Adoption Class

I started tweeting like mad earlier today and realized that I didn’t want to microblog about a certain subject. I wanted to blog about it.

Foster Care, Adoption & Me:

First of all, background check. (Little inside-the-system joke. Okay, it wasn't funny. Moving on.)

Hi! My name is Annie and my parents were foster/adoptive parents. However, I was not a foster/adopted child. That’s a relatively important distinction.

It means: I had the benefit of a stable, loving home but, at the same time, have been aware of the nasty ickiness in the world from a very early age. You’ll note (I hope) that I am still a nice, well-adjusted person and was not horribly scarred or mentally anguished by having been raised with foster/adopted siblings.

For the record: I love my siblings and think they are amazing: Even my sister who is struggling right now and whose daughter I am adopting.

What? You may ask that question. Go ahead.

I can’t tell people how bad Rita’s childhood was. Really. I know things my parents don’t know and I won’t tell them because they’re awful, terrible, disturbing things. The fact that my sister is alive and functioning in any capacity is a freaking miracle.

Rita is still messed up right now but she’s alive and, on some levels, functional. Yes, Rita didn’t straighten up and fly right in order to get her daughter back. That hurts: Especially after seeing all these testimonies of people who have done that very thing. But here is something GOOD about Rita.

Rita quit using drugs when she was pregnant, EVERY SINGLE TIME. You think that’s easy? You think most mothers automatically do that? No. They don’t. Rita is on a long road but there is definitely hope for her because of every member of my family and, most especially, because of my parents.

I’ve mentioned in the past that my parents are saints. Overall some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet. They’re getting older and starting to do that thing where they take politics way too seriously…or maybe they’re finally taking it seriously enough. Who knows? I’m not there yet. But still, they are some of the most wonderful people you will EVER meet.

Back to point!

The point is, my parents were watching the news one night and saw a problem. Children in a state system being shuffled like the jokers in a deck of cards.

“Ooops! I got the Joker! How’d that happen? Someone take this back and give me a real card.”

Rather than cluck their tongues and say, “Aw, that’s a shame; those poor kids.” Like 99% of us would do, my parents actually got up and did something about it. Going through the process of becoming a foster/adoptive parent has made my admiration of them skyrocket.

I know now that they didn’t walk down to an office and say, “Hey, you know all those kids who desperately need homes? I’ve got one!”

And have the office say, “Oh! You saint! Thank you SO MUCH! We really, desperately NEED you! Here fill out some forms, we’ll send someone to check out your house right away and do a background check that will take, at most, a month. In two weeks, be back here for a weekend of training. Don’t worry about your kids. We’ll provide child care with professionals that will use age appropriate methods to explain the situation to them because, after all, your kids are a part of this process as well, right? Assuming no red flags go up, we’ll have you ready to go in six weeks tops.”

That is precisely, exactly what did NOT happen. It was pretty much the opposite. It’s like the information, even the first phone number, you need is top secret. It’s locked in a suitcase that, I swear, is hiding up the butt of one of these tight cheeked bureaucrats. (BTW, isn’t bureaucrat the most PERFECTLY spelled word? It’s needlessly complicated.)

There is a serious problem here! Good homes taking in kids, is the solution. So, of course, the system seems to be centered around discouraging as many of these people as possible. The dastardly method? Red freaking TAPE!

There are just so many flaming hoops through which your average person is willing to jump before they say, “You know what? I’m trying to help you out here! I’m leaving.”

Now, there is a Christian organization in Arkansas that tries to recruit foster/adoptive parents and cut through as much red tape as possible. My hubby and I are actually going through this process with them and it’s still discouraging.

Instead of 10 weeks of 3 hour classes, it’s two weekends. Two 9 hour days and two 6 hour days of sorting through depressing stories and statistics that make you want to grab the nearest politician by his overpriced lapels and scream, “WAKE UP!!!” in his face repeatedly…and I mean repeatedly.

You know when you’re watching Family Guy, and they have those quirky asides that last too long? THAT repeatedly.

