Riding the Grief Train

So it's been almost 2 weeks since Niblet was legally returned to her dad. We've seen her once a week since, on the weekend. The first day was just the afternoon and we brought her back after dinner. This weekend we took her for the afternoon and overnight.

She is wonderful and continues to amaze us with her constant learning and her extreme cuteness.

At first, we were very happy to have the whole process over with. Her dad finally has her back and the county doesn't dictate little Niblet's life any more. It's a good thing. Her dad is very willing, even happy, to have us in her life, and we don't lose out on seeing her. It has really gone as well as could be hoped for.

But (and you knew there was a but, right?) it has still happened. We have still lost our baby girl. We have still lost the dreams we had. Lost the right to have her 24/7. Lost the right to be her moms. We will always have had that and we will always have lost it.
This apparently takes about 2 weeks to settle in and now that it has, well, it hurts.

We are sad. And since there's really nothing we can do about it, it's kind of aggrevating to be sad, so we're upset that we're sad. Helpful, I know.

I certainly don't want to cut off visits with her. I love her and want to see her as often as possible. It's just very hard to be with her and not be her parent. To put her to sleep and know that, in the morning, we'll be bringing her back to her parents.

Oh, yes, I said parents. Because her mom is back in the picture. Released from jail, I'm assuming, and seemingly living with Niblet and her dad. We have no idea what to think of this and can't figure out a way to ask someone if it's a good thing or not without it getting back to the parents and having them cut off our visits because they think we're narc-ing for The County.

The best thing I can come up with is asking the counselor here at work who the dad worked with. She has no connection to the county at all. But confidentiality really keeps her from saying anything to me. I just imagine that if I went to her crying and asked her to just tell me if she thought Niblet was safe with her mom around, she might tell me the truth. And, really, I want the answer to be yes. I think that it would be a good thing for Niblet to have her mom around. She's way younger than the dad, more "with it", and it reduces the chances that he'll get fed up with her. Sharing the load is always better.

Anyway, so this adds to the stressful feelings regarding Niblet. Not helpful.

It's just hard. I've never really had anything like this happen and I don't know how to grieve and move through it, while still maintaining a relationship with Niblet and her family.

There's no Wikipedia entry for this. No book I can get from the library. Hopefully time and friends will cure all. Until then...this sucks.

Visits for us!

On Saturday morning I called Niblet's dad and asked if we could visit with her some time soon. Turned out he was going out during the day on Sunday, but we could take her for the afternoon. We did, for about 3 1/2 hours. And it was awesome! I was afraid there would be some weirdness, being with her but not being her parents. And there was not. It was perfect in every way.
And afterwards, fostermommmy asked him if we could set up regular visits and we all agreed that we'd come pick her up every Sunday at 2pm, and then either bring her back that night or keep her overnight and bring her back Monday morning.

We are so lucky. And so is she, to have a dad who seems to be doing a great job taking care of her and isn't too threatened to let her keep this strong bond that she's had for the past year.

Yay!

Resolution

Court happened and Niblet's dad got full custody. Yay for Niblet and her dad!
We're even pretty relieved for everything to be over. No more "what-ifs". No more county f'ing everything up. Even the lawyer called her dad a "rare commodity" because he stepped up and did what he had to do.

We had Niblet for one day this weekend and she seemed really fine. She was happy to see us when we picked her up, but not super-clingy or anything. We get the impression that she still thinks of us as her primary parents, even though we only see her once a week. She doesn't mind being with him, but I suspect that she thinks of him more like daycare - eventually we'll come get her again.

He made a point of making sure we have his number and said we can take her whenever we want, so we're glad for that. We'll see her at least once a week for a while and then maybe regularly, or maybe just occasionally. We could take her for a weekend, or just go to the park one afternoon or something. I'm looking forward to seeing out it all pans out. Really, we could probably take her camping with us next summer, if we wanted to. As fostermama has said, it's kind of like being non-custodial parents. We didn't have a divorce or anything, but as far as Niblet's concerned, we are her parents, too, and she'll be happy to spend time with us!

Now we're on hiatus. No foster babies for a while. We're off the list.
We're signed up with our domestic private adoption agency, but we're not accepting a match where the baby would be due before mid-December or so. We need some time for ourselves.

