this close to giving up. We feel like we're in way over our heads right now. I feel resentful at The Agency for putting a kid who needed a therapeutic foster home in with non-therapeutic first time foster parents. I am angry at the people who caused this beautiful little boy to have all these problems. I am sad that we have to worry that we can't do this any more. The bottom line is, we cannot keep missing this much work. This child requires two adults to keep him (and the house, and us) safe when he is having a tantrum, and we cannot provide that when we both go back to work. I am so terrified. I love him more than I've ever loved anyone, in a way I've never loved anything. I want the best for him, he deserves only good things in life. But this child's violent rages are so much beyond what we "signed up for" (a joke of a phrase in the foster world) and are putting our jobs, our home, and our bodies in danger. I called The Agency today and said they needed to find a way to provide more supports if they want this placement not to disrupt. I never dreamed I would even be saying the word "disrupt." But if we cannot keep him safe, then we are not the right foster family for him. We are not giving up - We are keeping trying. We are giving all the professionals and opportunity to put a better support system in place for us. I just don't know if they can.

In the past few days:
-I got punched in the eye (thank G-d for glasses, and 70-pound weaklings), on purpose but I don't think he really wanted to hurt me
-I got kicked in the shin, on purpose
-I got hit repeatedly with pieces of plastic, on purpose
-The crib and the changing table have almost been broken, on purpose
-The fan and overhead light have almost been broken, on purpose
-A lightbulb was shattered, on purpose
-The screen in his window was almost pushed out
-Dents were made all over his walls, using the plastic top of a humidifier
-Sarah's been hit hard in the middle of the head with a piece of metal
-Sarah's been cursed at over and over and over
-I've hurt my (already bad) back trying to drag him into his room when he's refusing to stop breaking things
-We've had him threaten to tell The Agency we're abusing him, over and over

And so on, and so forth. This is just a part of the list. The hardest part to wrap my head around is the sweet, angelic, lovely child he is when he's not raging.

I want this to work.

I want this to work.

I want this to work.

But I don't know if this can work.

Why I've been M.I.A.

It sounds cliche to say "I just haven't had time to post"... but it's really true. Since my last post here's a brief version of what's happened:

1) We got licensed as foster parents

2) I finished up a pretty intense semester of school

3) I continued to struggle with several health issues that give me a lot of pain and fatigue

4) We got a call about an allegedly gorgeous 1 year old girl in perfect health who was a rare "truly fost-adopt placement" (in the words of the caseworker who called us) in that the TPR process had already started and she had been in a kinship care situation that was no longer working out due to nothing related to the baby. My hands shook, I could hardly contain myself. And then 1/2 hour later we got a call back saying "Uh, just kidding. We found another family member." We both felt really sad for a day or two, but praying for the baby and feeling happy for her that she was able to be with a family member got us through that.

5) We got a call about a teenager. Um, what? What part of "0-5" don't you understand, Agency?

6) We got a call about 1 and 9 year old brothers in mid-June. Because we are completely out of our minds insane we said YES! Little Guy, age 1, was a chubby and delicious and unusually adorable bundle of sweetness. An easy baby who slept through the night, was easily comforted, and adored his brother, Big Guy, like nothing else. He followed him around the house like a puppy dog and belly-laughed every time Big Guy yelled or whined or threw a tantrum. Big Guy was handsome fellow, with a sweet neshama (soul). Kind and helpful and funny and affectionate, when doing well... and extremely behaviorally challenged when not doing well. Diagnoses include Oppositional-Defiance Disorder (ODD), ADHD, depression, anxiety, impulse control disorder, so on and so forth.

7) After a week with us, our Agency totally screwed up their court case, which led to the judge requiring that Little Guy being returned home... but not Big Guy. So now the boys became separated, and for the last 6 weeks we've just had Big Guy, whose honeymoon period ended after 2 or 3 weeks with us. Since then we've been spending most of our energy managing his incredible tantrums and outbursts, which include throwing and breaking things, turning over furniture, threatening to run away, and threatening to hurt himself. In between those challenging episodes, he shows how much some of his behaviors have improved, he shows how much he's bonded with us (he's now asking if he can call us both Mom, and even though we told him we thought it was too early and we didn't want his Mommy to get upset, he's started to occasionally call us Mom-type names), he a pleasure to be around, and he amuses us ceaselessly. School says he's doing better since he's been with us. All his social workers are impressed. Yet at home, we are struggling with how much we are in love with this boy yet how totally clueless we are about how to manage some of his behaviors.

8) So, we're foster parents. It feels like it's been a lifetime. This has been the longest 6 weeks of my life. We know rationally that we're doing a great job with him, even if emotionally it doesn't always feel that way. It seems like Hashem (G-d) must have known what He was doing in leading a 9 year old with intense behavioral issues to our family instead of the 0-5 year olds with mild to moderate needs that we had originally signed up for. Except at the very most difficult times (when I am exhausted and hurt and angry and frustrated and sad and burnt out, and feel utterly isolated and unsupported) I feel like this was totally Meant To Be and I am so grateful that we've had the opportunity to learn how fulfilling it can feel to parent an older child. I miss Little Guy so much. We see him at Big Guy's weekly visits, and sometimes get to hold him. I am angry they have been separated - Angrier than words can express. At the same time, it's amazing to me the ways in which parenting an older child can actually be more satisfying than parenting a baby. I never would have dreamed I could handle this. But so far, I can. Just barely.