Bang Your Head and Scream

I know most moms have days where they want to bang their heads against a wall and scream because their children have not been so angelic. I have read plenty of Facebook posts about such children of my friends. Luckily, Junior is a very good teen and is not the one making me want to scream. Between stresses at work and frustrations with Junior's case, I want to bang my head against a brick wall!

We are having problems with background checks for our family members. I recently found out the background checks for my sisters were processed incorrectly so they cannot provide overnight care. Last month, my parents were to be cleared for overnight care, but only got cleared for children placed for adoption, not in foster care. Junior is a foster placement so how does any of this make sense? All background checks now have to be redone, but the state doesn't have the time to process them; luckily, we have a private agency competent enough to process the background checks needed. Currently, we are being expected to pay out of pocket for these background checks then we submit receipts for reimbursement. That is five people who need fingerprints.

All of this is added to the frustrations at work where I have one out of order copier/scanner and one copier/scanner that is intermittently scanning. I am attempting to scan 500 pages. We are waiting for the arrival of the new machines which are due this month.

I WANT TO BANG MY HEAD AND SCREAM!!!!!

Continued Frustrations

Now that we have transitioned into the next phase of our adoption process and are trying to register with the various photolisting websites, we have encountered more frustrations. In order to fully register for these sites we are required to have an agency contact - name, phone number and email. Turns out the caseworker who completed our adoption home study is done with our case and will not be our contact. The local adoption social worker only represents children or works with families who have children in their homes already. I have a third DSHS employee looking into DSHS protocol and who should be our agency contact or if DSHS can even help us with this step. If DSHS cannot help us with finding a child, why did they tell us we could adopt through DSHS? I even had one DSHS employee tell us to now go with a private adoption agency after all we have gone through dealing with DSHS. If we really do need to go with a private adoption, we should have known this in 2010 so we could have worked with an agency from the beginning. We hope to have some answers by next Tuesday or I will be calling DSHS HQ to get our answers.

Until we figure out who our agency and agency contact will be, we cannot inquire about any child or youth. We have begun searching the photolistings and creating a list of potential children/youth we would like to inquire about once we can fully register with the websites. Since we have chosen not to be foster parents but to seek a child already legally free, the photolistings are really the only way for us to find a potential child/youth. The process works as follows, to my understanding:

• We submit an electronic inquiry about a child we are interested in parenting.
• The child's caseworker reviews our home study and profile.
• If the child's caseworker thinks we could be potential parents, the caseworker contacts our agency's contact and the communicate.
• Our agency contact receives information about the child and shares it with us.
• We decide to parent or not parent the child after reviewing the file.
• If the child's caseworker approves us to become the parents, we are invited to visit the child/youth and a disclosure meeting. The disclosure meeting allows us to learn about the the child's past, reason for being in foster care.
• Depending on the needs of the child/youth, we may have several days of visits before returning home.
• If fully approved to adopt the child, we will go to the child's current location and may spend several days before bringing the child/youth home.
• Once home, we establish our routine with our child/youth with a DSHS caseworker making monthly visits until we are approved to finalize the adoption.
• After six months or more, we get to finalize the adoption and make our family permanent.

We might meet our forever child this year. We might meet our forever child next year. Then there is a process to bring our child home then make the adoption finalized.

Navigating Foster Care

Over the last month, I have attempted to make as many contacts as possible at DSHS to see who might be best able to help us with our foster-adopt process. Most of the people I have spoken to have been unhelpful. One woman who may be of assistance will not be in the office until mid-November. So I have to wait to contact the Placement Coordinator who might be able to match us to a child waiting for a forever family or who is moving from reunification to adoption placement. I have talked to different people in the Shelton office, in Thurston County and in Benton County. I feel like I am running out of people to talk to at this point. We should be meeting with our caseworker in November, finally. I am beyond frustration at this point; I am just about resigned to just go along for the ride, but I have not given up to fight for out child and for the rest of the children in foster care. I have spoken to:

• foster licensor
• assigned caseworker
• caseworker in another county
• foster licensor supervisor
• interim foster Placement Coordinator
• fingerprinting center
• part time adoption caseworker
• DSHS workers at HQ
• Sr Aide to State Representative
• other foster families

We are into this process 12 months already. From my communications with other foster-adopt families throughout the country, some had placements within a year of starting their process while others endure years of slow processing. It looks like we will be going through a multi-year process.

While we wait for DSHS to go through their steps, a child is waiting for their forever family which we could provide. There is a child hoping, wishing, wondering when he/she will have a forever family. Each night I pray for our child, our child continues to live in uncertainty. I pray his/her foster family is loving, caring, protective, secure, therapeutic and supportive. One day, we will work together to transition the child to our home.

I still have the fire inside me to keep fighting for the children waiting in foster care for permanency. It will be a long process just to make changes in my local DSHS office, let alone changes further up the chain of command. While our process may be long and unpredictable, I hope to make the path better for future foster-adopt families.