I wish I could post a picture of Niblet for you guys. She's so freakin' cute. And the difference between when we got her and now is so huge - almost a year! We got a nice picture of us, Niblet and her dad outside the courthouse. He even asked for a copy of it. We have a photo album for him that we've already put a bunch of pictures in, so we'll print that one and some of the recent ones, and then they'll have a nice album full of her baby pictures.

We have hundreds more, too, that we'd be happy to share with Niblet when she's older, if we're all still in touch. And videos. She's just the cutest thing.

Okay, well, this post is all over the place, so I'll stop here. We're doing okay over here in FostermomLand. We're happy that we're not worried about Niblet and we're looking forward to what's coming up next in our lives.

If the camel's back weren't already broken...

...this would do it.
This morning, fostermama dropped off Niblet with her dad. We had her for 2 days. Next week we get her for one more day and then that's it, officially.
Niblet's dad mentioned the court date next week, on the day we're supposed to have her.

Um, what court date????!

He says he's known for a week. We haven't heard anything about it.
So fostermama gets on the phone to all and sundry to find out what the heck is going on. Obviously, it being the county, nobody's at their desk.

Finally, she gets a hold of another one of the foster parent case workers, who does the legwork for us and finds out that, yes, there's court scheduled for next week, on the day we're supposed to have her, at 11am. She obviously didn't know why we hadn't been informed.

This has been a problem before. Because of this, we specifically asked the baby's case worker (who would be the one to know about court first) if she would make sure to let us know as soon as possible when a court date is set. We knew it could be any day. It's her fucking job to let us know. She's federally mandated to do so, in fact. But we asked her politely. And she agreed that, of course she'd let us know. There were many witnesses.

And what did she do? Not tell us. Again.

Fortunately, Niblet's dad had no problem with fostermama asking if we could have Niblet the day before so we could have our last day with her be a full day, not cut up by stressful court proceedings. We'll bring her with us to court, put her in the court daycare, and then he'll take her home from there. Very likely, legal custody will actually be transferred to him that day, as well. So it'll be a great day for the 2 of them to have together to celebrate.

So, really, it's all fine. We left another message for the Bad Case Worker saying that we have the info and she needn't call us back, we'll just see her next week. We'll see if she even mentions it. I'm guessing not.

Once Niblet is officially out of foster care, we'll be filing a complaint against Bad Case Worker for neglecting to inform us of the court dates. All she'll get, I'm sure, is a "inform foster parents of court dates" from her foster-parent-hating supervisor, but that's better than nothing

We've changed our tune? Really, we've just changed.

Niblet's transition to her dad is going really, really well. Last week he had her for 4 days and she came back happy to see us, but not crying. Her first night back with us wasn't unusually hard. She had a cold, so really it was just the congestion that was bothering her.

Now she's with him for 5 days. We get her back for 2, then she goes back to him for 6 days and comes back to us for 1 final day.

Fostermama was saying the other night that Niblet doesn't live with us anymore. Some of her stuff is here, and we are here, but she really lives with her dad.
It's such a change from 1 year ago.

1 year ago, her parents had missed 8 visits in a row and had their visits cancelled.
1 year ago, chances were high we'd be able to adopt her.
1 year ago we took her into our house with the intention to raise her/think of her as our own almost from day 1.

Since then, so much has changed. Her mom "disappeared", her dad decided to "try" and get her back himself. We didn't feel positive about this at all. Obviously we wanted to raise her ourselves (really, if you ever met this kid, you'd want to, too), but we also felt scared for her. We felt like it would be a huge mistake for him to raise her himself.

But even that's changed, lately. He's not going to raise her like we would, but he loves her and isn't stupid (which was questionable at times) and does want us to be in her life in some way (at least for a while).

We were at our foster parent support group recently and were talking about how it's not a horrible thing that she's going to live with him. How that's really the *goal* of foster care and how everything really did work out the way the system says it's supposed to. Yes, the dad was given too much time, but not more than is federally allowable.

One of the other parents there commented "wow, you've really changed your tune". And I suppose that's the case. But, really, we've just changed. Period.

We are not the same people, the same parents, we were 1 year ago. Raising Niblet, helping Niblet, fixing Niblet, and letting her go...have all been life-altering.
Now we're looking forward to moving along with a domestic private adoption AND continuing fostering as often as we can. 1 year ago we were committed to adopting through fostercare (and hoping to adopt Niblet).

We're planning on taking a breather once Niblet is fully gone. No placements. Just adult time to relax, sleep, get to know each other and ourselves again, spend time with our friends and our friends' kids more, etc.

