So, once Megan and I bought our house, it seems like our life changes started accelerating a bit. Or maybe it's just that my concept of time has changed and all I can think about are all the important life events that have happened in the last year or so.
We had been struggling with having children of our own. I saw a fertility specialist and he told me that I would need surgery in order to be able to father children. I had that surgery last June, but by October we still weren't having any luck. Megan saw another specialist, who prescribed her some medication, and by December we were finally pregnant!
However, Megan has for the longest time wanted to adopt a child. Her older brother, whom she just finally met back in 2016, was put up for adoption when he was born because her mother was still in high school at the time and she was too young to take care of him. Her best friend since elementary school was an adopted child. So early last year when it really seemed like having our own children was going to be a real challenge if it was at all possible, I started really looking into the idea of adoption. I had talked about it with Megan prior to that but I had never done my own research or really put much thought into it until early last year.
My research, however, took me down the path of foster care. I never wanted to adopt an infant the way her brother was adopted, but I really liked the idea of providing a home for children who really needed one in a time of crisis. Best of all, if we worked with the agency and discussed our desire to be a permanency home, we could provide that help for children who needed it and get the chance to adopt a child who was in need of a new permanent home.
I talked about it with Megan, and after four months we decided to take the leap. We had finally settled into our house and seemed comfortable with our current lifestyle, and it seemed like the appropriate time to start mixing things up a bit. Megan made an appointment with the agency, and in August we officially started our journey to become foster parents. There is quite a bit involved in the process as the agency has to vet potential foster parents before just allowing them to be involved in these very vulnerable children's lives. It took months, but we were finally 95% of the way done with the process by December. At that point, we were just waiting for the agency to review all of our documentation and make us a parent profile. Once that was completed, we'd review the profile and sign some papers and we'd be certified as foster parents.
As I mentioned above, this is around the time we found out Megan was pregnant and we were actually going to have a child of our own. Due to the holiday season, we didn't end up becoming certified until around mid-January. By that time, both of us wanted to put the fostering thing on hold. With the newness and excitement of our own baby on the way, we weren't sure when we'd want to proceed with fostering a child. Plus we had a whole house that we needed to get ready now for not just one, but two kiddos, and we had lots of work to do.
We let the agency know we wanted to be removed from the emergency list, and we didn't meet with the matching specialist until near the end of February. She let us know that the agency would follow our lead as far as when we were ready to start fostering, and she took down some new information as to what we were going to be comfortable with now that we were expecting a child of our own. Then after that, it seemed like all she wrote until two weeks ago.
We hadn't heard much of anything from the agency with the exception of asking for updated insurance documentation as it became necessary, and we put it out of our minds. The matching specialist said she'd call us if she found any kiddos that she thought we'd be a good match for, but she was focusing more on potentially permanent placements and less on the emergency care we had originally signed up for, so it wasn't much of a surprise to me that we hadn't heard from her in months. Then one day near the end of April, it was like the flood gates opened up. We received four or five calls in the course of two weeks. Half of those calls were outside of the realm of possible for us do to the circumstances, so we had to say no. Two of them we sent out our profile to the child's case worker, but we never heard back.
Then this week we got a call about a new kiddo that needed a short term home. Her story is one that I am not able to share here, but suffice it that it was sad and we opened our hearts and our home to her and she arrived at our house on Wednesday evening.
Everything has been up in the air since then! Thursday we had to go to court for a shelter hearing, where she was officially remanded into our care until such a time as they were able to get her someplace that would be better for her. She is scheduled for an interview Monday to determine if she will be leaving our home and where she will be going after that.
Beyond that, Megan and I are feeling really overwhelmed and incredibly unprepared. We didn't have a bedroom available for her to sleep in on Wednesday, so I had to leave work early and call in the cavalry to help me move four bookcases and build a bed. The bed has three drawers, which I figured would work as a quasi-dresser (I know my clothing could probably fit in three drawers and a closet), but the drawers are smaller than I thought and she came with way more clothing than I had anticipated. We had to buy a dresser and build that to accommodate all of her clothing. But now three nights in and I think we're finally starting to get into a rhythm. I don't know what we'll do if she ends up staying here longer term as we were originally told this would be just for a few days, but right now we're all just enjoying the time we have together.
Honestly, though, the biggest issue we've faced is not with our foster kiddo, but with the government agencies we've had to deal with in this process. The CYS agency in charge of her care didn't assign her a case worked until Friday afternoon. There has been a plethora of misinformation, or often just a complete lack of information. Our hearing Thursday morning was an hour late and the actual proceedings were mostly just about fixing incorrect information on official documentation. Between Megan and I, we've spoken to two lawyers, three case workers, and a medical professional, just in charge of our kiddo's care, and it wasn't until late yesterday afternoon that we finally started getting some concrete information. Even our case worker through our agency was uninformed and seemed to be learning a lot of the information from me, which I had in turn actually learned from our kiddo's previous family. It's been a very frustrating process wrought with incompetence, and I've been struggling with feelings of powerlessness since the moment this child arrived on our doorstep.
This experience so far, as you can tell, only reaffirms my belief that government agencies are by and large incompetent and nearly worthless. I hope the resolution turns out to be beneficial for all parties involved. In the meantime, I'm not holding my breath for any straight answers.
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