(Incidentally, how awkward is it that I had to type the numbers two and nine, and also, two and six consecutively in a sentence and yet still give the impression that they were not the mistyped numbers 29 or 26? Come to think of it, that incidental sentence commenting on the awkward sentence was also awkward. Fittingly, awkward is a very awkwardly spelled word. Ye gad! Okay! I’m stopping now!)

Doot. Doot. Doot. Ah!

Sorry, I’d forgotten what I was writing about. Back on point! Bureaucracy!

Part of adoption class is looking at really depressing statistics and stories. The fact is that the number of kids being abused and neglected keeps going up every year. What I was told yesterday is that currently in the US, one in five children will be sexually abused before reaching age 18. The number is one in four girls and one in ten boys.

So, naturally, the good Christian folks in my class asked if Christianity being taken out of schools etc. was the reason for the increase in these issues.

My answer? Nope.

Hmm, this IS a blog. Maybe I should expand on that.

My expanded answer is; bureaucracy is the problem. Americans stopped taking care of each other at some point. They stopped caring for the widows and orphans. Instead, they told the government to do it for them.

“Here, I’ll give you tax money. You hire someone to do it and then I don’t have to feel bad OR do anything! Win-Win!”

The problem is the government isn’t well suited for this type of thing and it’s all gone to hell. Yes, Mom. (If you’re reading this.) I said, hell. Maybe I should capitalize it? Nah, I’ll write it in all caps.

H-E-L-L. My definition of Hell is a place without God. Since God is love and all love and goodness and love come from him, Hell is a place in which love and caring do not exist.

This situation is my definition of HELL on Earth for so many of these kids.

Adoption class points out the primary focus for the foster care system: Get the kids back with their parents.

Train a parent up in the way he should go and when he gets his kids back he won’t neglect/sexually abuse/physically abuse them. That’s their motto!

The idea is that these parents haven’t been taught through example how to be parents. They don’t have any kind of support system in the community. They don’t have anyone helping them or teaching them how to help and teach their kids. They have emotional problems or addiction problems that cause them to act toward their kids in a way they wouldn’t otherwise act.

If you can treat the emotional or addiction problems and give the parents the support they need, they can be the parents the kids need. The kids have attachments, which is GOOD!!!

So, treat the kids. Treat the parents. Make happy productive families.

The problem is you have people like my sister. I love my sister, but this training has shown me one thing definitively: my sister doesn’t really want her daughter back. She’s going through the motions.

I’ve watched these videos and listened to all of these birth mothers and fathers talk about how devastated they were when their kids were taken from them. How hard they worked to get them back.

I’ve listened to my sister make excuses for the live in boyfriend whose arrest cost her the decision of her custody hearing. Your kid comes first.

If someone took my son, I’d crawl up a net of barbed wire to get him back. I would do anything asked. I would visit my son absolutely every opportunity I got for as long as I could.

My sister makes excuses and throws around blame like it’s confetti. She’s not alone. There are definitely parents out there that feel they have to put up a fight, society demands they do, but when push comes to shove, they don’t actually do anything they’re required to do in order to get their kids back.

So, what do you do with those kids?

Find them families. That sounds simple but people have been trained by the media to see these kids as damaged goods. They’ve been neglected and abused and they’ll never be right again. There is no way to fix them. They’re the jokers in the deck. There’s no value assigned to them. At the very best, they’re wild cards and at the end of the day, no one wants them in their hand.

Bullshit!

(My Mom’s going to kill me…I guess I could say crap but that’s semantics really and I’m kind of going for the reaction here so…)

BULLSHIT!

There are great kids in the system that have problems that will take years and years and years for them to even be able to properly grasp. But these problems are not insurmountable if someone cares enough to reach out and help them; really help them.

Will they magically overcome their problems by age 18? Maybe. Probably not.
Will they stop needing you at age 18? Definitely not.
Will they think they don’t need you at age 18? Probably.
Will taking care of a child who has been abused be hard? Yes.
Will it be harder than raising a baby or biological child that was always loved and was raised in a predictable and loving environment? Yes.

But, in general, do the things worth doing in life tend to be easy?