Tuesday, July 26, 2005

SNAFU

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon with my friend Kathy and another friend of hers, Wanda, in part talking to a court-ordered counselor who spends several hours a week with Kathy and her kids, independently assessing the living situation and purportedly providing support for Kathy in raising the four of them, two of whom are adopted and two of whom are still being fostered. In truth, just about all Kathy needs is someone to help her swamp out the house, so she can get a head start on setting it up again after a burglary and several years of children being little. Though they are now 8, 9, 9 and 10, they are special needs children and everything, including teaching them how to help with general day-to-day house maintenance, takes more time and effort than with “normal” children. And, Kathy is a single parent.

But after a parade of social workers has worked on the case for the last 10 years no one over at the foster care system has any notion of what’s really going on in her house. That doesn’t stop any of them from having an idea of what should be going on. Unfortunately, that idea has varied dramatically from new social worker to new social worker and sometimes, it seemed, on the time of year, whether the sun was out, or whom had her nails done that day. In the meantime, the last two adoptions are being held up, again, and a judge is actually waiting to hear from social services if they will approve the adoption of these children, who have never known any other mother than Kathy, and whose extended biological family, with whom they socialize on a regular basis, enthusiastically supports the adoption. At this late date, social services now wonders if Kathy, all by herself, can handle four teen-agers. The obvious question to me is, “Who can?”

Be that as it may, the judge finally decided to get an independent opinion/assessment of the situation and its potential and assigned her own person, this counselor with whom we all met on Monday. She was surprised (because no one at social services had bothered to find out) just how much support Kathy has and that, in fact, she is not all by herself, she is just not married. In fact, she has an extensive support system that has been and will continue to be involved with the children in a myriad of ways. In some ways, she has more support than most “normal” families. So, here’s hoping the adoption finally goes through, the needlessly time consuming task of explaining and re-explaining things to and accommodating individual and often conflicting idiosyncracies of person after person will go away, and the family can stop constantly worrying that they might be broken apart. Perhaps they can then get to cleaning and organizing their home. Let us pray.

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