Adoption frustration (still)

I know I have blogged about this in the past and yet here I am again. Same topic, still frustrated. It appears nothing has changed but a whole lot of time has passed.

We have an adoption worker (I am fairly sure it is number 7 or 8 which I have mentioned before).

We pressed the issue of how ridiculous it was that we still hadn't adopted in a meeting for foster parents a little over a month ago and it seemed as though things from that meeting put a bee in someones bonnet because it APPEARED as though things were moving forward. There has been a horrible shortage of workers in our region and so there was no-one to work on our file. After we voiced some complaints a supervisor called and said she would be working on our file herself so that we could move forward. I have started to ask SPECIFICS from the workers so we can have an idea of what we are looking at in terms of timelines. I asked when we could expect to become permanent guardians of our man. This is a step that has to be completed before we can become legal parents. I was told by the supervisor that we could look at being permanent guardians by the end of December. At the time she told us there were some things missing from our file. Of the things that were "missing", a copy of my Spousal Units Driver's license and an ORIGINAL copy of our marriage certificate was needed. Now I know we have given copies of this stuff before, because LAST year at the foster parent Christmas party we took copies of all this stuff and gave it to the person who was then working on our file. I don't understand exactly how this stuff goes "missing" from files. I have many files in my office. Things have never gone "missing" from them unless #1 I didn't put it into the file in the first place or #2 I didn't put it into the file in the first place. So I can only assume that it was never put into our file. It makes me wonder where a copy of my spouses driver's licence and a copy of our marriage certificate got to. Whatever the case, we need to supply them with this info again. I am a little confused, because I have NEVER been asked to give an ORIGINAL copy of my marriage certificate to any agency for any reason. Why do they need an original?

After she worked on our file, a new, full time, adoption worker was hired in the office and our file was transferred to her. She had an appointment to meet with us last week, which she had to cancel. It has now been rescheduled for the end of December. This means it is unlikely that we will be permanent guardians of our man before January or later.

Meanwhile I have been working on some assignments for my social movements class and came across an article about a gay couple in Edmonton who had some trouble adopting their son. In their story which you can link to here, they faced a number of obstacles in their adoption and it sounds too familiar.

In the meantime, we are still "ONLY" foster parents to our son and while he doesn't know the difference I certainly do. Until he is "ours" he is NOT ours - and while that may seem like a silly thing to say, another couple who we know personally recently had a child in their home for over 5 years had that child removed by foster care ... they were also "working" on adopting her.

Until the papers are in our hands that say our boy is our family, he COULD BE taken at any time.