Friday, January 25, 2008

I don't know what's happening

Well, I'm not sure what is going on. My SW is incommunicado. Yesterday was so confusing to me and I truly have no idea what to do. I will start at the beginning and hope to wrap my mind around this as I go.

We woke up at 4:30 am on Wednesday and left quickly for "big town" before the snow got too bad. We actually found the building with no problem, it was the parking space that was hard to find. We signed in and then waited for an hour and a half for someone to acknowledge us.

While waiting I sat next to a woman who had lost custody of her kids and was there for a visit. She called and called her ex"old-man" to show up for a visit. He lives in a homeless camp by the river with his new girlfriend. He had not showed for visits for almost a year. She told me the kids ask for daddy at every visit. She told me that she was going to fight for her kids. It was uncomfortable for me to listen to her story as I sat waiting to be interviewed and visit two girls that could just as easily be hers as any body's.

Finally a Social Worker from our agency showed up (our SW didn't come with us) and reiterated to us that the girls' SW was "different". She said that they might ask what kind of birth control we were using (oops- I freaked out a little as we hadn't been using any this last month as we had basically given up on this adoption). She also said that she didn't recognize us as she thought she was meeting an older lady with grey curly hair. Ummm.... As she was trying to talk to us the other SW came up to us.

DH and I liked her immediately. She was straightforward, to the point and honest. She didn't talk around issues like I have found many SW's do. We were in a little room filled with a small table, four chairs and we couldn't close the door as there was no room to do so. She stated that of course we had read the court papers. I said we hadn't, that all the information I had was that the girls' .26 was next month, I knew their first names and birth dates and that they had two older siblings.

She handed us her copy of the court report. I read the first page and then listened to her as DH reads SLOW. I never did get to read the rest as DH never finished and she was up and down the hall telling us that there was another baby sibling placed with another family already. The meeting lasted all of 15 minutes and the one question I had asked about the mother's use of Paxil while pregnant was met with "I have no idea". The SW that was there for us stated that "this was NO disclosure meeting" as she ran to catch up with the other SW. We were handed directions to the foster mother's house and told to follow her.

I'll write more in another post.

4 comments:

walternatives said...

Thank you for being willing to share this process with us as it's so different than our own path.

Keeping you in my thoughts....

Carolyn said...

I'm on tenderhooks for you. I've been lagging in blog reading (back to work), so I'm amazed! Oh my... I hope positive things are happening.

Yondalla said...

I haven't been commenting. I'm sort of torn between excitment and fear of jinxing it, you know?

But I am here, holding my breath, crossing my fingers, and reading every word.

Annie said...

I can't wait for the rest of the story...but am sort of worn out already. How terrible to see all these little lives shuffled around...