Not a DBG weekend

We are not going to have Dancing Baby Girl this weekend as previously planned and it is a good thing. I was talking with DBG's mom last night and i asked her if she wanted me to take her this weekend or next and she was very happy with next weekend. She said she felt like it hadn't been two weeks yet and that was the best news I have had in over a year. At the beginning of the summer mom was very much pushing for us to take DBG every weekend and was really expressing frustration and exhaustion in dealing with her.

The report about the luau they went to as an extended family last weekend was super positive. Mom reported that everyone was very impressed with DBG and I heard a lot of pride in mom's voice. They have been teaching her soccer and are looking for perhaps a soccer team for her, either this fall or in the spring. I am sooooo delighted to hear such good, positive stuff.

My weekend is shaping up to be pretty hectic and so I am relieved that I don't have DBG, she would not have gotten the attention that I like to give her and she wouldn't have been able to stay the whole weekend as I am teaching for work on Sunday.

So I am happy, a little wistful that maybe they all, DBG and mom and dad, are starting to out grow me. But it is a lot like letting a teen go into adulthood, a little wistfulness, a little fear, but lots of excitement and joy for the days ahead.

Reunificiation Blues

Family for Dancing Baby Girl is such a hard thing to determine. Here she is with her baby brother with whom she now lives with her birth mother and birth father. But she misses her big brother who was TPRed and is in the process of being adopted. And she doesn't want to live with her birth parents. She wants to live with her former foster family, that's us. She considers herself the little sister to Kendra and Bart and Douglas and the others, and she is bound and determined that I am her mother and DH is her dad.

When she visitis us she announces "I home now, I stay here at home." She goes around and touches the furniture, her bedroom, etc and announces this is mine. She declares her love to us in words and hugs and cuddles.

And when it is time to go home to her parents at the end of the weekend she pitches a huge fit and screams that she doesn't want to go to Mommy >>>'s house, she doesn't like her, etc.

So am I doing DBG any good by having her to my house almost every weekend at the birth mother's request? I just don't know. I love having her with me, I try to establish boundaries and really tried to taper off the visits to at least every other weekend, but Birthmom always pleads no babysitter, except the grandpa who is not ideal.

We go to the zoo, go to the pool, take walks, play games, fingerpaint, dress up, go grocery shopping, read books at bedtime. For me it is great and in each short weekend it is great for DBG also. But in the long run is it good for her? If I thought I was keeping her from bonding time with her birth mother I would be very reluctant to take her, but birthmom works Sat. and doesn't appear to do much with the kid except park her in front of the TV at other times. So.....what am I to do?

I am not sure what the right thing is here.

A Messy Life, Sometimes

Everything feels messy right now. Its been another crazy, busy weekend. Dancing Baby Girl has been with us since Friday, Kendra and her friend flew out tonight to San Francisco for their Spring Break/College Visit trip, my oldest son, Bart is off to Columbus, OH to see an old friend and meet up with his girlfriend who goes to school not too far from there, and my dh is off at a sleep clinic for the night getting his sleep monitored and analyzed. And I, I am pretty much a mess.

I had a first interview for one of the jobs on Friday and it went well. So I should be happy right? But taking this step means that I am going to be giving up an identity that has defined me for 20 years, if I take a job I will not be a foster mom any more. And I really think that once I get out of it, there is no way that I will convince my dh to get back in again. So I am doing grieving stuff in my head.

Dancing Baby Girl's situation is not improving and I am very concerned that she and her birth parents are not bonding. The parents seem way too eager for me to come get her at every opportunity and DBG resists with every fiber of her being going back to be with them. There is no specific concern of abuse but things just don't feel right to me. On top of that DBG is developing some behaviors that I find very difficult to deal with, a lot of attitude stuff, and screaming instead of discussing, etc. Makes me really wonder if anyone is listening to her.

On our walk to day, actually our pull since she sat in the wagon, when I started to turn down a street she was yelling and screaming at me. When I told her she only had to speak nicely to me and ask to not turn down that street and I would listen to her she looked at me like "OH". Anyway at the next block she says sweet as can be "Mommy, go that way, not this way." and she remembered to speak respectfully the rest of the walk. It is like she thinks that she will not be listened to at all so she has to start out fighting at the top of her voice. She didn't use to be like that.

