Three Daughters!!!

One Christmas season, Alice and Beatrice and I were getting ready for a sweet family Christmas. We had put up a tree and had gifts under it. We had decorations, Grandma’s special Advent Calendars, and twinkly lights festooned around the rooms.

Without any notice, on the evening of December 16, I got one of those social worker calls…. “We need a bed for……” As a foster parent, those calls are always hard. It means a child is having a really hard time. I’d received several of these calls through the fall, but had said ‘no’ each time. I felt as a single parent, 2 girls were enough and we had just found out that Alice was pregnant (as a teen mom).

But this one stopped me. It was a week before Christmas and we DID have a bed and it was just a little girl who needed a place for a few days over the holidays until a relative was ready to take her in. So I said yes.

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In a flurry of activity, the girls and I cleaned and got the spare bed fixed up. Clara arrived the next morning with her school backpack and the clothes on her back. She had been picked up at Kindergarten and brought to a stranger’s home.

Social Workers

I love social workers as a rule. They are some of the best people in our lives. Social workers play so many different roles in institutions across the country.

The social workers who work within the Child Protective Services and the foster care system have an impossible job.

• They often take the brunt of people’s anger from all sides…. biological families, foster families, biological siblings, and even the community.
• All the while, they are supposed to be making almost impossible decisions about whether or when it’s safe to leave a child in the home of origin in the first place or return a child to their first family after they have been removed.
• And to make it worse, they are often hampered by laws and codes that were meant to be helpful, but do not have the flexibility to let the workers be creative to keep kids safe.
• Most critical to us foster families working directly with the kids, our social workers have caseloads that are too big to let them work as effectively as they could with families (both bio and foster).

I am in awe that anyone could do this job and I try to work with understanding when I get frustrated about something that was done or not done for a child in my care. The social worker is carrying a huge weight and he/she works for a system that is broken.

But………

I have had two social workers over the years who, to put it bluntly, had no business working with children. Clara’s worker was one of them. I, of course, did not know this person when Clara first arrived, but I quickly rose to anger at what was happening in this little girl’s life. I attributed much of Clara’s anger and lack of trust to the system and to this social worker. It can’t be undone, of course, but the Mama Bear in me quickly rose to the surface as time passed.

Clara’s first months in our lives

So much of what transpired over the next months just floored me.

Clara arrived with wide, wary eyes and a lot of questions. The social worker gave us a chit for some clothing and told me that the foster home she had been in was “out of compliance.” That’s really the only information I got that day. On the our first day, Clara and I went shopping for a few clothes, then we picked up Beatrice from school and took her to gymnastics. Clara was fascinated with all that was going on in the gym. She cried herself to sleep.

It was such an interesting, emotional time. Everyone was SO excited for Christmas and little Clara was so lost. I had several phone conversations with the Social Worker and found out that Clara had an older brother and sister in different homes, but that they saw each other every day in after school care. I asked if Clara could visit them or talk to them, at least for Christmas. The social worker told me she thought that would be too upsetting for all the kids involved. That was my first inkling that this social worker didn’t understand children.

• 

• 

Friends pulled together and shared gifts and clothing for Clara. We had our sweet little family Christmas around the tree, and then headed to Oregon on Christmas morning for our usual extended family celebration at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Clara appeared to have some fun, and joined in games and songs, but her little eyes were still very wide and very sad.

A couple of days after Christmas, the social worker picked up Clara. She was going to an auntie’s house in northern Idaho. Incidentally, this was “family” that Clara had never met. This wee 5-year-old was going to yet another stranger’s house. We packed up all of her new clothes and presents. Beatrice and Alice each gave her one of their stuffed animals so she would remember us.

And Clara left us.

A week later

Early in the morning on January 5 (my birthday), I received a phone call from Clara’s social worker. The auntie had decided she wasn’t up to having a little girl, so they were asking if she could come back until they found another placement. My best birthday present that year was welcoming Clara back into our home!

Clara was a little bundle energy, anger, and curiosity. And sadness. She was a bundle of sadness. We set up school and a new routine. We went swimming and explored playgrounds. We read bedtime stories and had morning snuggles. She took it all in, but Clara was, understandably, in too much pain to relax. There were daily meltdowns and daily tears. Shouting and kicking, screaming and crying, follow up hugs and songs. Her pain at losing everything she had ever known, especially her siblings, who knew her better than anyone, was too much to bear.

A search for information

Over the next month, I talked with the social worker often and tried to understand what was going on. She told me that Clara had been in a pre-adoptive home and that the foster mother was out of compliance. That was it. I quickly gained the sense that there was not any new abuse going on, but I was unable to find out the circumstances that brought her to my home. I still, 15 years later, do not know what happened.

But much of my search for information was to try to get Clara and her siblings back together. All the social worker would say is that it would make everyone too upset. I am passionate about keeping siblings together, so to not even let them have contact by phone was infuriating. This was a social worker who did not understand the trauma that was unfolding. This was a social worker who did not understand child development. This was a social worker who should not have been working with children.

I had even more insight one day when this social worker called me to set up a home visit. We were in the car, parked, because Clara was having a huge meltdown. She had already tried to jump out of my moving car once before, so I always pulled over when she got activated. The social worker heard her screaming and asked to talked to Clara. I put the phone on speakerphone so Clara could hear. The social worker then started yelling at Clara, telling her to knock it off or she would find another family for her. If she can’t behave herself, she will need to be moved. I was shocked and almost spoke my mind. But in that moment, I knew that something was not right with this person and I should not make her mad at me. In that moment, too, I made a long term commitment to Clara.

Clara and her siblings finally got to see each other in May, after persistent requests from me and a letter from Clara’s therapist. It was a joy to watch!

And a year later, I adopted Clara. She had made my heart bigger and added joy to my life.

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If you want to read more about any of the kids’ journeys, click on their name under categories to the right –>

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