A guest blog by J-

In early May, our agency worker and her supervisor arranged a conference call with the S-County caseworker and HER supervisor.  This was just a few days after our most recent birth-parent visit.  Now, this visit had been preceded by a bit of a “crisis” (that word gets used so often it loses its punch).  So before I get to the conference call, here’s a bit of background.

In late March, D- and I had our worst travel home from one of these monthly, mandated, supervised visits.  The drive is well over an hour and a half each way.  We had often provided a “grounding” after the visits, having dinner with D-‘s mom, which often seemed to temper the impact of so much car time.  This month, though, D-‘s mom was sick.  On the drive home, T-4 and T-7 (actually, at that time she was still T-6) traded tantrums, screaming at the top of their lungs, fighting over toys, punching and pinching each other, pulling off their car seat straps, kicking the seats, etc.  We pulled over four times to allow for sequential calming, and the trip home took nearly four (yes, that’s right – four) hours.  Probably, T-7’s behavior was compounded by specific emotional issues: her birthday was coming up, she seemed to think she could invite her birth-mom to the party, she had received a lot of gifts, but mostly unsatisfying or inappropriate ones, etc.

As a result, we told the social workers we would simply NOT do this again.  They needed to take responsibility for transportation.  A lot of possibilities were raised (well, okay, they were things that only appeared to be possibilities until the social workers said they couldn’t do it), until finally, our agency supervisor agreed to drive along with me in D-‘s place.  Because of this, the drive in April went quite a bit better.  The S-County caseworker had also indicated that she would be available to talk with us together while the girls were in their visit. 

Well, she apparently didn’t mean it, since she did not answer her phone and wasn’t in the office, but chance had it that she strolled through the parking lot while I was leaning against my car.  The fakish half-smile she greeted me with disappeared pretty quickly when I told her that at the scheduled conference call the next week, D- and I needed ANSWERS, not just more discussion.  Would they consider removing T-7 and placing her in a therapeutic home?  This could be temporary (we would consider T-7’s return once she had resolved problems elsewhere) or permanent.  Would they adapt our placement along the therapeutic model, that is, paying us for essential services like the private attachment therapist we’d just begun seeing ($125/session), and paying for proper respite care ($150/week).  At this point, we were already paying upwards of $600/month of respite or afterschool care, to go along with T-4’s $1400/month pre-school.  And really, the intensity of T-7’s behavioral problems was still consuming our lives.

The conference call was actually face-to-face for all but the S-County supervisor.  The answers were clear.  No, they would not consider splitting the girls.  After all, there is such a thing as a “bad match,” and many children who do poorly in one home may, for reasons not well understood, experience less anxiety and disturbance in another.  They seemed uninterested in hearing about T-4’s remarkable progress on every level, from the physical, to the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral.  It was unimaginable to me that they would compromise her well-being in this way due to her sister’s developmental attachment problems (which nevertheless had only been informally diagnosed).  Would T-4 ever have such support again?  Who in her future life would send her to the very best pre-school available (one in which, let it be said, she responded with dramatic developmental acceleration)?  Would they simply drag her from wrecked placement to wrecked placement, until eventually the girls were split anyway? 

The answer, of course, was yes, that was exactly what they would do before even considering splitting the girls.  There simply was insufficient paper trail to suggest that T-7 wouldn’t adapt better elsewhere.  There was no reason to think T-4 would continue to do better in the absence of her sister than she would in her presence.  Resources for therapeutic homes were highly restricted, and such homes were only for “unadoptable” children, whereas they still believed that the girls could be successfully placed in a new adoptive home. 

They asked us for thirty days to find a new adoptive home.  We said:

“No, you may consider this officially a seven-day notice of placement disruption.”

We knew in advance of the meeting – and so did they – that this was how it would resolve.  We did not believe they would investigate any additional resources.  And we also did not believe that the girls (or us) would be more likely to place into an adoptive home in 30 days than in 7.  After all, they were four months in their previous temporary placement, and at the very least, T-7’s paper trail had lengthened, since we had troubling school reports, therapist reports, and had begin medication evaluation.  No, they would be going to a temporary placement in any case, better sooner than later. 

We had one week.  This was a Tuesday.  The next Tuesday, we would be accompanying them to S-County with all of their possessions.  We wouldn’t actually tell them until Monday.  But nevertheless, it was going to be a rough week.