So there is that. On top of all this coming and going we have been in contact with our oldest daughter's placement and she is sliding quickly downhill following the typical pathways. First she holds her bowels and despite repeated medical intervention she will not poop, so then she gets rashes and bladder infections which trigger her PTSD something awful. Then she gets paranoid that the staff are not helping her, they are trying to hurt her, ditto for medical folk and for the medicines she is prescribed. Fairly soon she will slip into psychosis and then she will either hurt herself or others. Then she will put into the psych hospital and it will be very horrible for a few weeks. Even when she has gotten "better", she will have in all likelihood lost her placement and she will have to sit in the psych hospital indefinitely until another provider decides to take a chance on her. I do not mean to be pessimistic, it is just that we have experienced this cycle with her since she was 8 years old and in 12 years I have learned to see it coming from afar.
Often it is frustrating because there is no specific triggering event, but this time it is even more frustrating because there is one. Last week her SW went down to talk with her and got her all excited about going to court in a few months and becoming her own guardian. (Without our knowledge) Now this is a young woman with an IQ of 55 (on a good day), with repeated psychotic breaks, who has major medical issues that might require surgery in the near future and who takes many medications each day that she has no clue how to take on her own. I think she is a great candidate for emancipation don't you? This has obviously scared Brooke quite a bit and she is beside herself with anxiety.

A little background, three years ago when she was 16.5 we had to let her go into the temporary custody of the state in order for her to get services. There is a good program called Supports for Community Living but she would not be eligible until age 21 and even then there would be a 10 year waiting list. Except that there was a loophole, if she was in state's custody they could get her into the program through the backdoor and when she turned 21 and aged out of the state's care as a foster child she would have a backdoor right into the funding source. Good plan, on paper anyway. What is now happening is that the state is trying to get her emancipated before her 21st birthday so that she will not be eligible for the SCL waiver.

We will of course be fighting all of this, but boy it makes me tired and messes with my head.

To add to the messy theme, my house has reached gross and disgusting and I have little to no interest in getting in there and doing the deep cleaning and organizing that needs to be done. One of the side effects of the depression that has gripped me since Dancing Baby Girl was reunited is that simple organizational tasks around the house just become impossible. Partly I know it is because there is too much in the house that reminds me of her living with us.

I need to go to bed. Sorry for the late night ramblings.

A Dancing Baby Girl Weekend

We had Dancing Baby Girl for the weekend again this weekend. She is the former foster daughter we had for almost 3 years from the time she was 9 mos old until just after this past Christmas. We have a good relationship with the birth parents and we see her a couple of times a month. Her case is the main reason we have stepped back from foster care after 19 years. Our anger and despair over the state's actions is making us seriously consider our continued participation in the foster care system.


We cherish the time we get to spend with Dancing Baby Girl and look forward to her visits, even though she is a 3 yo with major attitude issues. It is the return to parents that is just so hard, she doesn't want to go back to them, she considers us her home and her family and she does not understand why she can't stay with us. Each visit as the time to go back approaches she starts to plead, "I stay here with you, Mommy, I love you, I be good girl", then she starts to scream, "I no go," etc. At this point she usually tries to run and hide or she starts to tantrum and gets destructive of her toys. Most days it advances to her attacking whichever of us is trying to gather her up and get her into the car, she is screaming, clawing. kicking and trying to bite. After she is buckled into her car seat though is the worst, then she slumps there in despair with quiet tears coursing down her face and looks at me with the most hurting eyes imaginable and whispers to me "I love you Mommy."

We really thought this transition would get better as she developed a relationship with her birth parents and to some degree it is getting better. She is no longer plagued by extreme abandonment anxiety where I can't get out of her sight and she no longer has terrible nightmares. I was hoping she would be able to feel comfortable enough with her birth parents that she would not see us as a loss but them as a gain.

Sometimes I question whether this is even good for her, to continue to see us and be at our house for visits? Would it be easier for her if we just disappeared from her life? She had such extreme RAD issues when she first came to us, I was her 4th official placement (that is a long and sad story for another post) and she had been passed around among family members since birth. And we were really able to overcome much of the damage and develop deep reciprocal relationships with her. What damage would it do for us to be seen as abandoning her also?

But you know, it is about me also. I don't know how many more of these scenes I can take, each time my heart is ripped out of my chest and thrown in pieces to the floor. It takes me days to recover my emotional equilibrium. I need to move forward myself. I hate the incredibly helpless feelings and overwhelming sadness that overcome me at the end of each visit. My baby girl trusts me and loves me and I have to make her go live where she doesn't want to go. OUCH.