heartache

yesterday i had a conversation with someone from the county. she's not a case worker but she's in the mix.
i'm so discouraged.

SO discouraged.

they've all been spouting to me the past few months that "studies have shown that children do better with birth family." i do not agree. plain and simple. do. not. agree!!! there are exceptions to this. i have seen it and it can be successful to have birth family in the mix but it is not an across-the-board-blanket-statement kind of thing. selected members of selected family MIGHT be appropriate but i do not believe that ALL children do better with ALL birth families.

i ask my cousins and adopted family questions all the time about how they would feel if ________. they all disagree with the "studies have shown..." comment. i told my case worker "i know 'studies' show that...but no one in my real life shows that." and her response was "well my question would be how open was their adopted family to contact?" to which i stood up, scratched her eyeballs out and kicked her out of my house. ok...so i didn't do that last part. i bit my tongue and counted the minutes until she left.

so what was so upsetting yesterday? i have been put on probation for the mentoring. supposedly she just wants to meet with all of the mentor families...but she wanted to talk to me about a certain instance where karyssa hit one of our mentor moms and got a time out. i explained that karyssa is a child that if she gets to do something once she'll expect to do it everytime. for instance, if i let her touch the christmas tree, that will be something she expects to do every time. i have to be very consistent with her. i can't give her a time out once for hitting and not give her a time out the next time. to which she responded "is your tree tied down?" i said "what do you mean?" and she told me that she had a hook in her wall and every year she tied the tree to her wall. i'm imagining the kids climbing the tree while it flops from one side to the other. why would you not just tell your kid to leave the tree alone? my 9 month old already knows the rules about the tree. give me a friggin' break. (ok-friggin is NOT the word that comes to mind there but i'm trying to keep in PG.) so i asked if they have plenty of foster families right now? and she said "well, we're using family." meaning birth family. meaning they don't need us sub-par foster families because birth family is so great.

so i realized 1-i don't want anyone else from the county in here watching me raise my kids anymore than i have to. 2-a LOT of kids are going to go back to birth family and have no chance at a stress-free life. i know-it's happened for years, decades, like this that kids live in sucky environments...but if there's some way we could prevent that, wouldn't we want to? and 3-taking in more babies might be even more NOT on option that i already suspected.

this is not going to be a long term option. it's been said to me before, and the ghetto proves it time and time again: dysfunction runs in the family. if you grow up seeing dysfunction you don't have any other views of how things could/should go. most of your friends from the ghetto live in homes just like yours where violence is the first resort. i can promise you that kids who spend the first year in trauma filled homes spend YEARS getting over it. so it breaks my heart to think that there are babies out there (and by babies-i mean anyone under 18 years old) living in homes where they see no chance of hope, no semblance of normalcy, no way to get out and no way to stop the cycle and it breaks my heart for these babies. there is nothing i can do because my genes are not tied to theirs. and it makes me wonder why there are any foster parents left if we'll never be anything more than "foster".