Bang Head Here

Have you ever seen the sign that stays. “Stress Reduction Kit” at the top, then has a circle with “BANG HEAD HERE” written inside it? The instructions to reduce stress are 1. Place the sign on any hard surface 2. Follow instructions inside the circle and 3. Repeat until you are unstressed or unconscious. This is just the stress reduction kit I need because this is what it feels like I am already doing. The caseworker dropped the kids off at my house yesterday after their visit. I asked her if anything had changed with the kids’ goals (reunification or not reunification, that is the question) because the court date had changed. She shrugged and acted surprised that I would even ask that question. She claimed to know nothing, other than that the court date had been changed (which she admitted to knowing BEFORE the actual day it was scheduled - grrr). I found out that it was the kids mom’s birthday on Monday and wonder if this had something to do with it, but that’s pure conjecture on my part. So, I am left with no answers, no idea, and no one who can tell me what is going on apparently. Plus, I got the sense that even if she did know something, the caseworker would not feel obliged to tell me jack. I’m a glorified nanny. Correction, I am a glorified robot nanny with no feelings, no hopes and dreams, and no voice. I really miss the caseworker I had before! We felt like such a team and I never felt like she was disinterested in communicating with me or telling me what she knew about what was going on. I’m sure she did not tell me the whole case and that is fine, I’m not asking for the entire unabridged version – the Reader’s Digest version will do! And how can you be the caseworker for these kids and have no clue what is going on? Have you even taken the time to call the county and find out? Do you even care? I’m probably being unfair and getting worked up about nothing. I don’t want the children to leave but I HATE being left in limbo with no idea what is happening. We have blown right through the given timetable and there has been absolutely no mention of setting a date for reunification, there have been no more overnight visits or talks of overnight visits, it seems (to uninformed me) that the case is stuck. I was reading online about the Pennsylvania laws governing children placed in foster care and it mentioned that after the children have been in care for a year and the parents have made no progress (as documented by the county) the court will start pushing to have parental rights revoked. Legally, the county needs to hold permanency hearings every 6 months. But, everything seems to be case by case, so who knows? I think my frustration is derived from two things; 1. I feel like no one cares that I took in these kids out of the goodness of my heart (they were having a hard time finding a new placement for them and could have lost this referral to another agency) despite my desire to adopt and no one has even acknowledged that having them longer might be hard on me and 2. The longer the kids are with me the harder it will be on me and my parents to have them leave. It has taken my parents, especially my mom, quite some time to really warm up to these kids because they were so hurt when the three girls were left in November. But, now the little ones have wormed their way into my parents heart and they are starting on my grandparents as well. To have them and then not have them rips apart so many hearts! And the longer we have to love them, the harder it is to lose them. And, I guess I could add a third thing that frustrates me; when there seems to be impediments to the children going back home, it opens the door for me to “think” and that there might be some chance I would get the option to keep them. I have spent the entire time these kids have been with me reinforcing to myself the notion that they are going home, that they are with me for a temporary time and soon that time will run out and they will leave. I am desperately trying to protect myself! But, it gets harder the longer they are with me, to envision them not being around. So, this is why I am perturbed. I am trying to not get more irritated with each and every day; I’m trying to trust that God has this all planned out and it will work out for my good.

When I’m not obsessing about the case of the two kids I have living with me, I am thinking a lot about naming the child I plan to adopt and I have been reading about re-naming an adopted child. The most likely scenario is that I will get a legal risk placement and have to wait many, many moons for the courts to finalize the adoption. The child will have been named by his/her birth family and I will be using this name until the adoption is most assuredly going to be finalized. It might be difficult to readjust to a new name after knowing the child by their given name. But, I think this might be the one point where I decide to be selfish. I might never get to name a baby and I have had children with some pretty crazy, hard-to-pronounce names. And, I’m sorry to say, I have not been crazy about most of these names. Some are made up, not something you would find in a baby book and not something I’m crazy about calling out across the playground. While there are many advocates for keeping the child’s given name or at least incorporating it into their “new” name in some way, I’m just not sure I will be willing to do that. I want the child to be mine. I want to select their names because they are names I am proud to use, names I am proud for them to have. I can understand the desire to keep some part of the child’s name to reflect their different ethnicity or cultural heritage, but if it is a name that I despise I simply cannot do it. This is probably not something I need to be worrying myself about right now, but it’s been on my mind. I think any final decisions will be have to be made when I know that the child will most likely become mine. It’s entirely possible that I will get a placement for a child who’s name I like and would not want to change. Or, the child might be older and resistant to changing his or her name. I will need to be flexible, I suppose. I am trying very hard to not see this as another loss chalked up to vile infertility. I’m a girl, I picked out baby names in grade school, you know, back when I didn’t hate my useless uterus? It’s easy to see relinquishing baby naming rights as another notch on the list of what-I-don’t-get-to-do-as-a-lousy-infertile. But, I shouldn’t worry about this right now, not until the time comes for the actual decision to be made.