I had spoken with a few people who had been to disclosure meetings. They hadn’t met the kids or the social worker and they didn’t know much more about the kids than what was on a 1-page profile in a binder full of profiles of lots of kids.  It sounded totally nerve-wracking to know that this meeting was going to determine your committment to this kid or kids participation in their future family, while knowing so little to begin with.  Our story was a bit different, luckily. We had met the girls and had been targeted by their social worker, so we knew a lot about them. We had a general good sense of the situation and had a very good feeling about it.

Regardless, we had concerns about some of the information that we had and whether the match would work. We did feel nervous and knew that the course of the meeting would determine the course of our lives.  As much as we knew, there were still some surprises.  We had the wrong impression about a few specifics, so those got clarified.  Mostly, the information that got filled in was very good news.  The way that it seems to work is that the social workers try to make clear right up front, anything about the kids that may scare potential parents off. They don’t fill in a lot of details, that is what the disclosure meeting is for. So initially, things that sounded difficult turned out to not be a big deal at all.

When we walked into the room reserved for our disclosure, a file that was about 1 foot thick was sitting on the table.  This was for ONE of the girls!!  But what became obvious throughout the meeting was that as much information as there was in those files, the information seemed inconsistent and imcomplete. We read bizarrely different gestation times and birth weights, for example, for one of the girls.  There were medical tests and developmental assessments with little context and no follow-up.

While the girls had been well-cared for in foster care, for the most part, they lacked the continuity of information and practices that most children have.   One parent stopped giving the girls milk because they were less congested that way, but future parents didn’t seem to go by this.  Which appointments they made it to and who their doctors were changed many times. It was the social worker’s job to try to paint a broader picture for us, but the social worker had only been on their case for 1 year, which is less than 1/2 of their time in foster care.

The meeting took about 2.5 hours.  The girls social worker started by trying to give us the kids story from beginning to end, which ended up being somewhat conversational, since we were asking questions along the way.  Our social worker had a list of basic questions that are always run through, no matter who the kids are.  Of course, the deeper probings of the specifics of the kids are really where most of the interesting stuff comes out.  Because of the information that we had going into the disclosure, we were able to prepare 2 pages of questions that were specifically about the girls. Most of them had been answered already.

At some point, the girl’s social worker had to go grab another file to add to her ridiculous stack and J- and I both left to use the restroom. We had just a second, but it was enough to affirm that we were thinking the same thing: “Let’s move forward with these girls!”

At the end, we took care of logistics. We gave the social worker a picture book that we had made about our lives including photos and brief descriptions of ourselves and our house, dogs, friends and neighborhood.  This will be presented to the girls when they learn that we want to be their “forever family”.  We set up an aggressive visiting schedule since their social worker would like to see them make a fast transition.  Our first official meeting would be 7 days later, the following Thursday. We will spend the weekend following that in Sacramento with our dogs, so the girls have a chance to meet them and see us on Saturday and Sunday and we return the following Tuesday. Then, the girls will come and stay with us the weekend after that.  If all goes well with the legal request to move them out of county and the girls are doing well with the idea of moving in with us.  They will be able to stay!