But we both know that we're going to miss having a baby around, miss fostering, and if they call us with a placement in that first month or 2, it will be very, very hard to say no. After that, I'm not sure what we'll say....

In a parallel universe...

We decided this summer that we're not going to count on foster care to build our family. Adopting through foster care, though our blog title, is just not possible in our county right now. We do know of some people who have recently adopted or have kids who are going to be TPRed, but that's few and far between. Kids are going home.

What we've decided to do is go through domestic private adoption. We will continue fostering, after a break of undetermined length, but we will get our first forever baby through private adoption.

We've picked an agency and started our homestudy last week. We're working on all the paperwork and are hoping to get our fingerprints tomorrow and get everything rolling asap. We'll be going to meet with the agency in October (it's out of town).

It's very weird to be talking about adopting and our future baby while we still have Niblet. She'll be playing on the floor and we'll be sitting there discussing what kinds of babies/situations we're willing to accept, etc., and it's just SO WEIRD. Niblet really was meant to be our child. Sometimes what's meant to be just doesn't happen. I can accept that, but it's still really hard.

To top it off, the social worker who is doing our home study (a friend of ours) told us the other day that she was talking with the head of the agency and that she said they have a birthmother in mind that they'd like to match us with, so they're hoping we get our stuff in soon. Or something like that.
I can't even wrap my head around that. Realistically, if it's true, if the baby is due anytime in the next few months, we would have to pass on it.
We need time to recouperate. To clean the house (we never fully unpacked, as we moved in 1 month before we got Niblet). To have time to ourselves, time together, before we commit to being parents 24/7 for the rest of our lives. 4 months is the minimum, I think, but a little more would be good too.
Of course, we don't want to wait too long, but the agency said that, given that we want a situation where we wouldn't have to pay very much for the birth mother's expenses, we'd probably have to wait 9 months for a match. If we were willing to pay anything, it'd be much sooner. This is mainly because we're open to any race and gender. Most of their clients want white girls. Whatever.

Anyway, it does feel good to be on this path. Having Niblet leave will be the worst thing in the world. Welcoming my first permanent child will be the best. Being on both paths at once somehow feels right.

Transition's Upon Us

It's been a while, but there's been nothing and everything to say.
We had another case review meeting (probably the last) a couple of weeks ago.
Niblet's case worker was actually civil to us, but only because we forced *our* case worker to come to the meeting to back us up, if need be.

The meeting was to be about planning the transition from us to Niblet's dad. Instead of a conversation, the case worker came with a calendar all laid out. It had been set up by her supervisor and wasn't up for discussion. Fortunately, it's not too bad and she did agree that if Niblet wasn't handling it well, that we could revisit it.

Basically, we're adding one overnight per week. This week it was 2 nights/2 days. Next week 3 nights/3 days, etc. So that by the end of the month, she's coming back to us for one day and then back to him for good.

I counted it up today and we have 16 days with her between now and the end.

Looking at it on a calendar is so painful. It makes it so real that she's leaving. She's really not ours anymore.

The dad has filed for custody, so it's possible that the judge will call us all to court and give immediate custody back to the dad before the end of the month. We discussed this possibility during the meeting and everyone seems to be in agreement that, regardless of who has custody, the transition should proceed as planned. We don't want to traumatize Niblet.

If there's one thing we are FIRM on, it's that this little girl is NOT going to end up with an attachment disorder because of the County's fuck-ups. We don't care what kind of trouble we cause, we will work with her dad to transition Niblet as smoothly as possible.

He's said numerous times that we're like family and that of course we will be welcome to visit Niblet after the transition. He's said that we could take her for overnights; that he'd probably welcome that. (Of course, this wasn't said in complete sentences, but that was the gist...I think...)

Our pipe dream, as of now, is that we'd be able to set up with him a weekly overnight. That we'd be able to have her Sunday morning until Monday morning. Give him some time off, give Niblet the security that we haven't abandoned her. I don't know if he'll go for something structured like that, and I don't know how long we'd want to keep it up. But, really, I'd be happy to do it forever. We kinda think of it as us being the "non-custodial parents". We can stay in her life, be a resource for her, and only see her once a week or whatever. Who knows how it would play out, but it's our hope right now.

She comes back to us tomorrow morning. I hope the extended visit wasn't too hard on her. I hope she continues to be as brave and strong as she always has been and starts seeing him as a parent. She's really the one who is going to make this work. I really do think she'll be okay.