Consider Our Adoption Failed

In adoption circles, they say our adoption was "interrupted". It feels like it was ripped away.

Here's the skinny: I've previously alluded to the fact that there has been a new social worker who seems to think everything has been going great with the birth parents and that there was every likelihood they would get their kids back. In an aside, we let OUR social worker know about all of this and she was very forthcoming about saying that she had a bad feeling about this. We trust her judgement, and although we certainly didn't expect our adoption to fail (sort of like how you don't expect to die on your way to work, but you always know it could happen), we did have the opinion of a socal worker we trust to think about. This new social worker told me last week - on the public lobby phone at the CPS office - that an aunt had come out of the woodwork and was willing to take the kids and was looking very promising. Now, federal law dictates that family members trump everyone: foster families, adoptive families, group homes, the works, up to 4 degrees of separation. AS long as they can pass a background check and have a decent living environment, kids go to the family member.

Here's the kicker. She also said this aunt had been on the file ever since the beginning and for some reason hadn't been investigated. She didn't know why because (as I've said before) she's the second social worker on the case and is sort of picking up the pieces of what has become a hugantic, ginormic mess. For the uninitiated (I know there are many, including myself before all of this started), let me digress on a few points to put my rage and crippling disappointment into perspective.

Before a child's case goes to an adoption worker, all known family members have to be investigated. As I said before, that's federal law. Family members are not obligated to take the children, but they must be offered the opportunity and put through the process of fingerprinting, background checks, and home inspections to either rule them in or out before adoption is considered. Somehow this didn't happen with this aunt (I don't know who she is, I'm not legally entitled to know, and I don't want to know because I'd probably go to her house and steal the kids... thus lowering our chances of every getting another kid), and she's just now coming to the attention of the social worker.

So... this means our case was sent to adoption long before it should have been, these children should not have been up for adoption, and should certainly not have been presented as a low-risk placement. Furthermore, the first social worker said that the amount and length of the parent visits were up to the court, meaning nothing could change until there was another hearing. We've recently found out this was not true. In fact, the visits were under the jurisdiction of the social worker and could change at her discretion. Everything just moved far more quickly than it should have, and the first social worker committed some serious blunders along the way that have had some major repercussions affecting not only our family, but our extended family and friends as well.

Long story short, the aunt checked out nicely, and today we dropped the kids off for their parents visits, kissed them goodbye for the last time, and will most likely never see them again.

We are now faced with a few dicisions that we are pruposely not making this week, or next week, or porbably not in the next month or so. The first is whether, and under what conditions, we would be willing to take the children back. If this aunt changes her mind (which she's allowed to do at any time), do we want to be called for another placement? At this point in time, our feeling is that unless something major changes in this case (like parental rights being terminated), we don't want to be involved anymore. It's too painful for us, too hard for the kids, too negative all around.

The second is whether or when we want to be put back on the waiting list. This is something we're not sure about yet. This experience has left such a bad taste in our mouths that we're not sure we want to deal with this staff or this county anymore. And taking out a $30,000 loan and buying ourselves a baby is sounding really good. A birthmom who is willingly making an adoption plan versus parents who are fighting to get their kids back sounds a little more like what we want to deal with. Again, we haven't made any dicisions about this facet and don't plan to while we're still so angry and devastated, but these are the things we have to think about.

The third, and it is a decision for us, is how to go on. We have many choices. We can choose anger, bitterness, despair, and defeat, or we can choose to scrape ourselves up off the ground, dust off the big rocks, and start over. We can choose to hate everyone and eerything from social workers, to county workers, to God, to the birth parents, to anyone with kids, or we can choose to heal and move on. We haven't yet chosen a direction, it's still too raw, but it will be a plan we'll have to make in the coming weeks.

And now? Well, now we have 2 finished, furnished, empty children's rooms. Ryan has used up a year's worth of vacation time to stay home for three weeks at first. We rearranged our work schedules to make sure we would need very little childcare. We need to inform all our family and friends of what's happened and endure the apologies, the tears, the sympathetic looks, the over-senstivity that we all hate when something truly tragic has happened. I myself am a very private person (blogging about my life notwithstanding) and I was raised not to show emotion except in private. And by private I mean alone, locked in the bathroom where absolutely NO ONE will see me. Perhaps it's less than healthy, but what I want is for life to go on all around me so that I can participate as best I can, and leave the tragedy for while I'm alone. It's also perhaps unreasonable, but it's honest.

The future is uncertain, as always, and I hate uncertainty. But time marches on, as it's wont to do, and we must as well. In the words of Arthur O'Shaughnessy: "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

Shuil a rhun