Monday, March 24, 2008

Adoption frustration

I have not posted many things about our journey to adoption but this past week has frustrated me so much I am writing about it here today to vent. This process is so scary and at every step we are so concerned with saying everything "right" and not making waves because we want everything to go smoothly, and this week I have had enough.
We are foster parents. We have had Max (not his given name (yet) for anyone concerned with privacy issues) since he was released from the hospital at one month of age. He is 18 months old. When he was 6 months old his parents rights were terminated by the court and he became a permanent ward of the province and able to be adopted. Since we were his foster parents at the time we asked if we might adopt him. We were told that we could, but that we needed to be approved as an adoptive home first.
We met with the adoption worker. (Please note here that the SAME office with the SAME supervisor operates in our region as the foster AND permanency placement.) In order to be foster parents we have to go through a process of becoming certified and maintaining that certification on a yearly basis. We have to have medical records, police checks, home inspections and everything for foster care EVERY year. Well apparently this is not enough for the permanency workers, so we have to do ALL of this again. OK. So we do it. All of it. All over again.
And we get approval to be an adoptive family.
While all this is happening we go through three, yes THREE permanency workers. And while I am sure they are all very nice individuals, the first was pregnant and getting ready to go on maternity leave and did..... oh right NOTHING on our file. The second ROCKED and in the SHORT time that she was assigned to our case we met with her a number of times, she kept us informed with emails regarding what she needed, what she was working on, what to expect etc. When the first worker didn't return from maternity leave and the position opened for a full time position we hoped against hope that the lady filling in would be selected. Much to our chagrin, she was not.
We are now on permanency worker number three. Last week she came to our home to meet with us. She sat, took notes, and asked us all kinds of questions about how Max was doing. We updated her on speech therapy issues and other events and asked her how our file was progressing. She did what we know her to do (from past experience) - evaded the question - and said only "your file is progressing." What does that mean? She said she didn't have the complete file from the last worker, but the last worker was waiting on info from HER for the file. Huh? Confused yet? Us too.
After she left and Shel and I were able to process this information we decided that the LACK of information was a problem for us and we called our foster worker to let her know of our frustration. She passed the message on to their supervisor (again, SAME supervisor) and the supervisor called us. First of all our foster worker said that there was a piece of documentation that they still needed from me. Fine. Why didn't the worker tell us that when she was IN our home and could have taken it with her? Has she even opened our file? If we had not called to check the status when would she have asked for it? The supervisor left a message to say she had reviewed with the permanency worker what was on her plate and if we wanted to meet to discuss the priorities (blah blah blah) to call her on her direct line. Now tell me this. What good is a direct line if you don't answer your phone? This is where we sit. I have called that number - enough to be a tad irritating if she is checking her caller id - I have left my name and number and she has not called me back.
I know that the journey to adoption is long and filled with red tape for everyone who tries to navigate it. Somehow I thought since everything was being done in the same office it would somehow be easier. I was deluding myself.
Ai ai ai ai ai.

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